David Seymour has defended the Government's new school lunch service, but while he's eating in a swanky Auckland restaurant, the kids are being presented with lunches that they say looks like 'prison food'.
IT WASN'T quite a 'let them eat cake' moment, but Act leader David Seymour still did himself no favours. It's little moments like this that can condemn a politician to permanent public ignominy.
What on earth possessed Seymour to post to social media a photo of himself eating in an upmarket restaurant, in the very same week that his new school lunch service was delivering unappetising and underwhelming meals to massively unimpressed children and teachers alike? That's if they were delivered at all.
When the new cut-price school lunch service was announced, Seymour claimed that there would be no deterioration in the quality of meals delivered by Compass Group, a British multinational that operates in 45 countries. This assertion flew in the face of Compass Group's unimpressive track record.
A week or so into the school year, the results are in. Despite attempts by Seymour's supporters in the media like Newstalk ZB to defend the unpalatable, the school lunches have received the thumbs down from the students expected to eat them. The descriptions have ranged from 'uneatable' to 'unidentifiable'. Then there was the interesting news story about the butter chicken meals that were missing the vital chicken component. The kids got stuck with some rice and a bit of gravy. Yum, yum.
On student told RNZ: 'Last year we actually knew what we were eating, we could see it. This year, we're questioning what we're eating. It looks like pasta, some meat, probably beef and mixed with carrots. But that's it. No salt, no nothing.'
As one angry parent posted to social media: 'David Seymour should be forced to eat this slop every day.' Sorry mate, Dave's too busy whooping it up in upmarket Auckland restaurants.
The disaster that is David Seymour's cut-price school lunch service, comes at a time when food poverty is increasing in New Zealand. The annual NZ Health Survey for 2023-24, released in November, revealed that the proportion of children from homes where food ran out sometimes or often increased by nearly six percentage points in just one year, from 21.3 per cent to 27 per cent.
The increase in the number of children going hungry can be traced right back to government economic policy. The Government's austerity agenda has thrown ever more people out of work at a time when the high cost of living shows no sign of abating. But, at the same time, the Government has ratcheted up the sanctions regime in an effort to put further obstacles in the way of people trying to access the support they need.
But as Health Coalition Aotearoa has observed, against a backdrop of austerity and increasing financial hardship for many, 'free healthy school lunches are as a vital safety net for food insecure children.' Unfortunately, the kids have been sorely let down by David Seymour, who subscribes to a right-wing ideology that knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated.