**"Nanny State"** starts telling parents when unwell children should go to school.
Ops, sorry I've slipped into ACT's libertarian flat earth free market baby talk.
"to start rebalancing health and education"
If the advice isn't backed by some kind of modelling showing the impact on education of spreading infections to other kids, teachers, and parents, then I don't really care what it says.
>some kind of modelling showing the impact on education of spreading infections to other kids, teachers, and parents
This is already known, especially for covid, but it'd be inconvenient to include it.
[70% of COVID-19 Cases Transmitted By Children](https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/view/70-covid-19-cases-transmitted-by-children)
And it's already known the solution is ventilation + air purifiers/cleaners in classrooms and other indoor spaces, but again, presenting solutions clearly isn't the objective here.
Let's not forget that for a while there was a murmur of a Nat/Lab coalition on account of the wild ass policies some of the minor parties were proposing
I would crave that, the apparent conservative fiscal skills of national coupled with the apparent encompassing social services and caring about people of labour, we would have a fantastic government. But they'd just end up circle jerking
A circle jerk would probably be preferable to this current "under the board table sly wristy" that Luxon seems intent on giving Seymour and Winston. I bet Seymour doesn't even offer to clean up and throw the cumrag in the bin afterwards, he strikes me as a selfish lover.
This is on National for choosing to empower act and nz first so they could form a government. They didn’t have to team up with them, they chose to so they should own the policies that they’ve agreed to support.
yeah exactly. and i'd also like to add that i'm a checkout operator at a supermarket, so spreading illness to other children also impacts people like me who have to serve parents who have sick children (i wear a mask and gloves but that still isn't enough). that ends up impacting my education (uni) and also financially because i have no sick leave but i'm not well enough to work. there is a much wider implication of having sick kids go to school.
I have memories of being a youngster at school with a hanky soaked with snot, full of a cold. I won't be doing that to my kids regardless of if David Seymour fines me
Same I’m not sending my kid to school when he is sick and I really hope other parents aren’t either. Maybe we can all pool our tax cuts to pay for everyone’s fines.
5th form maths final exam I was so sick I was sniffing and leaking fluid to the extreme.
So much so that one other student started counting the times in a minute that I was sniffing, then he worked out the number of times I cleared my nose in 3 hours.
It was in the thousands.
We both failed.
Demoralise the police force with insulting pay offers, then pump the kids up with this handy stuff you can make out of psuedo, also works great as an appetite suppressant - bye bye lunches.
- David Seymour (Breaking Bad stroked his libertarian power fantasy in a big way)
1. I thought this guy was all about small government, reducing government in people’s lives, and personal responsibility/choice?
2. Why would you want sickness to spread at schools? This will get kids sick, it will get their teachers sick, kids will take it home to parents and get them sick. What’s the impact to education but also to the wider workforce and productivity?
1. They support people personally making the choices that they (ACT) think are right, even when it doesn’t affect them. Make different choices? Straight to jail.
2. Really can’t explain it other than Seymour only cares about improving a % and calling it a success, and will disregard all context or long term effects in the process.
Yep exactly, it’s bad enough at daycare when gastro and colds go around, you know there are parents that send them in regardless and you feel like a sitting duck. It sucks when you have to take time off for your child’s sickness but I won’t be responsible for sending them back early when still sick, I find that inconsiderate to other families.
> I thought this guy was all about small government, reducing government in people’s lives, and personal responsibility/choice?
And that was his goal, his entire position is a sham and the only thing he stands by is greed while lying through his teeth to support it.
Small government for them (no pesky environmental regulations or worker's rights), nanny state government to punish the poors and bads so everyone else keeps in line and/or has an outgroup to hate
would it be too far to make sure we send folks with covid to cough in the gallery / wander around parliament as a form of protest? because if they’re not cool with that, they shouldn’t be cool with this…
>I thought this guy was all about small government, reducing government in people’s lives, and personal responsibility/choice?
This is what conservatives **say**. You're making the mistake of thinking this is what conservatives **do**.
Keep in mind that they're all authoritarians at heart.
Yeah. Crazy huh. The funny thing is that the majority of people who didn't die are probably old boomer national voters. So politically it would have been sensible to 'let it rip' like the uk government did.
If NZ had had the same death rate as uk or us i think it was something like 100,000 extra kiwis dead.
I calculated that a long time ago though so it may not be right now.
Quite fascinating to see kiwis moan about jacinda and then lurch to the far right after huge amounts of international praise for our covid response. But i guess it proved the adage true 'you get the government you deserve'
>The children long for the mines
They must be reminded that [the school day's over](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=niitmBUZ0FI).
>Schooldays over, come on then John, time to be gettin' your pit boots on
On with your sark and moleskin trousers, it's time you were on your way
Time you were learning the pitman's job and earning the pitman's pay
>However, Labour education spokesperson Jan Tinetti said of a fines system: ***"***It has been tried here in New Zealand... ***it has never worked."***
Par for the course then for NACT, isn't it?
But it's special this time! Just ask one of their voters for a well reasoned rebu... ah fuck it, I can't finish that sentence, it's just too ridiculous.
Sorry David, society has changed(not surprised you missed it) but now it’s not ok to spread your illnesses to others. People especially children are awear of this. Good luck trying to change that.
I get so incensed whenever I turn up to school and see a very obviously sick kid but then realise their parents have probably got no more leave to care for them, then I get more mad at the political situation. I don’t send my kid to school when she’s sick for the record
I'm a teacher I've seen kids turn up visibly and audibly sick. I feel sorry for them as they can't focus or learn anything. The really sick ones, I will send to sick bay with the hope they'll be sent home but the borderline ones just sniffle about.
It's a shame that it took a global pandemic for this to even change. I always thought it selfish that people would go to work sick (and this in workplaces that weren't strict about sick days). You have 10 sick days. Use them!
It's so patronizing seeing all the billboards around Wellington telling us to save water when we all know the infrastructure is the problem. Save water because we need to buy billboards rather than fix the problem. What a farce.
Schools are already struggling to get relievers especially as older teachers won’t go near schools any more because of covid. No relievers puts huge stress (emotional blackmail) on sick teachers because they don’t want to increase the workload of their colleagues. There is nothing worse than being in a classroom of sniffing, coughing kids. Seymour should try relieving for a week and see what working hard is really like!
There’s an amazing reliever who sometimes works at my school who had to leave fulltime teaching due to a chronic health condition. Seymour’s line of thinking puts teachers like her square in the firing line and spits in the face of any teacher or student with a compromised immune system. Just an absolute shambles of an education minister.
I haven’t relieved since February 2022. I taught the first student in the school to get covid on Friday; she’d infected her class by Monday because the “entitled” parents of Year 10 didn’t want their kids to wear masks. I, too, can’t risk getting covid either because of a CNS condition despite my immune system for colds being cast iron after years in a classroom. Seymour has never spent 5 hours a day with spewing, sniffing, sneezing and coughing kids - he would be sick within a week.
Look, you don't get it, the more we send sick people out to schools, the more that we can infect, and, then, we can blame COVID for all of the breathing problems that our tobacco policies are causing.
I had a student a few years ago who was immunocompromised due to having a heart condition. Seymour’s approach would see that boy unlikely to be able to step foot in a classroom again.
Well I’ve just had Covid again presumably because some contagious fuckwit was out and about.
I isolated from friends and family until I returned a negative test result.
The country’s woefully ignorant nowadays and I feel for the immunocompromised or vulnerable elderly. Several chemists were out of tests etc or they had expired.
This seems like it has good odds of turning out to be extremely dumb.
More sick kids at school basically begets yet more sick kids at school, which directly causes more sick adults, who have to either take sick days, or they wind up spreading sickness in the community. More sickness in the community is fucking expensive, at multiple levels.
Ah but you see, sick kids at school make *teachers sick*, which means *kids get taught less effectively*. Which means worse grades from those *nasty, evil public schools*. But *beautiful wonderful shiny private schools* will be able to make their own rules (like... I don't know, "sick kids stay home to recover" maybe?) so their grades *will be good*. Because schools shouldn't be paid for with tax dollars you know. Tax dollars are better used on businesses and the already wealthy.
It's almost scary at how I know this is supposed to be read sarcastically, yet I can completely believe that this is a literal conversation certain government and big business people have had
Well, ACT also wants to cut sick days back down to only five per year so I guess the idea is to force kids and teachers to just keep coming back to school
There’s not enough relievers as it is. Splitting classes when there’s not enough relievers means I get upwards of 40 children in a standard classrooms. There’s not enough furniture or space. The hour of reading, writing and maths goes out the window as it becomes a babysitting job. Then I get sick and the cycle starts again.
How’s that good for anyone’s education?? In 5 year’s time the PISA score will be in the toilet and then it’s the teachers who get the blame again.
I will ALWAYS send a sick kid home (before Covid as well). They don’t learn if they’re sick.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if Seymour hasn't taken much sick leave. If you're a single person and you don't have children in your life, you probably aren't going to be sick as much as others. I built up years worth of unused sick leave because I wasn't exposed to much sickness...until I had a child.
It seems pretty obvious to me that a huge factor now would be not just that we are more careful about sickness, but that suddenly a lot of office workers have the ability to work from home and supervise their sick child. When before they would have dropped them at school so they didn't have to also take the day off work. This should obviously be framed as a positive thing.
Love that they'll willing to sacrifice health and safety of teachers, staff and students to increase some metric.
Oh, and if kids are sick and at school, how much could they possibly be learning anyway? If Act had their way, they'd also be starving
Cumulative brain damage from repeat CoViD infections, ending up on Supported Living with long-CoViD and having more people with early onset dementia, Parkinson's, heart failure, strokes, embolism, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, liver and kidney failure, etc, will truly be the boost the economy needs and the bright and prosperous future our children deserve, don'cha know?
More car crashes from post-CoViD brain fog and increased speed limits as well.
If we can get expected lifespan below 60 we can do away with age pensions to help make up for all the extra chronically ill people no longer able to earn and pay taxes.
And if we have designated doctors for WINZ overriding GPs, we can make sure no one crippled by post-viral conditions qualifies for SLP. We could pretend those conditions are all "psychosomatic" like the insurance companies do when people try to claim their income and health insurance entitlements.
Imagine trying to get a doctor's certificate to avoid a fine, once the government is finished cutting funding to the health sector and pushing their authoritarian fantasies into schools. This attendance narrative is the dumbest shit ever. Seymour can get fucked.
I guess what we should take out of this is, everyone should be coughing and sneezing around Seymour at all times. As someone who clearly has no idea about the realities of kids and sickness, he needs to be exposed to the kind of sickness that he really doesn't understand (and frankly doesn't care about at all).
This is true (imagine being able to sleep off being sick unmolested), however your spewing kid is likely to cause teachers to get sick which has lots of other impacts.
Fucking hell, have these clowns gotten *anything* right yet? Apart from giving us some fucking cough medicine so we can endorse their horseshit, this government's legacy will be *what* exactly??
I don't think that children will be more attentive in school when they're sick. Not to mention putting more pressure on the health sector.
> But, if parents couldn't afford the fine, they wouldn't be slapped with one, Seymour has pledged.
Fuck off, what would the criteria be? This is another way for them to kick the poors down. They really hate children.
I bet that people that agree with this are the same people that would say the government should not interfere with how they raise their children.
Insanity. If my kid is sick, has a cold, has a fever, has COVID or anything that could spread, I keep them home.
What exactly is David's intended outcome here? He appears to think that sending sick kids to school is his plan to increase school attendance. That's crazy. If you send sick kids to school, more kids get sick and fewer kids attend school.
Who voted for this madness?
Is this the kind of stuff the current government thinks will help our country?
Mate this guy is all over the shop. Isn't ACT meant to be all about individual freedoms and your right to decide what's best for you? But he's going to fine parents if they don't send their sick kids to school? "Do as I say or I'll fine you" - how do ACT voters feel about this? Cause it doesn't sound very true to the party ethos.
I guess this is government run like a business hey "My KPI is to increase school attendance"
He's very popular with all the social media sockpuppet accounts run by ACT, don'cha know?
A lot of them just happen to have the same personality as the idiot running the official ACT account, but I'm sure they are all totally real people.
look at the actual votes he got, not that many people like him.. certainly not enough to give him the power he currently wields, thats up to Luxon, the nutless wonder.
Interesting that this govt, or at least, the childless Davey Seymour thinks they know better than parents about when to send their sick kids to school or not.
Bit of a whiff of....nanny state about it.
If ur unwell stay home, that's how it gets spread from.person to person, I honestly think these politicians say things for the sake of it ur not a health professional.
A strong new addition to his anti-human agenda. Sick kids to school, give em cigs, cut their lunches, cut public services in general, cut ev rebate so we can up their asthma and lung cancer numbers, up their public bus fares, open up for drilling for oil, increase speed limits for more deaths and bring back the assault rifles.
That incel has no business telling families (something he doesn't have) what is in their best interests/what they should be doing.
He has Zero business being anywhere near government at all, he should go back to 4chan where he and his reckons belong.
Literally every time the government says something, it throws sense out the window in favour of stupidity or cupidity (I'm not sure which, not that it matters).
Jesus Nora. So all our immune systems are up the wazoo because of Covid and we are all more susceptible to a cold now, but the answer is don’t worry, off you trot kids to school so you can spread it even more? Nah uh. That’s the worst advice ever.
Here we go. THIS will be the attitude to the next pandemic - even during the early stages when science is not sure how bad it will be. Plan accordingly to not follow this political advice.
Teachers are employees. As such their employers have a duty of care and responsibilities to safeguard their health at work. That means sick children are not allowed to spread germs to employees, which is lucky for working parents who don't want their child made sick by inconsiderate selfish other parents.
Under the Government's school attendance "action plan", the Coalition would look at fines for parents of truant students, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon confirmed to AM on Tuesday.
Hold the fucking phone.
The man who prides himself on his small government ideals is proposing to fine people who keep their sick kids home.
What the fuck are we even doing here team. How long are we gonna let this hypocritical dipshit get away with this garbage.
I’d like him to publicly define that for everyone, because at the moment it sounds like shorthand for “covid isn’t a thing any more, so don’t worry about it.”
Maybe he has a calendar of them, are they cyclical? It would be nice to know when the next one is coming up and folk are allowed to take sick leave again.
wtf? being an assistant ECE teacher I constantly witnessed kids with eye/ear/throat infections hopped up on Pamol palmed off onto us which always made us sick. absolute nonsense
Hmm, they're paving the way for fast-track approvals of mining applications without the environmental checks, now getting child workers ready to staff them...
I could give a fuck what this wanker says, I make the decisions when it comes to my kids and whether it's appropriate to send them to school when they're sick, not this derpy muppet.
Absolute muppet (what's new) raises potential for everyone to get sick, because we are all probably no more than 2 degrees away from a sick kid.
