Shearer David: Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShearer David: Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 18 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2399. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): 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 30000 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.