“What would Jesus do?”
Was this the question the Prime Minister, the well-known evangelical Christian Christopher Luxon, asked himself this week?
“What would Jesus do if he’d been caught handing out contaminated loaves and fishes to hungry school children, and the people of Galilee were, you know, starting to throw stones at him?”
If Luxon really did ask himself this, he appears to have concluded Jesus would have said “let them eat marmite sandwiches”.
Had the Messiah decided to be a very naughty boy and really proclaimed such a thing, it would now be known to Biblical scholars as the “Miracle of the Marmite”. However for Luxon, suggesting pretty much the same thing succeeded only in turning another of his weeks into a big plate of shit sandwiches.
Meanwhile Jesus, like the rest of us, is probably wondering whether such sarnies will soon be inadvertently added to this government’s blundering school lunches programme, perhaps with hundreds and thousands added to sweeten the deal.
Certainly nothing appears to be off the menu under Associate Education Minister David Seymour’s retooled, cut-price scheme to feed the hungry multitudes. After a month of delivering, at least to some schools, late meals, not enough meals or the wrong meals or overheated meals or under-heated meals or overly spicy meals or meals that were not properly halal or meals that would make a bucket of warm sick seem more appetising, there was a new special on offer down in Murchison last week. Some meals delivered contained a whole new food group, in fact: melted plastic.
Was this Super Seymour, the Taxpayers’ Avenger, cutting wasteful spending by combining his school lunches programme with a cutting-edge plastic recycling scheme? Apparently not.
“It’s just been a bit of collective nightmare,” the poor Murchison principal told RNZ, which seems remarkably restrained, given the circumstances. From his experience it sounds like you’d have more luck finding a nice bite to eat if you’d spent the night binge drinking and decided it was time for a spot of dumpster diving.
The government’s reaction to this latest cock-up has been equally unappetising, if not quite as unappetising as a lunch with melted plastic in it. What the government’s attitude has not been, is surprising.
For more than a month Seymour, a sort of cross between a suit bought on sale in Newmarket and a surly teenager, has appeared largely dismissive when asked to explain yet another lunch programme fiasco. Meanwhile, the prime minister has largely made it clear he thinks the programme’s apparently endless supply of bad headlines is Seymour’s problem not his.
At least he did until this week, the week of the Miracle of the Marmite.
“If you are unhappy with it, for God’s sake, go make a Marmite sandwich and put an apple in a bag just like you and I had,” he spluttered on radio on Tuesday, before going on to make it quite clear that he thinks it is the responsibility of parents, not the government, to feed their children.
His deputy, the Finance Minister and renowned vowel strangler, Nicola Willis, said much the same thing on the same station the day before, but instead of marmite and an apple, hers was a miracle involving vegemite and a banana.
So there we go. Finally, after a month of suspecting it, we have heard it direct from the horse’s and the deputy horse’s mouths: hungry children are not the government’s problem.
Forget that since 2020, we have had the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation which has led to rising poverty levels and the highest unemployment and number of beneficiaries in decades.
Forget that most parents already send their kids to school with a lunch; of the roughly 850,000 school kids in New Zealand, only about 240,000 are being provided with government lunches.
Forget that the whole reason the programme was launched from the beginning of 2020 by the Labour government was that there were thousands of kids struggling to learn because they were hungry and a free school lunch provided by the government would help them.
For Luxon, who displayed a complete lack of empathy for struggling parents this week, none of that seems to matter. For him, it appears the lunches programme exists only because “irresponsible” parents are not doing their job. Apparently his Christian charity is only for what used to be called the deserving poor.
Meanwhile Seymour, like some lazy student already failing his level one NCEA, reckons he’s going to do better in term two. He won’t. We should expect to see this programme continue to provide poor food and a poor service because, as I’ve said in this column before, that’s the plan: run down this programme until it fails then kill it, saving the government money, and so leaving, as Luxon seems to want, feeding hungry kids to their parents, whether they can afford it or not.
Riddle of the week
If a mighty totara falls in a forest next to the Reserve Bank and then does not turn up to a press conference to explain itself, has the tree made a sound? Or has it just silently thrown the greatest wobbler in history? Answers on a postcard, please.
In politics, is less more, or more less?
Should the New Zealand Parliament have an extra year added to its political term?
Well, if it did right now, it would give the Prime Minister, the down-to-earth multimillionaire Christopher Luxon, a whole extra year to be unpopular in.
It does seem likely that Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith’s proposed legislation for a four-year term will get cross-party support, which means either at the 2026 election, or the one after that, voters will be asked in a referendum to give the idea a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
The crucial thing will be what question or questions the referendum asks. Another Kind of Politics suggests that there should be two questions of which you are required to answer only one.
The first one should read: “If you voted against Jacinda Ardern in 2020, would you have wanted another year of her government?”
The second should say: “If you voted against Christopher Luxon and his coalition in 2023, would you have wanted another year of his government?”
If everyone answered one of these two questions honestly, the referendum will deliver the result everyone, deep down, knows is the right answer.
Political quiz of the week
What is new Health Minister Simeon Brown looking for in this photo?
A/ More nurses.
B/ More doctors.
C/ More hospital beds.
D/ More band-aid solutions.
