Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Science Committee to consider this bill.

This bill came about some time ago—a couple of years ago, actually—when I was visiting a number of schools. The schools that I visited had children there who had come to school without food and, certainly, were not doing as well as they could have done. As a result of that, we drafted this bill, put it in the ballot, and it was drawn out—unexpectedly, of course, because nobody expects their bill to necessarily be drawn out. I took this bill and re-approached the schools to find out what was happening. I visited a number of schools, hospitals, health practitioners, and many others. As a result of those visits, I believe that I did not get it right, and as a result of that I believe that this bill needs to be substantially changed. But what I do believe is that it needs to go to the select committee, because the lessons we can learn from this bill are ones that have a profound impact on New Zealand.

I want to mention two of the schools that I visited that made me rethink what I believed was the right thing to do, which was to introduce food in schools. Yendarra School is a decile 1a school in Ōtara. In a sense it comes from the poorest area anywhere in New Zealand. They rely on Fruit in Schools and are about to receive milk from Fonterra, and yet their kids—all of them; all of them—bring a lunch to school. All of them bring a lunch to the school, and, as a result of that, what we are seeing is kids who are healthy, bright-eyed, and willing to learn. I asked this school: “What is it? What have you done that enables you to ensure that your kids are well fed, while the kids down the road are not?”. What the school told me was, basically, they work with the community. They work with families. They enable those kids to have the food and the sandwiches and whatever they needed to bring to school—to be augmented with some of the fruit and milk as well—and then they have the kids at lunchtime sitting down and the teachers moving around to make sure that their families are, actually, providing sandwiches. Sometimes they were just Marmite sandwiches, but nevertheless they were something the kids were bringing. If they did not, the school would help them out, on an emergency basis, and then go back to the parents and ask what it was that was happening. That was Yendarra—I will come back to that in a minute.

The second school that I visited was Ōwairaka District School, a decile 2 school in my electorate. This is a school that relies on a programme called Garden to Table, which some of you may have heard about. It is an organisation that helps schools grow vegetables and fruit trees in their schools, and then helps them not only to garden and learn how to garden but also to make sure that those same vegetables and that same fruit goes into a kitchen. And every week they make something from the food that comes out of their own gardens. What I saw in those schools told me that there is a better way of being able to look at the whole issue of providing food in schools, a different way that will provide long-term and sustainable change.

I want to say one other thing about both of these schools. Both of these schools banned fizzy drinks from the schools. All of them, without exception—and this goes for many other schools that I visited—all of them believed that fizzy drinks are detrimental to their kids’ health, along with everything else that the tuck shops often serve up. They believed that nine teaspoons of sugar in a can of Coke were not going to do their kids any good in terms of their health or their concentration. And when they took those drinks out, those kids’ concentration improved. The interesting thing about Yendarra in Ōtara is that the public health nurse, when she visited it, found there were fewer skin infections. The dental health nurse found that there were fewer cavities in the kids’ teeth. The kids were less heavy than comparable kids down the road; in a sense they were less overweight. In effect, what was happening was not just about feeding the kids in schools but about teaching them about good nutrition and making them and their families healthier. This is what this bill is really about.

I recognise that in some cases, of course, we are going to have to ensure that children do get fed; otherwise they will get left behind. But I do not want to take parents’ responsibility—which is to ensure that their kids grow up—away from them, because that is not what we are trying to do in terms of ensuring and guaranteeing a long-term and sustainable solution to our problems. It is simply fixing the problem today. There is an old Chinese proverb, which I am sure everybody has heard about: “Give a person a fish and you will feed them for a day. Teach a person how to fish and they will be able to be self-sufficient for their entire lifetime.” You will be feeding them for their entire lifetime. That is really what I am talking about with this bill.

What I would like to see is what I observed, before I came into Parliament, in many of the aid operations that I was involved in. I remember, in particular, in Somalia feeding 30,000 children under 5 who had to be starving in order to get into our programme. They had to be less than 80 percent weight-for-height than what they should be. Those kids came in and when they came up to 100 percent they were checked out. They were discharged from the programme. The idea is that feeding children in that environment is an emergency situation, not a prolonged situation that will guarantee that there will be dependence.

So with this bill—what do I want to do with it? It is not like a politician to accept that they have not necessarily got it right, but I do not think I got it right with that first bill. What I do want to do is see that this bill goes through to the select committee, because I believe that the stories of those schools that I spoke about—Yendarra, Ōwairaka, and many, many more—have something to give to New Zealand as a whole, by coming before us and sharing their experiences. I do not want to impose, and I do not want to see imposed, on schools a diktat from on high saying: “You must do this, you must teach nutrition.”, or whatever. What I want to see is that these schools, and other schools that would like to follow in the same direction, have the opportunity to access the resources and the money that will enable them to run programmes like the ones at Yendarra and Ōwairaka, and that they apply to, perhaps, the Ministry of Education, to ask how you run a Garden to Table programme—how you connect with the local community so that the local community is about sharing and ensuring that their dietary habits change along with those of the children whom they are sending to the school. Those are the sorts of things that I want to see come up.

