NEWSTALK ZBEEN: Wellington, You've Been Very Naughty

FIRST WITH YESTERDAY'S NEWS (highlights from Wednesday on Newstalk ZB) Detention!/Has Anyone Asked the Kids?/Less Commonwealth, More Bledisloe

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to a podcast from News Talk said B.
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Used Talk, sed Be You Talk said.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Oho, My beautiful beanies and welcome to the bean for Thursday.
First with yesterday's news, I am Glenn Hart and we
are looking back at Wednesday and boy boy is there
a lot of talk about school lunches. Ah. There was
also talk about the Conwealth Games. These are all things
that I feel like we're just talking, talking, talking, talk
and talk about. And of course we also had to

(00:44):
talk about the Wellington Council. They've been naughty and so
now they can't be left alone.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
So you bring in these people from the council staff
and say this is what we recommend, and then what happens?
How does it all go so pear shaped? If it
was just the council poodling along and muddling along and
there's a lot of money on it, I wonder where
we'll find that from. Then I could understand the need

(01:11):
for an observer to come in and go children, children
bang heads together and see what happens. But there are
all these people up and down the country working for
counsel and i'd really love to hear from you. What
happens as your advice just simply ignored. Is it not

(01:33):
your responsibility to come up with a budget. Surely counselors
would come to you for advice. If I was elected
to counsel, I'd say, what do you recommend we do? First?
How much money have we got to do all of
these jobs? Where can we get money from without necessarily

(01:54):
pinging the ratepayers? And I would assume that people who've
been working for counsel for ten years would have some answers.
You know, I have a dog and bark yourself. You've
got a chief executive? Why do you have an observer?

(02:14):
What's the chief executive doing? I'm just interested because otherwise
the whole concept of local democracy is flawed. If we
can't manage to manage ourselves, then just appoint a highly
trained CEO and let them get on with it.

Speaker 4 (02:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
I think we're sort of done with democracy now, aren't we.
I think we've pretty family established how florid it is.
And you know, if we're going to live in a
capitalist society, and you know you've got to make a profit,
and you know, you just want people who know how
to run the business, don't you. It's pretty black.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
And white news talk has it been.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Kind of thing. That's what David Seymour was trying to
do with the school lunches. It's just trying to, you know,
make a difference on the bottom line. Right, I'll tell
you what.

Speaker 4 (03:04):
It's more nutritious than nothing at all, an empty stomach.
Some said the food was too processed, it was one
size fits all. It wouldn't appeal to the kids. It's
not meant to appeal to kids so much as feed
them when they're hungry. I thought, at least I thought
that was the point. And if they don't eat it,
they're not hungry. It's simple. Now, there are some bold

(03:26):
claims being made by David Seymour which I am a
little skeptical of, like the fact that we can do
this for three dollars a meal. Sounds unheard of, But
he gets the benefit of the doubt and my good
luck for his cost saving crusade. Guess where some of
the savings are going feeding ten thousand poor two to
five year olds. David Seymour is the new Robin Hood.

(03:48):
In all the flurry of releases yesterday about this, there
was one staggering number that stood out to me. Seymour
reckons if Labor had adopted his model from the get go,
when they launched this program five years ago, we would
have saved eight hundred million dollars eight hundred million. They
could have had that bike bridge over the White to

(04:10):
Matar Harbor, or they could have had more rat tests
or whatever the hell they wanted. It's true there was
no such thing as a free lunch, but thank the Lord,
is at least now a cheaper menu.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Does anybody talk to the kids? I presume they have.
I presume that was probably what was on the TV news,
was it? I watched the TV news. Of course, it
doesn't seem to be very good anymore. I've got a
bit of things to do, like make and eat dinner.
But uh, you know, the kids who are actually getting it,

(04:41):
they you know, they have strong opinions about it. Or
is it just a lot of people they never had
to worry about whither they had lunch and they were
at school.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Bringing their hands over this US talk Sidney man.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
It was a talker. Everybody was talking about it yesterday.

Speaker 5 (05:01):
Boy boy, this will come as a surprise to some
of you. Oh it might have become as a surprise
to me. I think that act or David Seymour might
have got it kind of right with the school lunches. Yeah,

(05:22):
I think that might work because school lunch has been
around for three or four years now and it's been
a complicated process with providers and people been happy with
with the meals and meals that children are eat and YadA, yadia.
So that seems to be a good process they have

(05:46):
gone through with the provider they have found not everywhere
there with some people doing meaningful work and good community programs.
They could be kind of charities and stuff like that
providing meals, but certainly around the country in some of
the places it's been hard to get the right providers
to provide the meals. And I'm talking about the bottom
of the countries. That seems to be a good thing

