Watch the full interview on Q+A:
In an interview with Q+A's Jack Tame on Sunday, Associate Education Minister David Seymour has accused critics of the government's revamped school lunch programme of "nitpicking".
It is no secret that the school lunch programme has been plagued by problems - with Seymour himself describing them as teething issues - after he announced it would be pared back in October last year. The new menu was expected to save more than $130 million per year.
Earlier this week the School Lunch Collective's main food manufacturer Libelle, which was supposed to have provided about 125,000 meals a day, went into liquidation.
Prior to that, RNZ had reported concerns about the lunches which had been failed to be delivered, or had turned up late - as well as having been inedible, unappetising, repetitive, or failing to meet dietary restrictions. One meal was so hot it gave a child second-degree burns.
A survey of more than 200 principals and area school teachers by the New Zealand Educational Institute found 80 percent of the respondents were not satisfied with the meals provided by the School Lunch Collective. Of those supplied by the Compass lead collective, just 7.5 percent were satisfied.
Seymour told Q+A the revamped school lunch programme had "shown two sides of New Zealand".
"One is to point out at every opportunity: 'This is terrible,' 'This is wrong,' 'It's a conspiracy,' 'He's trying to deliberately sabotage it.' The other is, 'Yep, you know what? It's not what happens to you in life; it's how you deal with it.'
"And each time there's been a problem, we've been upfront, we've solved it, and it's kept getting better."
Compass Group New Zealand managing director Paul Harvey said 97.3 percent of the over 500,000 meals had been delivered on time this week, which meant at least 13,500 had not been.
"Again, there's two New Zealands, right?" Seymour told Q+A in response.
"There's people who will want to nitpick and say, 'Oh, but you know, I've done the maths. It's 13,500. That's what three percent is, whatever.' You're welcome to do that. But I tend to take the other view of life-that it's not what happens; it's how you deal with it. And actually, we've overcome all those problems to get to very high standards of performance."
Seymour had also refuted that the remaining 2.7 percent had any effect on education.
"What this government is doing is revamping the curriculum. We're revamping the qualifications. We're putting a huge amount of support into learning support and making it easier for kids to be supported as they go through their schooling journey.
"Now, if you seriously believe that some school lunches showing up late-in some cases, a few minutes late-is really what's holding us back, then I think we're not really having a serious conversation."
On Friday, the principal of Massey Primary School in West Auckland, Bruce Barnes, said students received two cold scrolls for lunch.
"Each student received two, about what looked like a hot cross bun size. There's a bigger one and a smaller one. They have a cheese topping, and I saw red stuff on the inside, but they came frozen and they're very, very cold, stone cold," Barnes told Checkpoint.
He thought the scrolls would have at least been thawed out since the school had no facilities to heat them up.
The Associate Education Minister David Seymour eating lunch at the launch of the revamped school lunch programme. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
In a Facebook post on Thursday, Kimihia School in Huntly announced it would temporarily suspend the school lunch programme, which Seymour told Q+A had subsequently "got overwhelmed by parents and students saying, 'No, don't do this, we want the lunches.'"
"I think part of this whole saga is that it's shown the way that people decide to jump on every little detail of the largest food delivery programme in New Zealand history, when in reality, there's a whole lot of people who say we enjoy these meals.
"Many people say they're better than what we had last year, when they're getting on time delivery, when the quality is improving, especially as we get rid of the wrinkle that's caused most of the problems.
"It's actually a positive story."
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