Shameful. Just Shameful!
There is no reason any child should go hungry in our land of plenty.
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Shameful. Just Shameful!
The Salvation Army has just released its State Of The Nation 2025 Report.
You can read the summary version of it here:
https://www.salvationarmy.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/TSA_SOTN25_Summary_online.pdf
There is a lot of alarming information in it, but there’s one statistic in particular I want to point up today because it’s just shameful and it’s this:
1 in 4 families with children under the age of 15 report running out of food often or sometimes.
We are a food producing nation for goodness sake.
We are brilliant at it.
By some estimates our tiny country of 5 million produces enough food to feed 40 million people each year.
So it’s shameful that 1 in 4 of our nation’s children are not assured of a decent meal today and every day.
And it’s not because all their parents are lazy or terrible at budgeting .
It’s because the cost of renting is increasing faster than inflation, electricity prices are soaring, transport costs keeps rocketing , but wages and benefits haven’t kept up with all these rising costs. Even making parents to now pay for the bus to take children to school, as this current government has done, is a stretch for some families.
So what do they cut back on? The only thing they can - food.
When I was a kid in the late 1950’s there was a low domestic price for the foods we produced such as milk ,butter,cheese,meat,vegetables and so on.
Why?
Because the government controlled Producer Boards were required to keep domestic prices low and export the excess to overseas markets who paid a higher price for it.
In other words the governments of the day were actively involved in the marketplace to make sure that everyone could put food on the table and have an affordable roof over their head.
All that changed in the 1980’s and 90’s with the introduction of Neoliberal Economics.
It wasn’t the job of government to be involved in the marketplace Finance Ministers Roger Douglas (Labour) and Ruth Richardson (National) argued. Leave that to business because business knows best was their mantra. And so fostering the interests of profit became the purpose of government instead of fostering the well-being of the people of our country.
What good is the neoliberal economic theory that Luxon, Seymour,Peters Willis and their ilk cling to, if 1 in 4 of children go hungry at some point every week?
It’s just shameful.
A couple of years ago I made a documentary about the reasons food costs so much in our country. It was called The Food Crisis and it won a Silver Medal in New York (the only international festival I could afford to enter).
But I don’t feel good about that because the message of the doco fell on deaf ears. Nothiing has changed. In fact, under the present right- wing government, with it’s unnecessarily cruel austerity measures, it’s a lot worse.
You should be able to watch my documentary The Food Crisis for free on Sky Open and Sky Go. If you can’t, you try watching it here.
The reason I have been unable to make more programmes like this one and others such as Inside Child Poverty and Who Owns New Zeland Now? to name a few, is because the current coalition government cut off the funding that allowed independent investigative documentary makers like me to do our fourth estate job of calling government policies to account. Since then, the television broadcasters have shown little or no appetite for supporting analytical documentaries that speak truth to power.
But, as you see, I have refused to be silenced. In April of last year I started the Substack you are reading and I’d like to take this moment to thank all of you who have taken out subscriptions . Please restack and share posts you think are worthwhile as it all helps to build readership. Kia kaha.
I can't help thinking that neo-liberalism has a great deal to do with the unkindness and selfishness that is so prevalent in society. For every post on the appalling school lunch situation that Seymour has brought about there has been a rush of mealy mouthed posts about "why should my tax dollars pay for feeding other people's children" and "if you can't afford children you shouldn't have them". How and why did we become this callous? This government rattles on about "growth, growth, growth". They mean "money, money, money". Tories never seem to understand that the greatest resource for the future of any country is a healthy, educated population. He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
I feel your tears and rage. There was an insightful quote by Lady Tureiti Moxon recently. Lady Tureiti Moxon contributed the Listener Commentary the week Feb 8- 14 2025. Lady Moxon quoted Dame Tariana Turia saying "Whanau will trust themselves only when they have respect for their ability to be able to do what they need to do for themselves. For too long whanau have had to listen to people telling them everything that was wrong with them, so it was only natural they started to believe it."
I think this thought can be applied widely.
There is no Trust from from our Coalition Government. During Covid Lockdown there were many entrepreneural initiatives. When we do not have enough to help us through, we lose our ability to think ourselves out of a situation. I think citizens must be given the respect to manage choices themselves. This recognition is one of the foundational tenets of Basiic Income.