David Seymour: Associate Education Minister on Food Safety NZ clearing the school lunch provider over mouldy lunches

“A week of drama” could have been avoided had the principal of a school with mouldy lunches waited for the investigation rather than going public, Associate Education Minister David Seymour says. 

New Zealand Food Safety said yesterday the mouldy lunches served at the Haeata Community Campus were most likely caused by an error at the school. 

Seymour told Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan the school should have “kept an open mind” so he did not have to spend a week talking about “what happened to 20 lunches”. 

“I guess people might start to ask themselves, ‘Look, this whole saga, it was unreasonable to have a principal who was out in the media for a week, when in reality, Food Safety New Zealand completed the assessment within 10 days, which is lightning speed for most things that happen in government’. 

“And if they were just open about what might have been the possibility, we could have waited till now, we could have saved a week of drama.” 

One of the lunches given to students at Haeata Community Campus 

He also said he had been told by Food Safety that the school had a policy of leaving school lunches in the cafeteria so students could have extras if they wanted, and the mouldy lunches came from there. 

He had been told by Food Safety that the school had a policy of leaving school lunches in the cafeteria so students could have extras if they wanted, and the mouldy lunches came from there. 

He said the same lunch was served on Thursday, so this seems like the most “plausible” answer. 

Seymour said Food Safety NZ had been all over the school and Compass “like a rash” and was confident in the result revealed yesterday. 

Haeata Community Campus principal Peggy Burrows did not wish to respond to Seymour’s comments this morning. 

She previously told the Herald the findings of the school’s internal investigation were with the board and the school’s lawyers and were due to be released on Friday. 

Haeata Community Campus principal Dr Peggy Burrows. Photo / Supplied 

Vincent Arbuckle, deputy director-general of New Zealand Food Safety, said an investigation into the incident found that the mouldy lunches were not part of a wider food safety issue with the School Lunch Collective. 

“We know the issue caused a lot of concern among parents and students at the school, so we considered it important to provide accurate and independent information about the likely cause,” Arbuckle said. 

“After carefully examining all the possible causes, we are able to reassure parents that there is not a wider, or ongoing, food safety risk with the School Lunch Collective. 

“The most plausible explanation is that lunches intended to be served to students the previous week were accidentally mixed in with that day’s lunches.” 

Burrows earlier maintained that none of its “robust” systems failed between Thursday and Monday, when the food was served. 

The lunches served at Haeata Community Campus were covered in a thick layer of mould. 

Arbuckle said New Zealand Food Safety’s food compliance officers considered the possibility that the error was made by the distributor. 

They found it was unlikely that the distributor delivered lunches from the previous week because several other schools received the same lunch on the same day with no reported issues. 

Arbuckle said another reason was that the Compass Christchurch Kitchen (Central Production Kitchen) only receives the number of meals required for the following school day because of the minimal capacity of available chillers. 

A food poisoning warning was issued last week after several children from Haeata Community Campus ate school lunches covered in thick mould. 

The meals, provided as part of the Government’s school lunch programme, were eaten before a teacher intervened. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The investigation into the moldy school lunch drama in christ
you just completed and really it's not actually clear what
happened here, but the food safety guys still think the
most likely problem was food left over at the school
rather out of the fridge for the weekend. David Seymour
is the Associate Ministry of Education Morning.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
David Hey heither, so, what is the most.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Likely thing that they think here has happened.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
They think that at the school there were some meals
that had been delivered the previous week. They were stored
somewhere in the school, probably in the cafeteria, and some
of those old meals got handed out with the new
ones that had been delivered that day. This is after
Food Safety in New Zealand have been to the school
that have been all over Compass like Krash, and the

(00:44):
main thing they notice is that on the day that
the moldy lunches were handed out, there were fifteen other
schools that got them, but also that there were many
other parts of the Heartier Community campus where the lunches
were handed out Those ones were fine. So it seems
that it wasn't just one school that was one part
of one school where there seemed to be some lunches

(01:07):
that were different from all the other ones that day.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Okay, how is it though, that we can't prove this
is just a guess, right, We can't prove it totally.
Is there no paperwork? Is there nothing like this that
actually formally records what is going on?