There are so many benefits that can arise from replicating what we have seen in those two schools and many others around the country, and applying them much more widely across the board. Instead, we are doing the same things over and over, expecting things to change. We have the third-highest obesity rate in the world, behind the USA and Mexico. If we do not change the way that we do things, it will cost us billions—billions—in taxpayer dollars. We cannot afford to have a society where obese and overweight children grow into unhealthy adults and cost our health system so much in our taxes. I want to see us move away from feeding as an emergency interaction, and I want to know that schools can access, if they want to, a more sustainable, self-reliant, and healthy programme, and that they can have the resources to do it.

Food in schools should be the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, but not the remedy to the overall problem. I do not want to see kids being dependent, families being dependent, on a feeding programme. What I want to see, rather than an institutionalised programme of feeding, is an institutionalised way of looking beyond that and teaching the long-term, lifelong skills that will enable kids not only to be able to be better fed but to have better nutrition and better health for the rest of their lives. Thank you.

I rise to speak briefly on the Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill in its first reading. First of all, I acknowledge the honourable member David Shearer, who put forward this particular bill. Actually, I believe David Shearer is a fine man. I did a search online on Wikipedia—although when I was an academic, I did not allow my students to use Wikipedia as a source of reference. I was looking at Wikipedia, and David Shearer, along with his wife, was named the New Zealander of the Year by the New Zealand Herald in 1992, and the following year he was appointed as a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the British New Year honours list. He also did humanitarian work in different parts of the world, including Liberia, Rwanda, Albania, Belgrade, Israel, Lebanon, and Iraq. So he has quite extraordinary experience, and I believe that he could have been a very good Leader of the Opposition, but, unfortunately, he did not have the support of his caucus. Now we—

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: Are you going to talk about the bill? When are you going to talk about the bill?

Well, the reason why I say this is that I appreciate the member’s intention of helping children from poor families.

Looking at the main provisions of the bill, basically—look at this—it inserts a new part in the Education Act 1989 that provides for the Secretary of Education to designate organisations as “food in school providers” and to set out the basis on which schools are eligible for receiving assistance from food in school providers. Also, a designated food in school provider must provide food to students in schools if the school board has requested assistance and the school has been defined as eligible for notice, and also if it is a State primary school. The fund is appropriated by Parliament, and the food in school providers must be paid a general grant. So these are some of the main provisions.

Also, the member has stated in the bill’s explanatory note that “There is substantive evidence from New Zealand and around the world that hunger has a significant impact on children’s cognitive development, learning, and classroom behaviour. … If kids turn up to school not having eaten breakfast, without shoes, or sick because their house is cold and damp, it is obvious they will not get the best start. Addressing this problem is one of the most important actions we can take to lift New Zealand’s educational achievement.”

I have to say that it is very hard to disagree. These are good observations, but the point is that the Government has been doing all sorts of things to help our kids. We say it is important to help kids from poor families. It is important. I had a look at the KickStart Breakfast programme online, and it states that “Schools say Kickstart Breakfast clubs are not only helping children nutritionally but is also making a positive impact on learning behaviour. In-school research shows: literacy and numeracy levels are improving; children are happier, have more energy and are able to concentrate longer; children are no longer eating junk food at morning tea; the club provides a great environment for children to socialise together; the older children are taking on responsibility and looking after the younger ones.” So I would say that it is, indeed, important for us to make sure that our kids have food in school.

I also meant to mention my educational background, and also my family background. I come from a family of teachers. My parents were teachers—they are now retired—and my parents-in-law are also retired teachers. My younger brother is still working in China as a deputy principal, and my sister-in-law is also working in the education sector in China. So very interestingly, of course, now I have moved to New Zealand and, as chair of the Education and Science Committee, I would say that education is fundamental to our kids and to our future. I would also mention that I experienced poverty myself. All my family were sent to the countryside in the 1960s as part of a Chinese programme called “Intellectuals Need to be Educated”—or re-educated—“by Peasants”. My parents were sent to the countryside to work as peasants, and so I witnessed poverty in China and I also saw numerous poor kids going to school, because in those years China was under socialism and everyone was equal, but everyone was poor. So for my family it was similar.

We would say that it is important, and I totally agree with the member David Shearer that it is important, but the National Government is already fulfilling the purpose of the bill—that is, we have undertaken a number of initiatives to help our kids. I note, for example, the KickStart Breakfast programme. Fonterra and Sanitarium partnered in February 2009 to provide a free school breakfast of Anchor milk and Weet-Bix to all New Zealand schools. The Government then expanded KickStart Breakfast, as part of a programme to better support vulnerable children, with an investment of $9.5 million over 5 years. That was in May 2013. So the investment enabled the programme to be extended from 2 days to 5 days a week, and it was opened up to all schools, from decile 1 to 10. So, basically, we are saying that not all poor children attend decile 1 and 2 schools. Some poor children also go to higher-decile schools.

