KEY POINTS:
What a vengeful, punitive little country we've become. The attitude of many people towards feeding kids at school astounds me.
Ever since John Key raised the issue of kids going to school on empty stomachs, there's been debate as to whose responsibility it is to feed them. And while I accept that of course it's the responsibility of the kids' parents, we know there are some woeful parents out there, parents completely incapable of providing the basic necessities of life for their children. They're hardly going to be staying up late, preparing nutritious, tasty, healthy lunches for their offspring, are they? And yes, they deserve our condemnation and scorn. But heaping blame on the parents isn't going to fill the stomachs of their children.
The Labour Government dismissed Key's plan to partner up a school with a local business as "Tory charity". Ministers quibbled over the actual numbers of kids who are too hungry to learn and accused Key of grandstanding.
This head-in-the-sand approach is unhelpful. If there are kids going to school without adequate nutrition, if these young ones are being failed by their parents, then surely we have a responsibility to help them.
Already, there are church groups and volunteer organisations working with their local schools, providing breakfasts for kids who need them, and many of these schemes have been going for years. Another charity, KidsCan, supplies lunches to some schools so teachers can give them out discreetly to children they can see are hungry. And now the Red Cross and Countdown supermarkets have offered to supply breakfasts to the poorest primary schools. It appears that private enterprise and NGOs are uniting to fulfil a need the Government denies exists.
Which is just as well. The suggestion of school lunches supplied by the Government was shouted down on talkback - parents, many of them single parents doing the right thing by their own children - felt taxpayer-funded meals would allow useless parents to escape their responsibilities and would be just another example of the nanny state interfering in the lives of New Zealanders. Which is all very well and good, but surely that is the duty of the state: to protect its most vulnerable citizens and to care for them when they are being failed.
I'm not sure about the wisdom of universal school lunches. Done properly, it could solve the problems of child hunger and child obesity in one fell swoop. And done properly, there could also be an improvement in the behaviour of children if a British study on nutrition and behaviour is to be believed.
A UK prison trial showed that when a group of violent young male offenders was fed a diet supplemented by multi-vitamins, essential fatty acids and minerals, the number of violent offences committed in jail fell by nearly 40 per cent. A similar trial is being conducted at the National Institute of Health in Washington, and in Holland officials are conducting trials on the prison population. And there have been claims that fish oil can help children with severe behaviour problems.
Combine that with parents' complaints of children coming home with full lunch-boxes and a general dismay about the lack of social niceties among the young, and a compulsory, sit-down school lunch might be just the answer: 20 minutes where private contractors come in to serve a nutritious, calorie-balanced Omega 3-rich lunch to young people who must learn the art of table manners and conversation while overworked teachers relax away from their charges to chow down on their own salmon sandwiches.
In the meantime, the issue of hungry children has become a political football.
Key has attempted to carve out a role as the father of the nation, Labour is in full Kim Jong-Il rhetorical flight, denying that any of its citizens are starving, and righteous parents are adamant that hungry kids can jolly well starve and that will teach their useless parents.
Thank heavens there are charitable organisations, caring businesses, church groups and community leaders that are just getting on with distributing food and filling stomachs without pausing to argue over who's to blame.