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Well, I guess to really ever be absolutely certain about
what happened, you'd have to basically have a tracking device
on every single lunch. Now that's not viable, but we
do have a scenario where in order to believe that
it was anything else, there have to be something extraordinary
that no one else can figure out. Whereas there's a

(01:42):
completely thaucible explanation that the same lunch was served four
days earlier. This school had had a teacher only day,
so hadn't had any other lunches delivered, and it had
a long term practice of having several boxs that were
kind of kept. Some lunches were put aside in this

(02:03):
cafeteria area where students were able to come and get
extras if they wanted to. Well, the few of those
turned out to have been there a bit longer than
they should have been.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Now, listen on the subject of this exact school. I
see the school's got a bit of rap of a
bit of a rap over the knuckles for spending about
close to nineteen thousand dollars for the principle and the
senior leadership team to go to Queenstown and there was
no clear business purpose. Now what happens here? Are there
consequences for this kind of spending?

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Well, the government had a policy several years back before
the election of giving out these funds to select schools.
Whether that program continues and how it's managed, I'm sure
will be up to Erica Stanford. But I think the
point of this audit is that school communities can decide
what to make of their processes and management. Remember, we

(02:51):
have self governing schools through boards of trustees in New Zealand.
I guess people might start to ask themselves, look this
whole saga, it was unreasonable to have a principal who
was out in the media for a week when in reality,
Food Safety New Zealand completed their assessment within ten days,
which is lightning speed for most things that happen in government.

(03:15):
And if they were just open about what might have
been the possibility we could have waited till now we
could have saved a week of dramas.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
This whole spending thing has come out because the Order
to General has had a look at all this like
a whole bunch of schools. Really, it's not just this school.
The thing that occurred to me when I was reading
about it and listening to it was that I wonder
if the days of boards of trustees running schools actually
should be numbered, because we're just asking very ordinary people
to approve some reasonable spending. Do you think that it's

(03:43):
maybe an outdated idea.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
Well, it's long been an argument. That's what the Tomorrow's
Schools model. It started in nineteen eighty nine. It's got
school boards elected from the community running schools, and a
lot of communities it actually works fantastically well. It doesn't
seem to work so well in some communities where they
just don't have the people to elect in it. So

(04:07):
you know, in a very I guess a high decile
area it seems to work quite well, and others it
sometimes doesn't. I mean, one reason I push charter schools
is it gives you a different model of governance, so
you can draw on different people, and that seems to
work quite well in a lot of places already, So look,
you can have that debate, but all I would say

(04:27):
in this particular instance, as I feel for the school community,
I feel for the students because frankly, you know, this
is an example where it would have been easier if
everyone just took a breath, said Okay, where did these
lunches come from? Keep an open mind, whereas I've had
to spend a week responding in the media to what
happened to twenty lunches.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
Would you consider supporting any kind of social media ban
or restriction for under sixteens if it works an Aussie?

Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah, and I think the right thing to do is
to watch what happens in Australia. There are really good
reasons to think that it may not work. Maybe one
obvious one is what if kids end up doing other
stuff on the Internet that could be worse than these
platforms that are being banned, Or they sneak on with
VPNs and suddenly they're unwilling to talk to adults about

(05:16):
what they're experiencing because they think they're doing something naughty.
That's something that you should keep in mind. I think
that parents overwhelmingly are distressed and want someone to be
on their side in this battle to be safe online,
but a blunt tool that could make it worse is
not doing them a service. It's doing them and especially
the children, are disserviced.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
Good stuff. Listen, David, thanks very much for your time.
That's David Seymour, Associate Minister of Education. For more from
the mic Asking Breakfast, listen live to news talks that'd
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