With the KickStart Breakfast programme extended to schools of every decile, it targets more kids in need, and more than 95,000 nutritious breakfasts are now served each week in the over 730 schools that run their own KickStart Breakfast club. Over 3.4 million breakfasts have been served, and we are now reaching more than 28,000 children. Also, we have our Children’s Action Plan, which is a plan that focuses resources on the kids most in need. And we also have KidsCan. The Government is increasing support for KidsCan, providing $1.5 million over 3 years in order to provide children with basic necessities like raincoats and shoes. That is why we do not need this legislation to launch a Government-funded programme to support the delivery of food or meals in schools. We are already doing this in partnership with corporate and not-for-profit groups.

Budget 2014 also supported our young families. For example, we invested almost $500 million more in the well-being of New Zealand’s children and families. Budget 2014 also provided a comprehensive package of practical measures focused on young families and those vulnerable children who most need our care and protection. An example here is that Budget 2014 committed $42 million to increase the parental tax credit from its previous maximum amount of $150 a week to $220 a week, and also from 1 April 2015 it increases the period for which the tax credit is paid from 8 weeks to 10 weeks following the birth of a child. Also, free doctors visits and prescriptions for children aged under 6 will be extended to children aged under 13 from July 2015—

I am sorry to interrupt the member but his time has expired.

It is a great pleasure to rise in support of the bill that David Shearer has put forward. I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the member who has just spoken before me, Jian Yang, who has demonstrated very clearly one of the perils of not listening to the contribution of the member speaking before him and simply relying on the notes provided by the party research unit, rather than actually engaging properly in the debate. Had he listened to what David Shearer had contributed in his first reading speech, he would have heard him acknowledge that the solution proposed in this bill might not be the right one, but by putting the bill before a select committee there would be an opportunity to canvass the issues properly, to get submissions from the public, to look at what is happening now and what is working, and to look at how things might be improved. I think that is an absolutely commendable approach to take.

This bill, of course, had its genesis some years ago, and I recall the speech that David Shearer made, talking about children in schools going to school hungry and not being ready to learn. That is how this bill came about. Since then there has been a lot of debate about the best way to tackle that problem, and I think that the contribution David Shearer made in the very beginning where he talked about the importance of some of the healthy eating and healthy action programmes that are already happening in schools was very, very pertinent to the debate and very important. I know, for example, in my own electorate that there are some fantastic programmes happening in local primary schools, early childhood centres, and secondary schools as well.

Just to give one example, Fraser Crescent School in my electorate has a large council reserve at its back door, the Clyma Park, which was not particularly well used. They have now established a community garden within Clyma Park and the people working in that garden work very closely with the primary school. The kids are involved in the community garden. They have got an orchard planted, they do their own compost, they harvest rainwater, and they grow vegetables. It is a fantastic learning experience for the kids and it involves members of the wider community as well. Those are the sorts of programmes that I think we should be looking at as examples of what can be achieved.

I grew up in a family where we had one of the old quarter-acre sections in the Hutt Valley, which are fast disappearing now as they are subdivided. My parents had a vegetable garden. I learned at a young age what growing vegetables is all about and how to do it. Many, many kids today do not get that opportunity. Many come from families with two working parents, and I was fortunate when I was a young kid to have one of my parents not working full-time—well, working at home—but if you look at the nature of how we live now, like I said, those sections are disappearing. The room for vegetable gardens is disappearing as sections are subdivided and people are living in much higher density housing. Schools can do something about that. Schools often have the land, and councils, in partnership with local authorities, have access to the land and can do some pretty amazing things. I think that this is an opportunity for us to really look at some of those issues and how we could better facilitate that happening all around the country.

What I am not willing to do is come along to Parliament and say that I am going to turn a blind eye to the fact that kids are coming to school hungry, because they are coming to school hungry and we should do something about that. Do I believe that Government intervention is the sole answer? No, of course I do not. It is a very complex problem and it is going to require a number of things to address it, but doing nothing is not an option. This bill that has been put forward by David Shearer provides us with an opportunity to do something. It provides us with an opportunity to talk about the various alternatives and the various options that are available to us.

💬 Meka Whaitiri: It does not have a predetermined outcome.

