Guest comment: Govt has responsibility to keep us safe

A RECENT report that a major supermarket chain is withdrawing support for school breakfasts is a revealing counterpoint to the spin the Government gave its latest Budget.
The supermarket chain's sponsorship of the Red Cross breakfast programme to 61 decile one schools has peeled back another layer of the community's soft underbelly that politicians, and particularly the ideologues who compiled the Budget, conveniently ignore.
The Red Cross, coupled with Kickstart, (sponsored by Fonterra and Sanitarium), serve nearly 500 needy schools at least some sort of day-starting food, which apparently is not provided in the homes of many children. Kickstart hopes that the benefits of the programme will filter down to the homes of the children, where it will be replicated.
Parents in decile one schools will claim it is because they do not have the money.
These are the same folk who use food banks mainly stocked by or organised by churches and other well-meaning charities.
Where is the analysis by the politicians of why this is happening? And it is a crock to blame parents who smoke, drink or gamble away their money as the cause. If you repeat this canard, you haven't been on the frontline of providing aid.
This whole area of people going hungry in this "land of plenty" is the stuff that makes revolutions.
Churches get involved because they believe their founder directed them to care for the poor, but food banks set up by these people because they see a need is a scandal that should not be tolerated in a country such as ours. So ingrained have food banks become we now have politicians telling this sector to take up the slack of dealing with these needs, without even blushing that they have failed to provide the necessities of life for their people.
Should a parent not provide the necessities of life for their children, they are dragged into court to be dealt to by giving them a criminal conviction - and politicians think they have provided a solution.
They haven't, and until some of them are also convicted of this neglect to protect and keep secure the nation, which means in part providing substantive solutions to feed the hungry, food banks will remain a blight on our society.
Euan Campbell is a newcomer to Wanganui, after living elsewhere in New Zealand, Australia and in Asia, writing and broadcasting on community issues in these places. He is a retired Presbyterian minister and says he has spent many years in the "patch-up industry".