Davy Poppins doses out spoonful of harden up

It was the week in which Act leader David Seymour posed the question of whether we have become a bunch of sooks. It came in the form of his truancy plan, dispensed with a steaming cup of harden-up for parents.

For some time now, Seymour has railed about a Chicken Little mentality lingering as a result of Covid-19.

In particular, he has pointed to parents (and schools) being terrified of the slightest sniffle or stubbed toe, locking the doors and keeping kids out of school or working from home. He remembered the days of the old school yard, and there weren’t as many sick days then.

He’s not alone in thinking things have gone a bit too far, and not only at school. A fair few employers are also wary that the working-from-home thing has started to be seen as a workplace right, rather than a fix-it in a time of crisis.

However, Seymour’s immediate issue as Associate Education Minister is getting kids back to school as attendance has stayed stubbornly low since the pandemic. His proposed cure is a cup of harden-up for those parents who decide to take their kids on holiday in term-time (more than 80,000 students miss at least half a day in some terms).

Provided he can get NZ First and National to agree, there will be no more trying to beat the rush on the skifields or cheap pre-holiday flights to Fiji unless parents want to cop a fine and some quality time in the principal’s office.

All of this toughen-up stuff is partly because Seymour has made a rod for his own back in the form of the coalition Government’s new truancy target: one of its nine overall targets for the public sector. That target is to get “regular” school attendance (students who turn up at least 90 per cent of the time) up to 80 per cent. It is currently at about 46 per cent.

Before Covid-19, it hovered between 65 and 70 per cent.

Given health was the most common reason for kids missing school, Seymour either needs children to get a lot healthier or return to the olden days of turning up to school come hell or high fever.

The response from some in the education sector and some parents was predictable. It was criticised for being too simplistic, picking on the wrong people and for secondguessing parents’ judgments.

Seymour will be relying on the quiet majority — parents who also think the bar for keeping a kid home from school has got too low, and those who do their utmost to get their kids to school every day.

Seymour is quite right to tackle the problem. The details around elements of his plan, such as when and whether parents will face fines and what to do about the worst truants, are still in the works.

Seymour has started by requiring far more regular reporting and monitoring of truancy to try to pin down what can be fixed easily — and how to fix the harder bits.

The easier bits should be dealing with non-attendance because of illness, holidays or family time.

But some elements of his plan have raised eyebrows.

His solution to the problem of children staying home with minor illnesses runs contrary to his usual political philosophy, which is that people are better placed than politicians or bureaucrats to make decisions about the way they live their lives.

That philosophy seems to be conditional on whether they make the decisions Seymour thinks they should be making, and he has decided that is not the case when it comes to children’s ailments or family holidays.

So it seemed a tad contrary that the plan is for a government department to take on the role of a tough-love Mary Poppins and compile a checklist for parents to use when deciding whether their child is sick enough to be kept home from school.

There is also to be a public health campaign to tell parents when they can and cannot send a child to school.

The joint truancy announcement by Seymour and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was also a test of how things work when two coalition partners both want to get the credit for a move.

Overall, that works a bit like a long road trip: they take turns at the wheel and there are games of shotgun to bags the front seat.

Thus far, NZ First has only occasionally taken its previously preferred seat on the handbrake, although there are indications it has occasionally pretended to grab at it.

So far this year, Seymour has had quite a lot of shotgun wins and at times has overshadowed Luxon. This week, he delivered on truancy and pseudoephedrine pills and claimed credit (some partly shared) for half the things on the Government’s new action plan.

It is probably to the benefit of the coalition arrangement that Luxon has proven to be pretty ego-free when it comes to sharing the spotlight.

It is one of the chief executive attributes that could serve him well in the coalition he’s got: he’s used to making the product or the company shine, rather than himself.

Most politicians like to be the centre of attention. Luxon genuinely doesn’t seem to mind being elbowed off to stage left on occasion — just not too far.

The operating motto appears to be along the lines of “together, but not in the same camera shot”.

Luxon and Seymour turned up at a school in Wellington to make their announcement with their social media video cameras in tow.

They circled a classroom where students were drawing. They moved in opposite directions, to ensure their shots of looking like an approachable guy talking to the kids were not ruined by the other approachable bloke in the background.

At the joint press conference later, it seemed like happy families talking about an issue both were passionate about. Then the social media came out and the bid to write each other out of the announcement was obvious.

Seymour’s video featured a clip of himself talking to the media about truancy, tightly framed so that only a tiny corner of Luxon’s shoulder was in view. Then came Luxon’s video: a clip of him at the same press conference and also tightly framed so only a tiny corner of Seymour’s shoulder was in view.

As far as the school was concerned, Luxon was clearly the star visitor: quite a lot of the children’s drawings featured him.

None had drawn Seymour, although one girl had drawn a place called The Cloud Kingdom.

That may or may not have been an allegorical representation of the coalition.

Seymour’s video featured a clip of himself . . . tightly framed so that only a tiny corner of Luxon’s shoulder was in view. Then came Luxon’s video . . . also tightly framed so only a tiny corner of Seymour’s shoulder was in view.