It does not have a predetermined outcome, as Meka Whaitiri has pointed out. This is an opportunity for us to look at a whole variety of options and potential outcomes. It is incredibly disappointing that the Government members are voting against the bill, because it is an opportunity to develop a robust policy and a good policy that will gain cross-party support and community support, which people can buy into, to address what is a very real problem in our schools—kids coming to school with either the wrong food or with no food. Actually, some of the kids coming to school with the wrong food are just as much of a problem. If you talk to the teachers who have got a classroom full of kids who have just been dosed up on fizzy drinks and sugar, they will tell you that that is just as hard to manage as a classroom full of hungry kids. So we have got to get real about this problem. We have an obesity problem in New Zealand; we have got a hungry kids problem in New Zealand. We could do something about that. This bill, if progressed to select committee, provides an opportunity for us to have that debate and to have a constructive discussion. I have absolutely no hesitation in saying that the Labour Party will be fully supporting it.

I have been listening very carefully to the debate tonight, and I note that the member who has just resumed his seat, Chris Hipkins, gave a very passionate speech about it. He acknowledged that the Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill did not solve the issues but that it would lead, if it went to select committee, to a lot of talking about it. I may be paraphrasing him there, but that is exactly what he sort of said.

I think everybody in this House would agree that the situation of young children going to school without breakfast and being hungry until lunchtime or even until they go home again is a very sorry thing to happen in this country—this land of plenty, God’s own country. I was very interested to hear Dr Jian Yang and his speech that referenced his own growing up and his parents’ growing up, and what they went through. I would also say that in my electorate in Papakura we have breakfast clubs—and that is generally how they are referred to—in some of our schools, particularly in some of the lower-decile schools. I have quite a few schools in my electorate that are decile 1 and decile 2. We have some of the poorest people in the country in my electorate. We also, by the way, have some of the wealthiest. So there is a huge disparity. I would also say that not all children who go to high-decile schools are wealthy children or from wealthy families. There are some children who come to our decile 10 schools, our decile 8 schools—in fact, I am going to see one on Friday with exactly this situation—who come from homes that are at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, and they often suffer.

I do not believe for a moment that because a family does not have a lot of money they cannot put two pieces of bread in the toaster, and some margarine, or butter, or whatever, and jam, or something on the toast for their child. But we know that sometimes both parents are working, sometimes there is only one parent who is generally home anyway with the child—maybe it is a sole-parent family—and that parent may be out working and not able to see the child off to school. We also know that some people simply do not make this a priority for their children. I do not think that they necessarily do not care about their children, but, actually, there are quite a few people in our country who do not understand the benefit of a child having breakfast before they go to school, because they did not have it when they were growing up, and their parents probably did not have it when they were growing up, and they just do not understand it.

But what we do see in my electorate are quite a few breakfast clubs for the children who come along, and, as some of my school principals have said to me, some of the kids coming into those breakfast clubs do not actually need to come in. There are many children who do need to and it is great that we have got them, but in some schools they encourage lots of kids to come because it actually takes away the stigma for the child. It also actually builds a sense of community for the child to come to school and they have got something to do straight away and it is a really fun activity; it is not sitting down listening to someone else telling them what to do—it is actually a fun thing. The KickStart Breakfast programme that we have got is available to any school that wants it, and I think that is better than just trying to target particular schools. I think we had to start off targeting particular schools because of the numbers of schools that we had to deal with in quite a short period of time. I would also say that the KickStart Breakfast programme is a real opportunity for some very successful companies like Sanitarium and Fonterra, which have, by the way, benefited for many years from New Zealand and being part of New Zealand. We support them, obviously, in all the things that we are seen to do as New Zealanders, and these companies have an opportunity—and they do—to help to contribute back to the very people who, by the way, have helped to make their fortunes. That is what I think is a really great thing.

One of the problems of having yet another committee look at something is that in the meantime these children need breakfast. You cannot wait a year and wonder why they have not got a breakfast. It does not work like that. We have already got the KickStart Breakfast programme. It is really feeding children right across the spectrum, and it is also a great way for kids to start the day. I would like to see that continue, and so the issue that Mr Shearer brought to the table is an issue that is being redressed. It is not actually for every child, but it is being redressed, and the opportunity is there for every school, no matter what their decile, to take this up for their children. I think that is a challenge for every school to do so.

It goes without saying that we support this bill’s referral to the select committee. Obviously, an issue very close to our heart is ensuring that hungry kids at school get fed. I was quite relieved to see Mr Shearer say that he is reconsidering the mechanism as it is not the best proposed mechanism, because that was our concern too. The bill proposed to essentially provide food rather than empower a school directly to come up with a solution that best suits their needs and the needs of the children and the community setting they are in. So we very much share that concern about the actual mechanism. But the intent of the bill, which is to ensure that kids at school do not go hungry, is one that we absolutely support. We have raised earlier today many reasons why it is so important to ensure that hungry kids are fed.

