Turei Metiria: Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTurei Metiria: Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 18 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2409. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): 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.METIRIA TUREI: 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 15000 kids a day. It already has 450 schools that it works with and already has a waiting list of 7000 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 7000 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.