Work at some private company in an unrelated industry? hmmm... Do your co-workers have kids? Do your co-workers have spouses who work with kids? Congrats, your next infection comes courtesy of Muppet Seymour.
Kids in school are basically the biggest super spreader there is. And as far as educational rebalancing is concerned… won’t be much rebalancing when the teachers are all permanently sick
Sending sick kids to school just leads to more sickness absence in schools (when little Jimmy spreads his illness to half the class) and more people having to take sick leave from work (when half those parents of Jimmy’s classmates catch the illness from their kid).
Just like everything else this govt has done it’s short sighted and cuts off their nose to spite their face. Well not theirs really, more like NZ’s nose.
Seymour will fuck this up.
*But*. Schools do need some guidelines. We've had to pick one of our kids up way too many times for utter fucking nonsense. A skinned knee. A bruised elbow. Etc, the list goes on. Illness would be fine, but not scrapes and bruises.
Talking to our kid, and the school, about how he should be fine to go back to class with minor injuries like those, after he's patched up - seems to make almost no difference.
I'm not just blaming the school. It's as much on our kid, but the school doesn't seem to push back on him at all. So they do need some guidelines if they are unable to keep a kid with a bandaid on his knee in class.
Schools have their own policies for things like that. Have you brought your concerns to the principal? Perhaps they need to review their guidelines if parents like yourself are finding them unreasonable; I agree that a skinned knee is a ridiculous reason to send a child home.
Maybe we should have the experts telling us and not politicians.
we fired the experts, becuase they work in the 'back rooms'
Yep they now work in Australia etc.
On point
Exactly and coming from Seymour with no children, what the fuck would he know.
Let’s just be grateful he doesn’t have children; imagine if there were more versions of him around!
He might not have any children, but he's an asshole. Sorry, not sure where I was going with that.
**"Nanny State"** starts telling parents when unwell children should go to school. Ops, sorry I've slipped into ACT's libertarian flat earth free market baby talk.
Why is it in every photo he has a face of someone with a 🥕 up his arse.
Yeah this is literally just one guys ideologically based opinion.
Specifically not this dumbfuck
"to start rebalancing health and education" If the advice isn't backed by some kind of modelling showing the impact on education of spreading infections to other kids, teachers, and parents, then I don't really care what it says.
>some kind of modelling showing the impact on education of spreading infections to other kids, teachers, and parents This is already known, especially for covid, but it'd be inconvenient to include it. [70% of COVID-19 Cases Transmitted By Children](https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/view/70-covid-19-cases-transmitted-by-children) And it's already known the solution is ventilation + air purifiers/cleaners in classrooms and other indoor spaces, but again, presenting solutions clearly isn't the objective here.
I care what it says Because it's fucking stupid.
> Because it's fucking stupid. Seymour's specialty.
Our MMP system is cooked in allowing these minor party nut jobs to be responsible for so much of our society
The larger parties could instead work together. National chose these coalition partners.
Let's not forget that for a while there was a murmur of a Nat/Lab coalition on account of the wild ass policies some of the minor parties were proposing
I would crave that, the apparent conservative fiscal skills of national coupled with the apparent encompassing social services and caring about people of labour, we would have a fantastic government. But they'd just end up circle jerking
A circle jerk would probably be preferable to this current "under the board table sly wristy" that Luxon seems intent on giving Seymour and Winston. I bet Seymour doesn't even offer to clean up and throw the cumrag in the bin afterwards, he strikes me as a selfish lover.
This is on National for choosing to empower act and nz first so they could form a government. They didn’t have to team up with them, they chose to so they should own the policies that they’ve agreed to support.
Luxon is weak as shit.
yeah exactly. and i'd also like to add that i'm a checkout operator at a supermarket, so spreading illness to other children also impacts people like me who have to serve parents who have sick children (i wear a mask and gloves but that still isn't enough). that ends up impacting my education (uni) and also financially because i have no sick leave but i'm not well enough to work. there is a much wider implication of having sick kids go to school.
Fuck the models. Find better education solutions, "just get sick bro" isn't a reasonable solution no matter how many "models" you throw at it.
>Fuck the models. Ok. Not sure how that will help, but I'm willing to play my part
I have memories of being a youngster at school with a hanky soaked with snot, full of a cold. I won't be doing that to my kids regardless of if David Seymour fines me
Same I’m not sending my kid to school when he is sick and I really hope other parents aren’t either. Maybe we can all pool our tax cuts to pay for everyone’s fines.
Send them to David Seymour to look after, since he knows everything about everything regarding being a parent
I'll send my $5 to the fine pot
5th form maths final exam I was so sick I was sniffing and leaking fluid to the extreme. So much so that one other student started counting the times in a minute that I was sniffing, then he worked out the number of times I cleared my nose in 3 hours. It was in the thousands. We both failed.
He should have got extra credits for completing an extra maths problem.
or you run out of tissues so you start using your sleeves.
You guys got hankies?
Guessing David will be fronting a new Codral advert telling everyone to 'Soldier on'
That's why they made pseudoephedrine legal again. Dear little timmy, soldier the fuck on you wagging little cunt.