I am going to repeat some of those reasons tonight because it was rather frustrating—when earlier today Metiria Turei’s Education (Breakfast and Lunch Programmes in Schools) Amendment Bill, the “Feed the Kids Bill”, was debated—to see the extent of the denial of the extent of the problem we have in New Zealand around the sheer numbers of students who are in poverty, experiencing real material poverty, and the numbers of students who are going hungry to school or are doing without lunch at school. If those members are not in denial, then they are blaming the parents for it by continually banging on about parental responsibility. I feel very uncomfortable when we go on about parental responsibility because it has overtones of Victorian England for me. The reality is that in New Zealand poverty has doubled in the last 25 years, and the highest levels are amongst children, with more than 200,000 living in poverty. Yes, we know that poverty will not go away without significant changes in employment, in the minimum wage, in housing, and in all the supports for families in need, but all of those things take time to implement, and children are going hungry right now. We can do something about that.

Feeding kids at school is a common low-cost option that will directly make a big difference for these children. I just want to say here that I was very fortunate to have spent my childhood in a small, rural school in Wales where we ate two-course, hot school lunches on-site. The school had three staff: two teachers and one cook, an amazing cook who created incredible meals from scratch, often following local traditional recipes such as cawl, which was a local recipe that used root vegetables and lamb. It was a recipe I absolutely loved. I always had a second helping. So, needless to say, no kids went hungry at the school I went to. Since we had a long walk home after school, several miles across the countryside, it was really good to be able to do that and be well-fed before we got home.

Food in schools, in my view, is an absolute no-brainer. It is affordable. It is something we can do right now, and we know it will help the kids, especially the kids who need it the most. Nearly every country in the OECD, apart from us, already runs an extensive programme to feed kids at school, and some countries, like Finland and Sweden, provide fully State - funded meals to every school student as part of a wider framework of child well-being. It is no coincidence that those countries regularly top the international surveys in child health and educational achievement. They do this because all the evidence from teachers, from nurses, and from doctors is that kids need a good meal every day to develop into healthy, well-educated adults.

This bill is about evidence-based policy decision-making. This is not about what you see in one school or another school. This takes a broad, comprehensive, evidence-based policy approach, and we absolutely need this bill to go to the select committee and continue that conversation.

I rise to speak in this first reading debate of the Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill. I absolutely sympathise with the intention of the member David Shearer in bringing this bill before the House. As a former teacher, he has spoken about the impacts that going to school hungry can have on the pedagogical outcomes we would seek to have delivered in our New Zealand schools. I do not think there is any debate over that as a matter of fact. I did listen very carefully to some of the previous contributions, and we had one from a member of the Opposition about what things were like when he was growing up. I thought I would share a similar story, since we have heard this already during this debate.

I cannot claim to have had any particular hardship at all in my upbringing. I was fortunate enough to grow up on a farm north of Auckland where we always had sufficient food, partially because we grew a lot of produce—fruit and vegetables as well as the meat and the milk that came off the land. But throughout my time at school I really did see the full gamut of the New Zealand educational system, from a decile 10, small, rural primary school, Otaika Primary School, through to a school that was actually referenced earlier in question time today by Metiria Turei, Manaia View School, except when I was there it was known as Raumanga Intermediate, a decile 1 school and definitely one of the most challenging for the teachers and one of the poorest schools in New Zealand, hence the decile 1 rating. Then I went to Whangarei Boys’ High School, a decile 5 State school.

I think it is absolutely something we would all agree on—that children going to school hungry is an issue that needs to be addressed, and that is why this Government has put in a significant effort and funding to the tune of $9.5 million to set up the KickStart programme to provide breakfasts in schools. This programme has provided 3.4 million breakfasts, and, actually, more—100,000 or so—every week, reaching 26,000 children on a weekly basis. But if I think back to my time at Raumanga Intermediate and think of the parents, some of whom were in pretty tough economic conditions, I remember that they managed to send their children to school with a decent breakfast. It may not have been anything particularly flash. It might have been something along the lines of what is delivered under the KickStart programme—a couple of Weet-Bix served up with milk, or perhaps a couple of pieces of toast and some Marmite—but it was a nutritious breakfast so that kids had a full tummy and could get on with the day’s learning. I think this is something this Government would want to see happen, but we do not want to take away from the responsibility of parents to make sure that their children are turning up to school nutritionally able to undertake a day’s learning.

There are other complexities and challenges that this legislation would introduce. By making it a responsibility of the State rather than allowing schools to access the programme that is a partnership between Sanitarium and Fonterra alongside community involvement in running a breakfast club, we face a huge issue with the management of schools including capital issues in schools around setting up kitchens and spaces to prepare food when the vast majority of parents, as we know, are perfectly able and capable of making sure their children take a packed lunch to school or, potentially, have access to the school tuck shop.

Also, the funding appropriated by Parliament for education is for that purpose and I would wonder, operationally, how this would fit. I do not know—perhaps the member who has backed this bill has another opportunity to tell us more about how this fits in. We are talking about, effectively, the provision of a social service via schools, so I would actually be interested to hear more about that. But because of the complexities that we have identified, plus also the lack of necessity given we already have the KickStart Breakfast programme, I personally will not be supporting this bill any further. Thank you.

