Mathers Mojo: Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMathers Mojo: Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 18 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2405. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOJO MATHERS (Green): 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 200000 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.