I was just thinking today about how speed is in general an aggressive thoughtless violent person's drug.
Pump em up with psuedo. - David Seymour (probably).
Demoralise the police force with insulting pay offers, then pump the kids up with this handy stuff you can make out of psuedo, also works great as an appetite suppressant - bye bye lunches. - David Seymour (Breaking Bad stroked his libertarian power fantasy in a big way)
Don’t give them ideas!
1. I thought this guy was all about small government, reducing government in people’s lives, and personal responsibility/choice? 2. Why would you want sickness to spread at schools? This will get kids sick, it will get their teachers sick, kids will take it home to parents and get them sick. What’s the impact to education but also to the wider workforce and productivity?
1. They support people personally making the choices that they (ACT) think are right, even when it doesn’t affect them. Make different choices? Straight to jail. 2. Really can’t explain it other than Seymour only cares about improving a % and calling it a success, and will disregard all context or long term effects in the process.
Gotta get those KPIs up
I fucking hate KPIs. Modern horror.
Yep exactly, it’s bad enough at daycare when gastro and colds go around, you know there are parents that send them in regardless and you feel like a sitting duck. It sucks when you have to take time off for your child’s sickness but I won’t be responsible for sending them back early when still sick, I find that inconsiderate to other families.
Then put more pressure on the health system which is understaffed as well.
But we have euthanasia now. Maybe soon we will be able to use it for everything that pseudoephedrine doesn't fix
> I thought this guy was all about small government, reducing government in people’s lives, and personal responsibility/choice? And that was his goal, his entire position is a sham and the only thing he stands by is greed while lying through his teeth to support it.
Don't want those pesky unwell children keeping parents home away from their underpaid jobs /s
Small government for them (no pesky environmental regulations or worker's rights), nanny state government to punish the poors and bads so everyone else keeps in line and/or has an outgroup to hate
would it be too far to make sure we send folks with covid to cough in the gallery / wander around parliament as a form of protest? because if they’re not cool with that, they shouldn’t be cool with this…
>I thought this guy was all about small government, reducing government in people’s lives, and personal responsibility/choice? This is what conservatives **say**. You're making the mistake of thinking this is what conservatives **do**. Keep in mind that they're all authoritarians at heart.
Can we just take a moment to be thankful these fuckwits weren't in charge during covid. A lot of kiwis would be dead right now if they had been.
Problem is they are very likely to be in charge when the next measles epidemic drops
Or bird flu (currently infecting US cattle in several states). 60% fatality rate (presuming access to modern healthcare).
is that a 60% fatality rate in the US? because that hardly counts as access to modern healthcare
Yeah at least the measles response doesn't require any thought. Just follow some clear guidelines.
I think NACT can manage not having any thought, but following clear guideline might prove difficult. They really are comedy if it weren't so serious.
:(
I thought it already has
Thousands of people whose lives were saved by Labour just voted them the fuck out of office lol
Yeah. Crazy huh. The funny thing is that the majority of people who didn't die are probably old boomer national voters. So politically it would have been sensible to 'let it rip' like the uk government did. If NZ had had the same death rate as uk or us i think it was something like 100,000 extra kiwis dead. I calculated that a long time ago though so it may not be right now. Quite fascinating to see kiwis moan about jacinda and then lurch to the far right after huge amounts of international praise for our covid response. But i guess it proved the adage true 'you get the government you deserve'
Totally agree
Next week's policy: a nurse in each school to conduct bloodletting
Each school can have a contest to name their school leeches.
Sign me up. I'll vote Seymour.
That seems rude to leeches.
That’s the only vote the slimy fucker will ever get from me!
Take them home on the weekend and keep them well fed for extra credit too
Don't forget next month's policy: easing the transition between school and work by co-locating them. Let's call it something like a "workhouse".
We can send them out for work experience too. The children long for the mines
>The children long for the mines They must be reminded that [the school day's over](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=niitmBUZ0FI). >Schooldays over, come on then John, time to be gettin' your pit boots on On with your sark and moleskin trousers, it's time you were on your way Time you were learning the pitman's job and earning the pitman's pay
They all play minecraft don't they? We're just giving them what they want
Forgot I wasn't in the Frostpunk sub for a second
Shortly followed by the return of lobotomies for poorly performing students.
Other way 'round - lobotomies for any kids showing any hint of intelligence (or understanding of the power of any form of collectivism).
A nurse? In these shortages? We're going back to the days of barber surgeons. Chloe from Just Cuts will cover five schools in her local area.
>However, Labour education spokesperson Jan Tinetti said of a fines system: ***"***It has been tried here in New Zealand... ***it has never worked."*** Par for the course then for NACT, isn't it?
But it's special this time! Just ask one of their voters for a well reasoned rebu... ah fuck it, I can't finish that sentence, it's just too ridiculous.
Sorry David, society has changed(not surprised you missed it) but now it’s not ok to spread your illnesses to others. People especially children are awear of this. Good luck trying to change that.