(06:09):
and it looks like the meals that the kids would
like to eat, and of course over time they could
develop on that and they could make them in fact,
perhaps one that are slightly more nutritious. But yeah, I
think it's an interesting messaging of that scheme. So there
we go with that one, that's the school meals.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
Well, why is it surprising that Marcus thinks that Seymour
has done a good job with the school lunches. Is
he not normally a Seymour fan. I wasn't aware of this,
and I think that is the problem probably with this issue.
Isn't it that people think that just because they're not
in to act the Act Party generally, that they've got
to be against the school lunch thing. And I think

(06:48):
this is the I think to a certain degree, David
Seymour does paint himself into a corner on some issues.
He has some really good ideas and then he has
some why out there pretty far right we're not far right,
but conservative ideas as well. Should give that, shouldn't You're

(07:14):
more left deliberal people can't get behind. And then of
course the left deliberal people feel like they've just got
to disagree with everything he does as a result of that,
and then it's.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
Great gets complicated you still sept Is.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
It complicated for Heather or not? Really?

Speaker 6 (07:35):
I'm sure that a government contract like this one would
have dragged a lot of businesses through what has been
a very very tough economic downturn which we're still in
and without the money, I'm sure it's going to be
very very hard to make ends meet, and I obviously
would rather that the money was being spent with New
Zealand businesses than on a global giant like the Compass Group.
But center mentality like that can not drive government spending decisions.

(07:59):
We cannot pay an average of nine dollars a meal
simply because it creates jobs and helps Kiwi businesses out,
not when it is possible to feed kids for a
third of the price at three dollars a meal. I mean,
that's the kind of make work mentality that ended up
with this country blowing huge amounts of money on a
public's massive public sector workforce back in the eighties that
was around about twice what it should have been because

(08:19):
we were making jobs for people, keeping people employed. Anyone
cutting their budget, any business cutting their budget is brutal,
but especially when we're talking about a government cutting budgets
back and cutting budgets back this big. But it needs
to happen. I do not want to pay more tax
than I need to just to subsidize Peter Pits businesses.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
Now.

Speaker 6 (08:39):
Actually, what David Seymour has managed to do here deserves
a huge amount of praise, not the criticism that he's
coppying at the moment. He has managed to save one
hundred and thirty million dollars a year and deliver the
same service. Basically, that's impressive, right, Feeding kids for three
dollars a meal is impressive. Now, obviously the proof of
the pudding is going to be in the eating. I mean,
it's one thing to serve up a few lunches at

(08:59):
Parliament on a Tuesday. It's quite another to sustain that
across thousands of lunches for months on end and still
make sure that the kids a getting pulled that are
satisfactory and quality that's satisfactory. And there are clearly critics
who are just waiting for something to go wrong so
they could say, look, David Seaboard did the wrong thing right,
so he's absolutely got his work cut out for him.

(09:20):
But so far, I all think we ought to be
grateful that he's managed to do something that politicians very
rarely managed to do, which is to maintain a service
while saving money.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
It's interesting that thing about you know, the suppliers missing
out since they were too expensive or whatever. Isn't it
a butterfly flapt It swings and a kid gets its
lunch as they say news talk.

Speaker 7 (09:45):
Has it been.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
Right, Let's finish out Trump Chance still talking about the
common Rold James and I thought we weren't having them anymore.

Speaker 7 (09:51):
You know, it's been stripped right back when it's going
to be hosted in Edinburgh. This was after the State
of Victoria's said it was too expensive, we can't do it.
Originally they budgeted two point six billion, then it blew
out to an estimated seven billion, so they said, no,
we can't do it. Scotland has come to the table.
But I say it's been good. It's been nice. Thanks
for the memories, but probably time for the commonwealths to

(10:13):
just go away at this point. Matt, you disagree wholeheartedly
with that.

Speaker 8 (10:18):
I think it's a fantastic time the Commonwealth Games and
it's an opportunity for athletes to showcase themselves. In this
text here you said it's just a budget Commonwealth Game.
I said, the poor, poor cousin a budget so Olympics. Yeah,
poor cousin Olympics. As this Texas says here should be
not compete in the Blue Dolow Cup because it's just
a budget Rugby World Cup. I mean you can have

(10:41):
levels of competition. That doesn't mean just because they're not
the pinnacle, you don't do them. The Olympics is always
going to be the glamor event, but there's a lot
of glamor to be had in the Comwealth Games, a
lot of great memories and I think it's a fantastic thing.
It will be an absolute tragedy if the world lost it.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
I think tragedy is going a little bit far. And
I don't think we should have less bit as low Cup.

Speaker 5 (11:00):
We should go back to.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
Having three games. This whole thing about you know, we
get to keep it forever because they've got to win
both games. It doesn't seem very fair. We don't get
me wrong. I don't want Australia do I ever win
it ever again. But at the moment they're not going
to because they're never going to win two games, are they?
Poor old Australia. Jez. I never thought i'd say poor

(11:21):
old Australia. It feels weird in my mouth. Just forget
I said anything, actually, And we'll finish the podcast and yeah,
we'll just carry on and I listen happen.

Speaker 1 (11:30):
Hu's talk is talking zid bean for more from news Talk,
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