First of all, can I just make it very, very clear: if the Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill fails to go to select committee it will be because of one person and one person alone, and that will be Mr David Seymour. So I ask Mr David Seymour to contact the Government whip and tell him that he is changing his vote and that he will support this bill to select committee, and I will tell you why. It is because if the National Party members, instead of deciding that this is about feeding hungry children with free lunches, had listened to Mr Shearer when he spoke at the beginning, they would know that this bill is actually about delivering the New Zealand curriculum. It is about delivering the science curriculum, Mr Bell. It is about delivering the living world strand of the science curriculum through growing vegetables. It is about delivering the material world science curriculum inside the New Zealand curriculum, which is the chemistry curriculum, through the cooking and the preparation of food. It is about the interaction of children with the earth and also the science extension of that: do vegetables grow better in hydroponics or do they grow better in the earth? There is a huge opportunity here, Mr Bell and Dr Yang—

💬 Paul Foster-Bell: Foster-Bell.

Mr Foster-Bell, I do beg your pardon. We are both on the Education and Science Committee. This is an opportunity for the Education and Science Committee to look at ways to deliver the New Zealand curriculum, the science strand, and at least two, if not three, of those strands, in a way that actually continues to benefit.

I will give you credit for the food that is being delivered inside schools now. Well done! Thank you. This is the long-term plan. That was the short-term plan. Mr Seymour, are you listening? This is the long-term answer to this issue: teach children how to grow the food. They will take those lessons home, just as our parents took those lessons home. Whether they live in a unit in the middle of Auckland, where they can grow vegetables inside flowerpots, or whether they live on a quarter acre section somewhere in Ruatōria, they will take those lessons home. This is the long-term answer and yet, because you are blinded by the title of the bill, you will not support it.

Mr Seymour, pick up the phone. This is an opportunity to make a difference, and I suggest—I urge—the National Party members to actually think about what Mr Shearer said. This is the New Zealand curriculum. This is the delivery, and this is your long-term solution. We do not want to keep on having to bring sandwiches into schools—nobody does—and this is one of the solutions to it. Short-term answer: deliver sandwiches to schools; long-term answer: teach people to be self-sufficient. Mr Shearer said that in his contribution. Did nobody listen? Were you blinded by the notes you were given by your researchers, which were wrong?

Look at the bill. Just because it says “food in school providers” does not mean that they are bringing the food in in carts. It could be a person who has been contracted by the school or is under a partial-employment contract with the school to set up those gardens. The schools already have some part of it already there. It may very well be that those in-school providers are the people who take those chemistry lessons, who make sure that during the weekends all the materials are there, for the children to then come and participate in those gardens. It may be that they are the ones who go out to the communities and source the fruit trees, so that we can cut down the costs. How do we know what the cost is? How do we know what the cost is—because this is not about sandwiches. This is about gardens and fruit trees, and Mr Shearer told you that when he stood up at the start of it.

Listen, for goodness’ sake, to the contributions. Send the bill to select committee. Give us an opportunity to give you some numbers around it. Give us an opportunity to see how we can make a culture shift inside, with the New Zealand curriculum as the basis of it, and sort out this problem long term.

It is a pleasure to rise to speak on the this bill; however, I am opposing this bill. I commend the member David Shearer. I do actually work with him in the electorate of Mt Albert—he is the elected member and I am the list member and we often are seen together at many different events around the electorate. But for this particular bill I have to say that I do not agree with him that we should actually teach kids how to grow vegetables. Well, I guess you could teach kids how to grow vegetables and you could actually teach kids how to cook food and learn how to make gravy. We used to have that in our curriculum. I think that when I was in high school in Malaysia—

💬 Simon O’Connor: Just a few years ago.

—yes, a couple of years ago, we did actually have cookery lessons and we also had typing lessons, as well, on a typewriter. That was a long time ago. We do actually have a New Zealand curriculum and, for me, I wonder why the parents cannot actually teach the kids about gardening at home. Why does it have to be introduced at school? The member who just sat down, Tracey Martin, talked about this bill being inaptly named “Food in Schools”. Well, it does actually say “Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill”.

Earlier, my learned colleague Paul Foster-Bell talked about his school life experience and I just wanted to go back to my childhood and talk about how different it was for me to grow up in a country like Korea in the late 1970s. Often people ask: “What was it like for you? How many kids were in your classroom?”, and all that sort of stuff. I often say that I grew up in a very normal Korean primary school. I remember only primary school, because I was there only for primary school, and there were 65 kids in my classroom. In every year level there were about 20 classes and there were thousands of kids in a primary school. They were not decile schools like New Zealand. Not one single student was ever provided lunch by the school. It was the responsibility of the parents or the grandparents who were raising these kids to have them bring their own lunch. It was the responsibility of the parents and the grandparents who were raising these kids to feed them breakfast. It was the responsibility of the parents to look after their children.

I remember during cold winter days when, after you washed your face, you walked to school and your eyebrows actually froze over because it was that cold, and we all had our lunchboxes in the urn that was in the middle of the classroom. This was in the 1970s. Korea was decimated in the 1950 Korean War. It was almost like the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake. It was about children learning good education. It is not about learning how to grow your own food and eat it because you are hungry. Well, it should be the responsibility of the family. Not all poor children attend decile 1 or decile 2 schools.

Earlier speakers have talked about the KickStart Breakfast programme that the Government is already funding. Over 3.4 million breakfasts have been served and now it reaches about 26,000 children. That to me is a little sad, you know, having grown up in a country that was decimated by war and yet in the 1970s, only 20 years after the war, the parents knew their responsibility. Korea did not have social welfare; New Zealand does. New Zealand has one of the most progressive social welfare systems and yet there are parents who will send their children to school without breakfast, without lunches, and shame on them. That is not all parents.

I have to say that as a parent who is raising a teenage child, it would be fantastic if the Government actually took care of my child so that I would be richer. Would it not be fantastic? But thank God that I am not raising a teenage daughter because she would be a lot more expensive. But this is about responsible Government, looking after the welfare of all New Zealanders, and good for those parents who will look after their children by providing breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and for the welfare of their children. It is the responsibility of the parents not the Government. Thank you very much.

New Zealand in 2015 is not Korea in the 1970s and neither is it New Zealand in the 1970s or the 1980s.

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: Neither is it Paul Foster-Bell’s intermediate back whenever.

Yes, neither is what is happening with Manaia View School now what was happening with Manaia View School when Paul Foster-Bell knew it. We are now in a situation in 2015 where the one major agency that is working with schools to provide lunch and breakfast in those schools is already feeding 15,000 kids a day. It already has 450 schools that it works with, and already has a waiting list of 7,000 children who are looking for that same service. Melissa Lee can stand up and berate parents all she likes, and regale us with tales of Korea in the 1970s. Not a single statement she made has any relevance to the life of a child who went to school today without breakfast and without lunch, and was not in a school where there was some assistance. That is what we are facing today. Thousands of New Zealand children go to school without breakfast or lunch.

We sit here in this Parliament with all the resources of our entire nation available to us to fix that problem. We have already had today a discussion on the Education (Breakfast and Lunch Programmes in Schools) Amendment Bill, where the Parliament could have chosen to support hungry kids and provide them with the solution. We have another chance today to fix the mistake that was made this afternoon and to support David Shearer’s Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill to the select committee so that we can have, as we have said time and time again, the conversation about New Zealand in 2015—families in 2015, and children in 2015 who are going to school without breakfast and lunch. They are the people whom we should be talking about, not about Paul Foster-Bell when he was 7 and not about Melissa Lee when she was 10. We should be talking about the kids of today who are 7 and who are 10 and who are going to school hungry, and because they are hungry they cannot learn properly and their whole lives are affected by what happens as a result of the decisions we make.

I am very pleased to support David Shearer’s bill. It is different from the solution that was put forward this afternoon, which put an obligation on schools to provide breakfast and lunch. It is different from the solution that the Green Party prepared, which is to have a fund that schools can access, to then spend as they choose to provide lunch in school. These are all the ideas that our Parliament should be having a constructive conversation about, not on the floor of the debating chamber but actually in the select committee where we are together, with members from all parties, and talking with our own communities about how we deal with today’s problem—the problem of 2015. That is the rational, responsible thing for this Parliament to do. We have another chance to do that today, and we should take it up.

This bill is going to fail by only one vote—do I understand that correctly—because Peter Dunne is supporting it. That is very good news. One vote is going to make the difference between having a conversation about how to feed today’s hungry kids, or not, and the National Party is choosing yet again to say no to those hungry kids. The 7,000 kids who are waiting on the KidsCan list are being told no by this Government. The many thousands of others who are not yet able to get on the waiting list are about to be told no, yet again, by John Key and his Government and they should be deeply ashamed of themselves. There is no other reason for members to be here in this Parliament, with all the privileges of this office, if not to take care of our kids. Here is an opportunity to prove that you are worthy of this job, and to support this bill. Thank you.

It is an absolute pleasure to speak on this bill. It is an absolute pleasure because the National Party is already doing this through our KickStart Breakfast programme—a $9.5 million investment over 5 years, an investment that has seen an additional 3.4 million breakfasts provided in the schools that want them. This is a service that is reaching over 26,000 children, and is providing the assistance that those children need. I think every one of us acknowledges that our children will be in a better position to learn and in a better position to absorb the teaching of their teachers if they are well fed and starting the day on the right foot. But the reality is that we are already doing it.