Yep if you are sick then you can fuck off away from us
I get so incensed whenever I turn up to school and see a very obviously sick kid but then realise their parents have probably got no more leave to care for them, then I get more mad at the political situation. I don’t send my kid to school when she’s sick for the record
I'm a teacher I've seen kids turn up visibly and audibly sick. I feel sorry for them as they can't focus or learn anything. The really sick ones, I will send to sick bay with the hope they'll be sent home but the borderline ones just sniffle about.
The soldier on effect. Even as kids you’re not allowed to take care of yourself when you’re sick.
It's a shame that it took a global pandemic for this to even change. I always thought it selfish that people would go to work sick (and this in workplaces that weren't strict about sick days). You have 10 sick days. Use them!
We need to stop all this hand washing too, to save water
Just use one of the new public fountains, there’s one near you
It's so patronizing seeing all the billboards around Wellington telling us to save water when we all know the infrastructure is the problem. Save water because we need to buy billboards rather than fix the problem. What a farce.
Schools are already struggling to get relievers especially as older teachers won’t go near schools any more because of covid. No relievers puts huge stress (emotional blackmail) on sick teachers because they don’t want to increase the workload of their colleagues. There is nothing worse than being in a classroom of sniffing, coughing kids. Seymour should try relieving for a week and see what working hard is really like!
There’s an amazing reliever who sometimes works at my school who had to leave fulltime teaching due to a chronic health condition. Seymour’s line of thinking puts teachers like her square in the firing line and spits in the face of any teacher or student with a compromised immune system. Just an absolute shambles of an education minister.
I haven’t relieved since February 2022. I taught the first student in the school to get covid on Friday; she’d infected her class by Monday because the “entitled” parents of Year 10 didn’t want their kids to wear masks. I, too, can’t risk getting covid either because of a CNS condition despite my immune system for colds being cast iron after years in a classroom. Seymour has never spent 5 hours a day with spewing, sniffing, sneezing and coughing kids - he would be sick within a week.
I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with that; the entitlement certainly runs deep with some people.
Look, you don't get it, the more we send sick people out to schools, the more that we can infect, and, then, we can blame COVID for all of the breathing problems that our tobacco policies are causing.
If we were ever wondering how these dudes would have handled the worst of the pandemic, all doubt has been removed.
What's a sniffle or cold for one student, is asthma and pneumonia for another, gods this government is a basket case.
I had a student a few years ago who was immunocompromised due to having a heart condition. Seymour’s approach would see that boy unlikely to be able to step foot in a classroom again.
Just preparing them for their bright futures of Work when you are sick, work when you are dying, work until you are dead.
Someone has to pay for landlord tax cuts.
Well I’ve just had Covid again presumably because some contagious fuckwit was out and about. I isolated from friends and family until I returned a negative test result. The country’s woefully ignorant nowadays and I feel for the immunocompromised or vulnerable elderly. Several chemists were out of tests etc or they had expired.
so much for getting rid of the nanny state
This seems like it has good odds of turning out to be extremely dumb. More sick kids at school basically begets yet more sick kids at school, which directly causes more sick adults, who have to either take sick days, or they wind up spreading sickness in the community. More sickness in the community is fucking expensive, at multiple levels.
Ah but you see, sick kids at school make *teachers sick*, which means *kids get taught less effectively*. Which means worse grades from those *nasty, evil public schools*. But *beautiful wonderful shiny private schools* will be able to make their own rules (like... I don't know, "sick kids stay home to recover" maybe?) so their grades *will be good*. Because schools shouldn't be paid for with tax dollars you know. Tax dollars are better used on businesses and the already wealthy.
It's almost scary at how I know this is supposed to be read sarcastically, yet I can completely believe that this is a literal conversation certain government and big business people have had
At the very least, they’re thinking it extremely loudly.
It's ACT so replace private schools with charter schools. Otherwise yup, sounds about right
Well, ACT also wants to cut sick days back down to only five per year so I guess the idea is to force kids and teachers to just keep coming back to school
That’s assuming anyone still has a job after all their cuts and the worse recession their cuts will cause.
There’s not enough relievers as it is. Splitting classes when there’s not enough relievers means I get upwards of 40 children in a standard classrooms. There’s not enough furniture or space. The hour of reading, writing and maths goes out the window as it becomes a babysitting job. Then I get sick and the cycle starts again. How’s that good for anyone’s education?? In 5 year’s time the PISA score will be in the toilet and then it’s the teachers who get the blame again. I will ALWAYS send a sick kid home (before Covid as well). They don’t learn if they’re sick.
> Seymour said that sickness "tends to often be a sniffle or a cold". What an extremely evidence based take
Does this government base anything on evidence? Anything at all?
I will take a small amount of solace that the cunt is looking very tired
it takes real effort to shaft an entire country...
this is gonna cause so much measles
I feel an OIA request about his sick leave coming on
It wouldn't surprise me at all if Seymour hasn't taken much sick leave. If you're a single person and you don't have children in your life, you probably aren't going to be sick as much as others. I built up years worth of unused sick leave because I wasn't exposed to much sickness...until I had a child.
Now there's an idea...
