Show me a victim and I’ll show you an opposition politician preaching concern, a union leader criticising those who caused it, and a media scrum scrambling to tell the story.
Our television news teams have become quite expert at starting a story about any topic with the victim’s perspective. It could be crime, the economy or a shortage of fish in the sea. Rather than explain the issue or its cause, let’s start with the victim’s perspective.
As beat-ups go, the latest one is a doozy. At its centre are our children. In this case, they represent our victims. On the fringes are the critics; our left-leaning politicians, media, teachers unions and others.
The issue is the provision of school lunches. In the Government’s attempts to save a little over $100 million on the cost of the school lunch programme, there have been some teething troubles.
Those teething troubles include meals arriving late, being too cold or too hot, or lacking variety.
Of course, as the usual handwringers have stated their case, the blame for this debacle was placed fairly and squarely on the Government, and responsible Minister, David Seymour. A Government seeking to right-size the inherited spending across our bloated and unaffordable bureaucracy.
One such critic, a school lunch co-ordinator, complained that a delivery of spaghetti and meatballs had arrived late and she was worried that “the children could get sick”. She went on to say the children “were happy with the meals, but had said that they were tired of rice and chicken”.
I can’t help but think that we are losing a bit of perspective here.
Those of us in our 40s, 50s and 60s will well remember our school lunches. The options were pretty simple. White bread sandwiches with jam, Marmite or peanut butter. Sometimes we had luncheon sausage or even lettuce AND Marmite. Or jam AND cheese. Usually there were a couple of biscuits in our lunch boxes as well. And a piece of fruit.
If you’re tired of rice and chicken, try five consecutive days of Marmite sandwiches.
We didn’t walk around with Coke or Powerade or oversized drink bottles either. We drank water from the tap when we were thirsty. And yet, for the most part, we turned out okay. We went to school for 10 or 12 years and, for the most part, came away as resilient and active participants in society.
Elsewhere, a school principal announced last week that “Seymour” cut the $7 per lunch to $3. No wonder our maths teaching is so poor.
Based on my own analysis of the Government budget reducing from $342 million to $235m, across 235,000 students attending 190 days of school per year, the variance is more like $2.50 rather than $4.
But there is a risk that excessive analysis overlooks the source of the issue.
I wouldn’t for one moment belittle the importance of a child being well-fed. But equally I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of the role a parent has in ensuring their child is well fed. It would appear in this petty argument over school lunches, this fact is being overlooked.
And we should acknowledge there are children who suffer from enormous family disfunction, and who, if not fed at school, may not be fed at all.
And it should be logical to all of us that well-fed children will participate better, learn better and be more attentive throughout their school day.
But whose job is that?
Of the 470,000 students who attend primary and intermediate school, do we really believe that half, or 235,000, suffer such inequity?
Another school principal shouted from the pages of a rival newspaper that “our students deserve better”. She is right. They do. And first and foremost that better solution should be delivered by parents.
The same principal complained of insufficient halal, vegan or meals fitting other dietary requirements. Really?
If the Government is to be the ambulance at the bottom of the school lunch cliff, so be it. But wherever functionally or financially possible, the top of that cliff should be manned by parents.
And if we’re buying lunch for half the kids, we’re letting a lot of parents, who could otherwise provide lunches for their children, off the hook.
At any level of welfare, the Government should be the provider of last resort. This column has previously stated that an important factor in any society is its willingness and ability to look after those who cannot look after themselves.
But beyond that, beyond those who cannot help themselves, are school lunches really the job of Government? No. It is not the job of our teachers to feed students. It’s not the school’s job either. A school principal engaged on lunches is not focused on education.
Someone once said if you don’t have plans for your life, chances are you will fit into someone else’s plans. If you have the means, and want to make sure your kids get a nutritious lunch, make it for them. If not, don’t complain about what the state does or doesn’t do for them.
We need to acknowledge it is our parents who are letting their kids down, not the Government. This school lunch programme is a response to some parents neglecting their responsibilities, and a Government which believed it was its job to fill the void.
It goes back to 2019 when the then Labour-led Government decided to introduce school lunch programmes into the neediest of areas.
Initially targeted at 120 schools and 21,000 children who “need our support the most”, the programme, like much of what that Government touched, ballooned into an unnecessarily overstretched and unaffordable regime.
Somehow that regime continued to grow to a point where now almost half of primary and intermediate school children are receiving Government-sponsored welfare in the form of a school lunch.
It has gone too far and it needs to be reigned in - not stopped - but we need to maintain a programme where it is needed. Beyond that, let’s take the politics out of it and pull it back.
We cannot afford to spend a single dollar that we don’t have to. Supplementing the responsibilities of those who are financially able is a luxury beyond our current means. Secondly, the more Government gives, the more that is expected. Initially they wanted lunch. Now it seems, chicken and rice and $7 a pop is not good enough.
If we want to get exercised about the welfare of our children, there are plenty of other topics those same serial complainers, politicians, unions and lunch monitors alike, don’t seem so keen to engage on.
How about this week’s announcement that for the year ended June 2024, 9% of our children in state care were abused and neglected?
This announcement immediately after the trials and apologies brought about by our very own Royal Commission into the same topic. Nine per cent is 507 children. Lives affected and possibly ruined.
And then there’s the fact that every month, Starship Children’s Hospital sees an abused child with a head injury so serious as to cause brain damage, as a result of child abuse.
Or how about our collective capacity to murder our children? We’ve lost at least 75 children under the age of 14 in the past 10 years. The current running rate is one death every five weeks as a result of family violence.
The list goes on. Our youth suicide rate is one of the worst in the OECD. Infant mortality is sixth. Mental health, teen pregnancy, obesity.
According to Unicef, we’re at the wrong end of most statistics for our children and teenagers. As a country once at the top of the ratings it’s a disgrace we now rank 35th out of 41 developed countries for child well-being outcomes.
And yet here we stand, complaining about chicken or rice. Late or early. Hot or cold. Chasing a headline because we can embarrass a minister. We’re embarrassing ourselves.
I just went down to the local supermarket to get some lunch. Shaved ham, coleslaw and a tomato. The 150g of ham was $3.30 while 150g of coleslaw was $1.39. At $4.39 a loaf the ploughman’s wholemeal bread cost 21c a slice or 84c for four slices. The tomato was 50c. A man-sized lunch, two full-sized sandwiches for $6.03.
It shouldn’t be that hard. We might be broke. But you don’t need money to care. Sometimes we have to take the crutches away so people can walk free.
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