David Seymour: Associate Education Minister on the new school lunches on offer to Kiwi students

The Associate Education Minister's unveiled his new plan for school lunches.

Newstalk ZB can reveal nine sample recipes from the Ministry of Education include butter chicken, a chicken sandwich, a rice and bean burrito, and Thai chicken curry.

David Seymour says these choices are the most cost-effective ways to keep Kiwi students fed.

"There's every reason to believe that we're going to be able to deliver what's been indicated - at the prices that have been indicated."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So curries, past the dishes, burritos and sandwiches are just
some of the options that are going to be on
the menu for next year for the school lunch program.
The Associate Minister of Education, David Seymo, who's in charge
of this, is with me. Hello, David, Hi, are you
providing all of these hot meals for three bucks a meal?

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Well, there's been early market indications of what people might
ender to provide, and certainly the expert advisory group we've
had these are people that work in logistics and catering
at a commercial level. They believe that it's possible that
we're going to land contracts like that. It'd be amazed.
I know lunch can be expensive, but when you buy

(00:39):
lunch for two hundred and fifty thousand people every day,
you can get some better deals. By contrast, the previous
government was due in quarter of a million meals a day,
paying up to eight dollars sixty. I've got people that
work in my office and the beehive who say, man,
I do meal prep for the week and I don't
budget that much for my lunch. It just shows how
much money has been previously.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah, how is it possible to get that level of efficiency.
What's going is it smaller portions? What's going on?

Speaker 2 (01:07):
It's just that you're buying such large amounts. So I mean,
if you are running logistics and delivery, if you're running storage,
if you're doing cooking, it's always going to be cheaper
to do big deals in large amounts. And if you
talk to people like we've had somebody associated with Ryman,

(01:27):
you know they do about eight thousand meals a day,
that just got really good at doing it at scale.
If you talk to people at Kids Can Charitably Supported,
they actually budget two dollars per kid per day for
their meal. So you know, I can understand it's kind
of surprisingly seem like small amounts of money, especially if
you've been living through the inflation of the last few

(01:48):
years and the amount things cost. But these people who
have hired that know what they're doing and do it
for a job every day. I believe it's possible. Now
we're putting out the tender and there's every reason to
believe that we're going to be able to deliver what's
been indicated that the prices that have been indicated.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
David, what's up with your new Ministry for Regulation needing
five communications staff.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Well, first of all, who are they communicating to? Actually,
a lot of it is listening. So for example, we're
doing a red tape reduction drive on early childhood, which
is terribly overregulated. They've had over a thousand people engaged
with that so far, and then there's also regulators across it.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
Are you telling me the comm staff for listening to people?

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, because it's not just communications with journalism that you
might be familiar with. It's communications with a range of
different stakeholders, including the regulated parties that are part of
sector reviews, and eventually their job is going to be
to communicate with regulate tours across government. So it's not
just answering the phone when a journo rings up, which

(02:55):
I'm sure you'll be familiar with. What proportion of communication
in the wider sense?

Speaker 1 (02:59):
What proportion of these are just media staff.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
That I couldn't tell you, but as I understand it,
the job couldn't well it could be, but they at
least have to spend some of their time doing kinds
of communication.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
All David, you're the guys who went hard at the
Ministry of Education for having too many communications stuff from
and at Health New Zealand as well. This looks a
bit hypocritical, doesn't it.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
No, I don't think so, because if it was five
people answering the phone as pres secretaries for journalists that
rung up, I'd be pretty alarmed. But they assure me
that that's not the purpose. And if you want further
proof that we don't have a whole lot of people
doing comms for journalists, why are they trowing me out
here to do the defense of them rather than having

(03:44):
all of the supposed pre secretary story hired them.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Maybe they're not an idea. David, thank you very much.
I really appreciate your time. Make this David Seamore, the
Associate Ministry of Education.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
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