Mike's Minute: Stop Whingeing, Seymour has cracked it

The Mike Hosking Breakfast - Un pódcast de Newstalk ZB - Martes

Who doesn’t love katsu chicken?  And with the katsu chicken, and the wraps, and the lasagne, David Seymour has saved us $130m.  All the moaners, whingers, whiners, and hand wringers can say sorry because it wasn’t the end of the world.  Several crimes have been committed in the school lunch drama, which of course should never have been a drama because the previous Government, in yet another example of their wasteful, haphazard way of doing things, should never have got into the school lunch programme business.  Because when they did, they worked out they couldn’t afford it and therefore only gave it to a few and many of the few didn’t actually want the lunches.  But they had to take them because the kid who did want the lunch couldn’t be made to feel bad, so the other 300 had to eat sandwiches with them.  That was crime number one.  Crime number two was they only funded it until the election, thus making it a fiscal cliff. David Seymour should have killed the thing completely but got talked down to what we have, which is $3 dollars a meal.  Crime number 3 is to all the hand wringers who opined over and over and over about how they wouldn’t be any good, no one can make food for $3, kids would go hungry, it’s a scandal etc, etc.  Fast forward and the menu is out, complete with photos of food, and wouldn’t you know it, for $3 you can do a pretty decent job.  You feed kids, you save money, we have a lesson in expenditure and wastage and a Government promise has been delivered.  The lunches were $8.68 a pop under Labour vs $3 now. That's quite the difference, isn't it?  What cost almost half a billion dollars now costs $320m.  And maybe the stories of the teachers helping themselves, or the families getting delivered the extras, or the farmers feeding it all to the pigs will vanish along with the doubters who have made it a past time, if not a living, refusing to believe a lot of what was done under Labour could be done cheaper and better.  If only they paid attention to detail and were driven more by practicality and less by ideology and thought bubbles. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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