Garth George: Our nation's shame - hungry children

We have known for a long time that some children are sent to school without breakfast or kept at home because there is no food.
But reports this week that more than 40,000 children turn up at school hungry each day brings the extent of the problem crashing home.
This is a national disgrace, a tragedy of epic proportion, a reason not just for dismay but for anger. How the hell did we ever let the situation get this bad? And why do we rely on private charities to feed these kids rather than Government support?
The Child Poverty Action Group says that taxpayers should pay for a part-time co-ordinator for three hours a day in every decile 1 and 2 primary and intermediate school to organise food supplies and volunteers to make sure children get breakfast.
It says this would cost $6.7 million a year if charities and other donors provided the food, or up to $14 million if schools had to buy the food. Only $14 million? In today's economy that's merely pocket money.
One of the most astonishing things to come out of the series so far is the news that the Australian-owned Countdown (Woolworths/Foodtown) supermarket chain has withdrawn its sponsorship of the most comprehensive breakfast in schools programme, that run by the Red Cross, which has served more than 720,000 breakfasts to thousands of children in the past five years.
A Countdown spokesman said the company had given more than $1 million in food and other help to the Red Cross since the programme began, but the supermarket chain was changing its priorities. Now what, I ask, could be a more urgent priority than helping to feed hungry kinds?
The cost, a mere $200,000 a year for five years, is but an infinitesimal fraction of that chain's daily profits. It will be interesting to see what the Countdown spokesman's "developing a new programme that features the needs of the broader community" really means.
Surveys indicate that by far the majority of hungry children are from Maori families, so the question has to be asked: What is Maoridom doing about this?
It seems to me that nearly all the organisations trying to address this issue are Pakeha-led.
Is it not time that Maoridom, with all its Treaty of Waitangi settlement billions, took ownership of this hungry kids calamity and weighed in with financial and personnel support?
News of the extent of the plight of hungry children has generated the sort of reaction we have come to expect from many in today's society.
To our shame, a poll on nzherald.co.nz, which asked, "Should the Government underwrite breakfast programmes in all NZ's 463 decile 1 and 2 primary and intermediate schools?" brought only a 51 per cent "yes" against a 49 per cent "no". The widely-held view is that parents are to blame, that they spend their money on booze, smokes and other drugs and let their children starve and that food vouchers should be given to beneficiaries instead of cash.
It's the old "I pay my taxes and that's enough" philosophy.
But what do we do about hungry kids in the meantime? Let them starve?
There is no doubt that many of the parents of hungry kids are simply incapable of managing anything, even the smallest amount of money. But that is no reason to allow their children to suffer.
The parents may be irredeemable, but their children are not.
There was an item in this newspaper the other day in which the local Salvation Army foodbank reported that some people were auctioning off in pubs the food parcels they were given, and spending the money on booze.
A food vouchers raffle, anyone?