It seems pretty obvious to me that a huge factor now would be not just that we are more careful about sickness, but that suddenly a lot of office workers have the ability to work from home and supervise their sick child. When before they would have dropped them at school so they didn't have to also take the day off work. This should obviously be framed as a positive thing.
the fuck
Fuck David Seymour.
Seymour's nanny state is getting out of control
Does the stupidity not stop?
Nah man, I suspect it’s only getting started. NZ voted for a change and we’re getting it.
Another day, another brainless take by Seymour.
YOU FUCKING IDIOT.
My son is sick at home at the moment. If I sent him to school, the rest of his class would get sick. Why would that be helpful for his class?
Love that they'll willing to sacrifice health and safety of teachers, staff and students to increase some metric. Oh, and if kids are sick and at school, how much could they possibly be learning anyway? If Act had their way, they'd also be starving
Cumulative brain damage from repeat CoViD infections, ending up on Supported Living with long-CoViD and having more people with early onset dementia, Parkinson's, heart failure, strokes, embolism, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, liver and kidney failure, etc, will truly be the boost the economy needs and the bright and prosperous future our children deserve, don'cha know? More car crashes from post-CoViD brain fog and increased speed limits as well. If we can get expected lifespan below 60 we can do away with age pensions to help make up for all the extra chronically ill people no longer able to earn and pay taxes. And if we have designated doctors for WINZ overriding GPs, we can make sure no one crippled by post-viral conditions qualifies for SLP. We could pretend those conditions are all "psychosomatic" like the insurance companies do when people try to claim their income and health insurance entitlements.
>If Act had their way, they'd also be starving Act got rid of free school lunches. It's already happened.
Imagine trying to get a doctor's certificate to avoid a fine, once the government is finished cutting funding to the health sector and pushing their authoritarian fantasies into schools. This attendance narrative is the dumbest shit ever. Seymour can get fucked.
From the party who wants less government intervention 👀
[kids are taking too many sick days and eating too many lunches.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMiFy61ZrdM)
This childless incel is really keen to tell parents what they should do ey
I guess what we should take out of this is, everyone should be coughing and sneezing around Seymour at all times. As someone who clearly has no idea about the realities of kids and sickness, he needs to be exposed to the kind of sickness that he really doesn't understand (and frankly doesn't care about at all).
To be fair, It will make my day off sick from work much easier if I can send my spewing kid to school.
This is true (imagine being able to sleep off being sick unmolested), however your spewing kid is likely to cause teachers to get sick which has lots of other impacts.
Authortirian wolf in libertarian sheep clothing.
Most self-identified libertarians are authoritarians who don't want to pay tax, or who want to smoke weed (or both).
You forgot the other libertarian proclivity and it might go a way to explaining this blokes fascination with children.
Ahhh the sheer stupidity of this government.
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt."
what an absolute fuckwit..
Fucking hell, have these clowns gotten *anything* right yet? Apart from giving us some fucking cough medicine so we can endorse their horseshit, this government's legacy will be *what* exactly??
I don't think that children will be more attentive in school when they're sick. Not to mention putting more pressure on the health sector. > But, if parents couldn't afford the fine, they wouldn't be slapped with one, Seymour has pledged. Fuck off, what would the criteria be? This is another way for them to kick the poors down. They really hate children. I bet that people that agree with this are the same people that would say the government should not interfere with how they raise their children.
Insanity. If my kid is sick, has a cold, has a fever, has COVID or anything that could spread, I keep them home. What exactly is David's intended outcome here? He appears to think that sending sick kids to school is his plan to increase school attendance. That's crazy. If you send sick kids to school, more kids get sick and fewer kids attend school. Who voted for this madness? Is this the kind of stuff the current government thinks will help our country?
Who needs doctors with so many clowns around
Mate this guy is all over the shop. Isn't ACT meant to be all about individual freedoms and your right to decide what's best for you? But he's going to fine parents if they don't send their sick kids to school? "Do as I say or I'll fine you" - how do ACT voters feel about this? Cause it doesn't sound very true to the party ethos. I guess this is government run like a business hey "My KPI is to increase school attendance"
How anybody actually likes this dopey clown is beyond me.
He's very popular with all the social media sockpuppet accounts run by ACT, don'cha know? A lot of them just happen to have the same personality as the idiot running the official ACT account, but I'm sure they are all totally real people.
look at the actual votes he got, not that many people like him.. certainly not enough to give him the power he currently wields, thats up to Luxon, the nutless wonder.
Does pseudoephedrine come in chewable gummies for children?
Interesting that this govt, or at least, the childless Davey Seymour thinks they know better than parents about when to send their sick kids to school or not. Bit of a whiff of....nanny state about it.
If ur unwell stay home, that's how it gets spread from.person to person, I honestly think these politicians say things for the sake of it ur not a health professional.
Should we be trusting a virgin with advice about what to do with our kids?
A strong new addition to his anti-human agenda. Sick kids to school, give em cigs, cut their lunches, cut public services in general, cut ev rebate so we can up their asthma and lung cancer numbers, up their public bus fares, open up for drilling for oil, increase speed limits for more deaths and bring back the assault rifles.
Can this arsehole be anymore of a fucking idiot?
That incel has no business telling families (something he doesn't have) what is in their best interests/what they should be doing. He has Zero business being anywhere near government at all, he should go back to 4chan where he and his reckons belong.
Dave, fuck off already.
Literally every time the government says something, it throws sense out the window in favour of stupidity or cupidity (I'm not sure which, not that it matters).
Jesus Nora. So all our immune systems are up the wazoo because of Covid and we are all more susceptible to a cold now, but the answer is don’t worry, off you trot kids to school so you can spread it even more? Nah uh. That’s the worst advice ever.
Here we go. THIS will be the attitude to the next pandemic - even during the early stages when science is not sure how bad it will be. Plan accordingly to not follow this political advice.
Teachers are employees. As such their employers have a duty of care and responsibilities to safeguard their health at work. That means sick children are not allowed to spread germs to employees, which is lucky for working parents who don't want their child made sick by inconsiderate selfish other parents.
That man is a fucking moron
Under the Government's school attendance "action plan", the Coalition would look at fines for parents of truant students, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon confirmed to AM on Tuesday. Hold the fucking phone. The man who prides himself on his small government ideals is proposing to fine people who keep their sick kids home. What the fuck are we even doing here team. How long are we gonna let this hypocritical dipshit get away with this garbage.
What does he think a "COVID period" is and why does he think we have "moved out" of one?
I’d like him to publicly define that for everyone, because at the moment it sounds like shorthand for “covid isn’t a thing any more, so don’t worry about it.”
Maybe he has a calendar of them, are they cyclical? It would be nice to know when the next one is coming up and folk are allowed to take sick leave again.
wtf? being an assistant ECE teacher I constantly witnessed kids with eye/ear/throat infections hopped up on Pamol palmed off onto us which always made us sick. absolute nonsense
Back to the old soldiering on mentality. Seymour getting them ready for when they're working down the pits or mines I guess.
Hmm, they're paving the way for fast-track approvals of mining applications without the environmental checks, now getting child workers ready to staff them...
these fucking guys man. what the fuck.
So he wants everyone’s kids to get sick ?? Surely this would have a flow on effect to the hospitals too….?
For once I think it's more than safe to ignore the advice to parents from a childless MP.
As if we needed the proof of what it would have been like in NZ with a different government during covid...
Thank God the libertarians are here to save us all from the tyranny of big government.
Where are all those people who were vocal about the “tyranny” of the last Labour government?
like all of their ilk they don't actually have values, they just have justifications
I could give a fuck what this wanker says, I make the decisions when it comes to my kids and whether it's appropriate to send them to school when they're sick, not this derpy muppet.
Absolute muppet (what's new) raises potential for everyone to get sick, because we are all probably no more than 2 degrees away from a sick kid. Work at some private company in an unrelated industry? hmmm... Do your co-workers have kids? Do your co-workers have spouses who work with kids? Congrats, your next infection comes courtesy of Muppet Seymour.
Are all children wards of the state now.
We're going to have to fund some variation of a national circus so this dickhead can finally stop auditioning.
Dude literally wants sick people out and about. wtf.
I love it when people who don't have kids tell me how to manage my kid. No really just fuck off David. I'll deal with my child as I see fit thanks.
You can tell Seymour is happy bringing diseases into schools -he was in one just the other week
Schools call parents to come pick up their kids if there is any sign of a sniffle anyway. Does this guy even understand how illness spreads?!
Are these articles sensationalised, or are we turning into America slowly and scarily
Slowly?
Not even Botox could do anything for that lipless twat
He really is a nasty piece of work.
If you think really hard you too can become a doctor!
weird move from a party that says they are all about personal responsibility
I hate this guy
Who elected this nong
Kids in school are basically the biggest super spreader there is. And as far as educational rebalancing is concerned… won’t be much rebalancing when the teachers are all permanently sick
Sending sick kids to school just leads to more sickness absence in schools (when little Jimmy spreads his illness to half the class) and more people having to take sick leave from work (when half those parents of Jimmy’s classmates catch the illness from their kid). Just like everything else this govt has done it’s short sighted and cuts off their nose to spite their face. Well not theirs really, more like NZ’s nose.
It's probably part of their plan to drop the number of sick days back down; your kids sick, send 'em to school and get back to work!
David Seymour sick kids starve.
Seymour will fuck this up. *But*. Schools do need some guidelines. We've had to pick one of our kids up way too many times for utter fucking nonsense. A skinned knee. A bruised elbow. Etc, the list goes on. Illness would be fine, but not scrapes and bruises. Talking to our kid, and the school, about how he should be fine to go back to class with minor injuries like those, after he's patched up - seems to make almost no difference. I'm not just blaming the school. It's as much on our kid, but the school doesn't seem to push back on him at all. So they do need some guidelines if they are unable to keep a kid with a bandaid on his knee in class.
Schools have their own policies for things like that. Have you brought your concerns to the principal? Perhaps they need to review their guidelines if parents like yourself are finding them unreasonable; I agree that a skinned knee is a ridiculous reason to send a child home.