The Auditor General’s damning report on the school lunch programme– and the litany of callous bungles it has uncovered – should require associate education minister David Seymour to be offering his resignation. After all, it has been found that his pet schools lunch programme has displayed a conscious disregard for (a) the health and wellbeing of children, and (b) for their ability to learn in the classroom without being distracted by the pangs of hunger. This has been a preventable disaster, intentionally enacted. At the very least, it should destroy any pretence by Seymour and his Regulations Ministry that they are competent to hold any other agency to account.
One can only imagine Seymour’s strident response if any other state agency had unfairly awarded its contracts, ignored flagged risks with those suppliers and – subsequently – had not properly measured, monitored and managed the outcomes. According to the Auditor-General, half of the meals now being provided do not meet the Ministry’s own nutritional standards. Any savings by going cheap are illusory –every day, some 20,000 meals are being returned uneaten and wasted, because they are inedible. So much for Seymour bragging about the money he is saving.
Former competent suppliers displaced by the centralisation of delivery have pointed to other significant failings of oversight. As Trust House CEO John Prendergast told RNZ, the same Audit Office that is now being so critical of the current school lunches programme had sat in “in real time” on the setting up of the process it is now belatedly condemning. Also:
Prendergast slammed the procurement process as “appalling” and “badly deficient”, and said that some suppliers were told contracts for Years 1 to 6 lunches would continue and therefore did not tender for them. “They then found out, through the media, that those contracts had been given to someone else without any opportunity to bid,” he said.
Nor has the Ministry learned from its mistakes. Instead, it has perpetuated them: :
[Prendergast] also criticised the Ministry of Education’s decision to extend the existing supplier contracts for another year without reopening the process to competition.
The financial savings have been achieved by reducing the cost per meal from roughly $8 to $3 per meal. (Good luck with feeding a teenager on $3 a meal.) The $360 million savings figure being cited by David Seymour is also misleading. By his own calculations, this is the guesstimate forecast for the period from the programme’s inception until the end of 2027, should Seymour totally ignore the Audit Office report.
Finally…those “savings” are only book figures. Since the current lunches programme has not been properly managed or monitored, Seymour’s figures are therefore unreliable. Also, there has been no attempt to assess the cost of (a) the wasted meals and their disposal and more importantly (b) no attempt has been made to assess the entirely preventable social and personal costs that hunger imposes on the learning opportunities of hundreds of thousands of New Zealand children.
Footnote: Seymour has been banging the drum on school attendance. Yet evidently at the same time, he has been actively undermining the ability of many of those children to learn, once they do get to school. Go figure.
Homes and away
It is worth keeping in mind that New Zealand’s problems with homelessness are relatively recent. As Greens co-leader Chloe Swarbrick pointed out succinctly this morning, the final report of the National Housing Commission in 1988 had celebrated the fact that New Zealand did not have the same insoluble problems with homelessness that other countries were experiencing. The Commission was then disbanded, and the human right to housing was left to the workings of the market. Epic fail.
In other words, there has been nothing inevitable about the evolution of the homelessness problems that we now face. They are the direct results of policy settings and political choices. The workings of this heartless combo has been fully exposed this week. As TVNZ’s Q&A programme has revealed, MSD staff have been performance-managed if they failed to meet their targets for refusing emergency housing support to the homeless. This is occurring in tandem with “move on” laws that threaten the homeless with three months in jail or a fine of up to $2,000.
This legislation has been treated as a priority by the government, even though PM Christopher Luxon has apparently never asked – or been told – that there is no night shelter in Auckland for rough sleepers to move on into, on a cold winter’s night. How on earth can anyone pass a punitive law of this kind while being so wilfully clueless about the existence of an adequate safety net? Once again, it seems that our PM lacks an inquiring mind, ore a compassionate heart.
Not that Labour is doing much better. True to recent form, Labour is criticising the current policy as “abhorrent” without being willing to say what it would do differently for the homeless, if elected. Can Labour manage to look sympathetic to the plight of the homeless without alienating business sentiment? Quite a juggling act, but Hipkins has turned this into an art form. Unfortunately…it seems that the process of gentrification has left the traditional values of the Labour Party currently without a home. Over on the official centre-right…they don’t t even bother her to fake a concern for the homeless.
BTW, this isn’t the first time that MSD staff have been incentivised to deny relief to those in need. In the 1990s, there was a similar scandal in the wake of revelations that MSD staff were being motivated to compete among themselves (with pay incentives to the “winners”) over their ability to reduce the beneficiary numbers.
Cold around the heart
Many of New Zealand’s socio-economic changes over the past 40 years have been imported from the United States. With that sympatico in mind, it may be worth looking at where the US is headed right now, two years after the US Supreme Court passed a landmark decision ( called Johnson v Grant’s Pass) condoning the criminalisation of the homeless.
No doubt, there is a genuine conflict between the homeless lacking shelter and the sizeable number of people inclined to view their very presence as (a) a threat to public safety, and (b) as a buzzkill when it comes to their enjoyment of public spaces. This problem dates back at least to the hobo camps of the Great Depression, and for much the same reasons: unemployment, the undersupply of affordable housing, the underfunding and understaffing of the mental healthcare system, the underfunding of drug and alcohol treatment centres etc etc.
The uncomfortable reality is that most of the individuals living on the street are not there by choice. As Beth Haroules, senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in response to the Grant’s Pass decision:
“We cannot arrest our way out of poverty. Instead of arresting or fining people for simply existing, cities should prioritize proven solutions to end homelessness, like affordable housing, accessible and voluntary services, and evictions protections.”
Unfortunately, that path is not being taken by the US, or by its imitators in the New Zealand government. So where is US federal and state policy on the homeless now ending up? Not in a good place:
In the two years since the Johnson v. Grant’s Pass ruling, the National Homelessness Law Centre has documented over 350 cities that have passed laws making it a crime to be homeless. Additionally, 11 states have passed state-wide anti-homelessness laws. None of these laws address the lack of affordable housing, the main driver of homelessness. Instead, they make it easier for politicians to move homeless residents away from the public view, and for cities to close their eyes to the reality of our nation’s growing housing crisis.
Once criminalised, the homeless can be easily de-humanised. In the US the trajectory of their homelessness laws is disturbing:
Most recently, the [right wing] Cicero Institute supported a Louisiana law that not only makes it a crime to sleep outside, but also paves the way to push homeless people into forced treatment and unpaid labour. Cicero also supports Utah’s plan to create a remote, government-run facility that will hold up to 1,300 people experiencing homelessness. And while these laws hurt us all, they hurt black, brown, queer, immigrant, indigenous, and disabled communities first and worst.
Given our gullible embrace of US precedents (in welfare, in healthcare) there is a genuine risk that this is where our treatment of the homeless may also be headed: to fenced camps, where the homeless can be pressed into mandatory forms of unpaid labour in return for their upkeep.
All for their own good, of course.
Songs for an election year
Back in 1971, the Dramatics had a medium-sized soul hit with this timeless track. When people want something from you – your vote, your love – trust your gut, but don’t let your cynicism deny you access to the real thing: if it ever comes along:
Hey, some people are made of plastic
And you know, some people are made of wood
Some people have hearts of stone
Some people (Some people)
Are up to no good…
But baby, the song also says, trust me, I’m as real as real can get. Is this news and information you can trust? Maybe:
Every election cycle, this classic reggae track by the Ethiopians feels more and more relevant. Beware of politicians making promises, promises, on a full belly. Because they’re leading the children to a land of make believe: