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David Seymour and Health Coalition Aotearoa co-chair Professor Lisa Te Morenga are confident the personal insults they’ve exchanged won’t disrupt constructive debate over the Government’s free school lunches programme.
The Herald yesterday reported how the coalition of health charities was critical of the decision to give ministerial responsibility for the Ka Ora, Ka Ako programme to Seymour after the Associate Education Minister and Act leader campaigned for it to be abolished.
Since those criticisms were reported, Seymour posted screenshots of disparaging comments Te Morenga - one of two chairs of the coalition - had made about him and the Government, suggesting the coalition’s motivations weren’t strictly in the interests of the 220,000 students the programme fed.
Those comments included a 2017 Twitter post in which she hoped Seymour didn’t have children during a time when one member of his party said people who couldn’t afford to have children shouldn’t have them. Te Morenga had also made more recent and radical allegations about what she viewed as a “fascist white supremacist Government”.
Speaking to the Herald today, Seymour claimed Te Morenga’s comments indicated she had “anger management problems” that precluded her from appropriately participating in the debate, despite having no evidence Te Morenga had such problems.
Last night, Seymour also posted some of Te Morenga’s previous comments about him on social media, which saw Te Morenga reply: “How long did it take you to find that tweet from 7yrs ago? Which incidentally was a response to you saying the poor shouldn’t have kids. I stand by my comments that the coalitions first 100 days are the definition of white supremacist fascism.”
Health Coalition Aotearoa co-chair Professor Lisa Te Morenga.
Te Morenga said she did not have issues managing anger and said Seymour could say what he liked.
“I know that his supporters will think he’s doing a great job and lots of people out there will continue to think he’s not,” she said.
“I don’t have a lot of fragility here, I’ve been around a long time.
“We’re always happy to engage, but we’re going to be advocating for evidence-based policy, not policy-based evidence.”
In a letter, the coalition had requested a meeting with Seymour to discuss his intentions with the programme which he called “wasteful”, “unaffordable”, and a “marketing stunt” during last year’s election campaign.
Ka Ora, Ka Ako, introduced by Labour in 2019, was allocated $323.4 million in Budget 2023 to continue it through this year but has not been funded beyond that.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says he supports the free lunches programme. Photo / Mark Mitchell.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has said he supported the programme but wanted to assess its efficiency before making further funding decisions.
Seymour told the Herald he believed funding given to the programme could be reduced by at least a third and as much as half. He said he felt efficiency improvements wouldn’t mean the same proportion of children would miss out on free lunches.
He said Te Morenga’s past comments wouldn’t limit the ability of coalition members to converse with him about the programme, which they supported.
“We’d invite them to send us anything useful they think they have.”
Fellow coalition co-chair Professor Boyd Swinburn was confident all parties involved could rise above any personal spats to discuss what actually mattered.
“I think we need to put all that stuff to one side and just deal with the evidence.”
Swinburn was eager to hear Seymour’s thinking behind why he wanted to cut the programme’s funding and what he hoped it would deliver.
“I don’t get the sense that there’s a lot of fat in the system ... if he wants to cut up 30 to 50 per cent, he’s cutting 30 to 50 per cent of kids out of the programme would be my guess.”
Adam Pearse is a political reporter in the NZ Herald Press Gallery team, based at Parliament. He has worked for NZME since 2018, covering sport and health for the Northern Advocate in Whangārei before moving to the NZ Herald in Auckland, covering Covid-19 and crime.
