As someone who lived and worked in the Pacific for five years and as a mother of three Pacific-NZ children, I know how central food is to Pacific families, communities and cultures.
So I can’t imagine what our Pacific communities think of the rubbish that is being served as school lunches as a result of the government funding cuts.
Most recently, the National government awarding an exclusive school lunches contract to Libelle and Compass despite their shoddy past performances has made headlines and raised eyebrows.
When asked why his government granted them the contract — at the expense of many local jobs and better-received providers, no less — Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had no answer.
The latest polling from Talbot Mills shows two-thirds of Kiwis want Labour’s school lunches programme back.
Even half of the National Party voters surveyed agreed with the statement "overall the new school lunch programme isn’t working".
Rural schools with rolls under 350 have been disproportionately affected by National’s cuts, because they cannot apply for top-up funding from the ministry due to their size.
At Bathgate Park School on Monday, the children complained about endless butter chicken and showed me how difficult it was to open the lunch packaging.
Some of them mentioned they were scared, after one of the packages exploded when their classmate tried to open it several weeks ago. They have written letters to Minister Seymour and shared with me asking the government to go back to the previous regime under the Labour government.
Last year, more than 51,000 people joined our call to save the school lunches programme.
I urge you to join them in calling on the government to show some leadership and return to locally made lunches — click the "Campaigns" tab on labour.org.nz for more information.
Christopher Luxon is quite happy handing $2.9 billion to landlords and $216 million to tobacco companies, but it seems he’s not as interested in providing free, healthy food for hungry Kiwi kids.
The contrast between what communities can cook up versus what this government is serving our kids at school couldn’t be more stark.