I would just like to take issue with a comment that one of the previous speakers made about this being a bill to teach children how to grow their own food. That is an absolute nonsense. The bill is very clear about what it is, and I will just read from the bill if I may—if my computer would come to life. The bill says it is all about helping to provide the supply of food to schools that need it. There is no provision—no provision at all—in this bill to do with any form of gardening or any form of growing any form of fruit or vegetables. It is not about teaching children to be farmers or orchardists or even to grow a home garden. It is simply about supplying food, which, as I have pointed out, we already do.

The other point I would make on that is that even if there were an intent, even if we allowed that there were an intent behind this, to teach children how to grow fruit and vegetables, the simple reality is you do not need this amendment bill for schools to teach that. There is nothing in the amendment bill that takes away a prohibition or reduces a barrier or actually creates a scenario where it is about teaching children how to grow fruit and vegetables. But the simple reality is this: there is no barrier. To date, there is no legislative barrier to schools doing that. If, as the previous speaker said, this is actually about a pathway to teaching children to grow their own food, quite frankly there is no impediment to that to date. There is no legislative impediment that this amendment bill would address or that an amendment bill needs to address.

I return to the very clear and simple message here. This amendment bill introduced by the member the honourable David Shearer is actually about something that this Government is already doing. It is about providing food to children in those schools that perceive a need for that service and want to take it up. Through our KickStart Breakfast programme, in association with Sanitarium and Fonterra, this Government is already delivering that to the schools that want it. It is a highly effective service. It has been proven to be delivering to the schools that need it. Quite frankly, it is also interesting that not all schools see they have a need for this programme and not all schools take it up, although it is available to all of them.

I will just end with a very simple message for members opposite, and that is that they are trying to introduce legislation that this Government is already delivering on. Their bill is completely redundant. We will continue doing what we do. I oppose this bill. I will not be supporting it.

I call David Shearer—5 minutes in reply.

First of all, could I just thank the parties that have agreed to support this bill—the Green Party, the New Zealand First Party, the Māori Party, and United Future. Unfortunately, the National Party and the ACT Party are not supporting the bill, which I find rather extraordinary because this bill, as I explained in my introductory comments, is about self-reliance, it is about sustainability, and it is about teaching lifelong skills. It is not necessarily just about growing vegetables. We have problems in New Zealand. The first problem is that kids are coming to school hungry, and the second problem is that we have an obesity issue in New Zealand, which is the third-worst in the world and which will cost us billions and billions of dollars if we do not do something about it.

I started off, as I began in my earlier comments when I introduced this bill, believing that the solution to this was to provide food for kids in schools. I looked at other schools and at what they were doing, and believed that this was not the best way to address something that is not a band-aid on a problem but is about ensuring we have a mechanism and a solution to create an opportunity for schools to be able to teach long-term lifelong skills. I want to make sure that people on the other side understand what in fact they are giving up, because I have been criticised with this bill. One is for changing my opinion and my mind on it, and that is something that a politician does not generally do. We normally dig ourselves into a huge hole and bury ourselves in it, and in this particular case I said: “This is not the right way forward. I disagree and we need to be going in a different direction, and that is why I have outlined this direction.” The second thing I have been criticised for is asking why National and ACT are not supporting this. This is about being independent, being self-reliant, and teaching lifelong skills. I, for the life of me, cannot understand it. I think it is a real shame.

What I do know now is that there are schools out there right now, across New Zealand, that are doing remarkable things for their kids. I want to come back to a school that I mentioned in my opening, which is Yendarra School, a decile 1a school in Ōtara. In the schools around it, kids are coming to school hungry. They have more cavities. They have more health problems, but somehow Yendarra School is remarkable in the sense that it does not have the same scale of problems that the schools around it have. The reason for that is that it has brought the community into the school and with the community is teaching good nutrition. The kids are not being fed by an outside feeding programme; they are being fed by the parents themselves, as they should be. I am not saying that in every case parents are able to do that, and in emergency cases I absolutely see the necessity for feeding kids. But that should not be the solution to hungry kids in schools. It is not the solution. It is absolutely not the solution. It is simply addressing the symptoms of a problem and not addressing the problem itself.

That is the underlying tenet of this bill. It was about getting this idea to a select committee where we could actually hear from those experts and the schools that are able to achieve what other schools across New Zealand cannot, despite the fact that, as the member beforehand said, they have every opportunity. Actually, they do not have every opportunity, because they are not doing it. If they were doing it, we would not have a problem. But they are not, and what we on this side of the House want to be able to do is to provide schools across New Zealand with the ability to have their kids come to school well fed and able to have lunches in their schools, but also to teach the basic tenets of nutrition, which will go home with the kids and make a real difference in the homes that they come from. Instead, we have squandered—absolutely squandered—an opportunity to be able to do that in this House. I think that is a real shame. I think it is a real shame for those schools out there that are able to do what they need to do. I want to leave by thanking those parties that have been supporting it, but I believe that those parties that did not will have, in effect, missed an opportunity. Thank you very much.