School lunch issues put pressure on coalition Government - The Front Page

Associate Minister of Education David Seymour samples the menu as he announces the Healthy School Lunches Programme in October last year at Parliament. Photo / Mark Mitchell

There’s no such thing as a free lunch ... at least that’s what the coalition Government’s learning in the tempest surrounding Ka Ora, Ka Ako.

The Healthy School Lunches Programme provides free lunches to about 242,000 students in greatest need.

A brainchild of the previous Labour Government, its new flagbearer is Associate Education Minister David Seymour - who touted $130 million a year in savings in his iteration of the programme.

The School Lunch Collective, a partnership between Compass Group NZ, Libelle Group and Gilmours, won the $85m annual contract. Libelle Group has since gone into liquidation.

The cheaper alternative, with meals at $3 down by $5, has faced a myriad of issues since its launch this year. Incidents of unappetising, late, or absent food deliveries have littered news feeds. In one instance, a child suffered second-degree burns from a hot lunch.

The revamp’s been called “nightmarish”, “unforgivable”, and has been lambasted as “not even getting the basics right” after “vegan” lunches contained beef, Halal lunches ham.

Victoria University of Wellington political scientist Dr Lara Greaves told The Front Page she isn’t surprised the debacles become such a talking point, given there’s picture evidence.

“This is one of those political issues where you can just take a photo of a school lunch and voters can make snap judgments based on A, whether they would eat the food or B, whether they wouldn’t.

“It’s one of those issues where it’s quite a simple black-and-white kind of issue for voters when they see a photo ... In the same way that people say things like the flag referendum was quite an easy issue for people to get their heads around. You either like a flag or you don’t. We’re not talking about something like end-of-life choice or any kind of big moral, or ethical issue. It’s been framed in terms of is this food yucky or yummy,” she said.

Whangārei Intermediate School was forced to send back school lunches that arrived in an inedible state. Photo / Yolisa Tswanya

Greaves said it was surprising initially when the coalition Government kept the programme.

“The only poll that I could find was commissioned, it was a Talbot Mills poll prior to the change of government around whether people supported an expansion of the school lunches programme and it showed the majority of people did support that expansion into more schools back in 2023.

" So it seems like it’s a popular programme overall. But we haven’t quite, as far as I can see, seen any kind of high-quality polling on this lately. So it must be one of those middle-voter, vote-winning type issues.

“Ultimately, if that’s the case, if it’s those kinds of swing voters, those median voters, that 5 to 10% of people that swing between Labour and National, if this is an issue they really care about, it makes a lot of sense for the Government to focus on it,” she said.

When it comes to the programme’s future, Greaves said the Government needs to change the discourse otherwise, the clock is ticking.

" There’s only certain ways that they can do that. Either distracting based on another issue, either fixing the school lunch programme is one way to do it, or getting rid of it. They’re going to have to make some kind of decision because otherwise, this will go on and on.

“People will get bored of it, it will become a joke, it will become a meme, and it will become something that people can point to as the failure of the Government. Especially in your first term, you want to limit the failures that people can point to, you want to limit in the 2026 election, the extent to which Hipkins, or the Labour leader at the time, can point at National and say, well, you failed on the school lunches. You couldn’t even manage that programme.

" We saw an interview on Q&A not long ago, with Erica Stanford, in her role as Education Minister, and she did say, well, it’s Seymour’s area, it’s Seymour’s area. The extent to which it reflects back on Seymour versus other parts of the coalition, again, remains to be seen," she said.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about the school lunch programme debacle, and what it could mean for the Government’s popularity.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.

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