Utopia, you are standing in it!

 Joe Trinder, the Mana News editor, today blogged about the great expense of feeding the kids for ordinary families. In the course of doing so, he showed how extremely cheap it was for parents to make their children breakfast. The Far Left has inadvertently capitulated on school breakfast programmes been outside the reach of ordinary families.

I completely agree with Joe. A 1 kg box of Weet-Bix costs $7 and a 2 L bottle of milk costs $5.55. I buy the cheaper brands of Weet-Bix than this myself.

1 kg box of Weet-Bix will last maybe two weeks. 2 L of milk will last not much less than that if you pour the milk on Weet-Bix to the extent I do. Two weeks breakfast will cost much less than one dollar per breakfast as argued by Eugene Rush in her letter to the editor a few months ago.

If a family can’t find $.55 to make their children breakfast, they need targeted specific intervention from Work and Income New Zealand to see what additional financial assistance they need, including budget advice, and from the child protection agency, Child, Youth and Families.

• Providing a hungry child with breakfast at school through a Feed the Kids Bill is parliamentary grandstanding that doesn’t strike at the root of the problem.
• These hungry children are not provided with breakfast either at the weekend or during the school holidays. They are abandoned by the process set up under the Feed the Kids Bill championed by the hard left.
• Worst of all, what about the parents? No good parent would have breakfast while their child goes hungry.

No provision is made by the hard left in its Feed the Kids Bill to feed the parents of these hungry children who also go hungry every morning. There is no other charitable explanation as to why their children were not given breakfast. No one in the house can afford breakfast both during school days, at the weekend and in school holidays.

As shown from the screenshot above, the Otago University’s annual Food Cost Survey suggests that to meet basic needs, a family must spend $44 per week for a five-year-old and $34 per week for a four-year-old in Wellington, which is where I live. That is, it costs about five or six dollars per day per child to feed them. A liberal diet for a small child for a day costs not much more than a cup of coffee at a cafe where I’m going shortly. The real issue is the income of parents.

The best solution to poverty is to move people into a job. Simon Chapple is quite clear in his book in the middle of last year with Jonathan Boston that a sole parent in full-time work, and a two parent family with one earner with one full-time and one part-time worker, even at low wages, will earn enough to lift their children above most poverty thresholds.

Sustained full-time employment of sole parents and the fulltime and part-time employment of two parents, even at low wages, are sufficient to pull the majority of children above most poverty lines, given the various existing tax credits and family supports.

The best available analysis, the most credible analysis, the most independent analysis in New Zealand or anywhere else in the world that having a job and marrying the father of your child is the secret to escaping poverty is recently by the Living Wage movement in New Zealand.

According to the calculations of the Living Wage movement, earning only $18.80 per hour with a second earner working only 20 hours per week affords their two children, including a teenager, Sky TV, pets, international travel, video games and 10 hours childcare. This analysis of the Living Wage movement shows that finishing school so your job pays something reasonable and marrying the father of your child affords a comfortable family life.