Learning a lesson at school
Last week I went to Field Days where I saw some cows, sheep and David Seymour. “Hi,” I said to Seymour. He said “fancy seeing you here”, then I asked what he was up to.
Right now, said the deputy prime minister-in-waiting, he was supporting the dairy industry by buying, I think, a latte, then he’d be making an announcement.
“Nice,” I said, “are you going to buy lunch too?”
Seymour wasn’t sure if he’d get time for lunch because the day was shaping up to be a busy one.
Before the announcement, he was going to pop into his ACT stall that was somewhere among the hundreds at Field Days.
“I have to find it first,” he said, and I pointed west, a small, petty act of my own because the stall was in the opposite direction.
Seymour said that after the coffee, stallvisit and announcement he was heading off to visit a Palmerston North school. “Nice,” I said “that’s nice.”
Later, we’d find out it wasn’t nice at all, at least not for Seymour.
With all the guile of a lamb walking into a lion’s den, he breezed into one of the very schools whose pupils are among the 220,000 tamariki receiving the free lunches he wants to cut.
There, he was greeted both by students performing the haka Ka Mate and bearing the tino rangatiratanga flag.
There, one student spat at the ground by Seymour’s feet; some followed Seymour to his Crown car; some screamed “f... you”.
Here, the only surprise is some of these students are now facing punishment from their school.
Bad students, implies Freyberg High’s principal Graeme Williams, who has also trotted out words like “behaviour”, “totally unacceptable” and “values and high standards”.
Also, whatever this means: “Upholding the mana of our young people recognises the reality of their world but also that we must respect and uphold the dignity of each other and all guests at our kura/ school.”
Here, what Williams seemingly fails to grasp is what he expected his students to suck up, or swallow, is the very antithesis of respect, dignity or mana. Those students have said they were protesting against the Government’s actions against te ao Māori and the use of te reo Māori, including Seymour’s plans to review the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.
At this school, Seymour was never a guest but a thief, and what Williams was asking is the equivalent of imploring a homeowner to help a burglar carry their TV out to the getaway car.
Meanwhile, that reference to the so-called “reality of their world” is almost as offensive as his mention of mana.
Still, teachers shouldn’t need to be activists and I suspect Seymour damn well knew what he was doing.
But before that, Field Days, niceties and an argument beside a coffee cart.
Seymour said, “at the end of the day you have $340m the previous guys didn’t actually budget for so we have to figure out how do you get the benefits people want for it, which, by the way, there’s no evidence base for”.
I said that students, parents, teachers and health experts all say free lunches benefit young learners. Isn’t that evidence enough?
“Oh Virginia,” Seymour said, “... I don’t think there’s much point in debating the difference between evidence and opinion so there you go.”
So off he went. He got his coffee, went to his stall, made his announcement. Later, he went to a school, got a haka, some f... yous, some spit.
Evidence and opinion, served fresh for the associate education minister.
“Have a good one,” I said before that, “enjoy your lunch”.
Virginia Fallon is a staff writer and columnist based in Wellington.