The school lunches saga gets worse by the day. Bland, repetitive menus, failures in heating, failures in timely delivery, failures to deliver halal meals that are truly halal, endangering children who have known allergies by giving them food that may contain the triggering ingredients, etc etc. It's not as if this new system was sprung on anyone overnight. The private sector, for all its alleged efficiency, had been given eight months notice to get prepared, and get this right.

If ACT leader David Seymour can’t/won’t now admit that this brainchild of his is a total disaster...what more evidence pray, does he need? Do children have to die in the school cafeteria before Seymour will admit the error of his ways, and revert to the old system, as previously funded?

With good reason, the main focus in the school lunches debacle has been on the repetitive fare and bad taste/poor quality/inept delivery of the food, the subsequent waste, and the likely impact on the educational outcomes for children now going hungry. The related social cost has been paid less attention, but is worth considering.

Meaning: the modes of preparation and delivery of the better quality food formerly available had enhanced co-operation between the schools who shared the tasks. Even more importantly, the school lunch programme had enabled local communities to become more involved in the general life of the school, by dint of taking part in the provision of what tended to be locally grown food ingredients within locally prepared meals. In some cases, migrant communities within the schools’ catchment areas had been contributing significantly to the cuisine on offer.

In other words, the state funding for the former school lunch programme was delivering a dual benefit: healthier children more able to concentrate and achieve in the classroom, and healthier communities for whom the school lunch programme had become a force for social cohesion.

All of this, of course, was anathema to an ACT Party that – on principle – is opposed to any and all expressions of collective action and community empowerment. Margaret Thatcher, the ACT Party’s patron saint, once famously denied that society even exists, arguing instead that we are just an aggregate of individuals. One can see how undermining the school lunch programme would be sympatico with that grim worldview.

More to the point, the former school lunch programme was also a sin against commerce. Community involvement – and the inter-school efficiencies of scale – were ripping profits from the hungry mouths of corporate providers, who have now been invited to deliver a shoddier product at less cost to the government, while still enriching themselves in the process. Because hey, if you can’t make a profit from feeding hungry kids, what’s the point?

What ACT is doing – with the support of coalition partners like Education Minister Erica Stanford – is in line with an age-old method of cutting public services. First, reduce the quality of an essential service so drastically that the demand for it plummets. Then, with fewer people using the service, more “savings” can be made by cutting back further on the programme, which will end up delivering an increasingly shabbier product to fewer and fewer end users. The “savings” will be immense!

That seems to be what has been happening to the school lunch programme. After experience with the slop that’s currently on offer, more and more children are not even bothering to open the containers.

From the sidelines, the MoE officials trying to justify the experiment that’s being conducted on the wellbeing of hungry children keep on saying that the nutritional standards haven’t changed – a claim that begs the question that there is no sign yet of a system for monitoring and enforcing compliance with those standards.

Footnote One: Meanwhile, the denizens of talkback radio have been saying that the kids can’t be that hungry if they’re not eating what’s put in front of them. (ACT has succeeded in creating Oliver Twist in reverse. Please sir, can I have less of this gruel.) Obviously, the grinches on talkback radio have never been parents. Children are blessed with fresh, lively taste buds. Force-feeding them with poor food is likely to make them ill, and an urge to vomit is not widely regarded as being conducive to the learning process.

Footnote Two. Still, in one sense, David Seymour is providing a valuable life lesson to the younger generation. Kids, if you don’t fight back, some politicians really will try to make you eat shit. Don’t let him get away with it.

Footnote Three: The reference in the headline to eating the young is a reference to this painting by Goya, of parental destruction.

Good news sighting

Good news is rare, anywhere. That’s one reason why the release of the Native American indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, after 50 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, is cause for celebration. When two FBI agents were killed in 1974 on Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, Pelter was framed for it. He was depicted by the prosecution to be the only person on the reservation with the requisite AR-15 rifle.

It later transpired that the prosecution had hidden a ballistic report that had tested Peltier’s weapon and found it could not have fired the fatal bullets:

....Dozens of people had participated in the gunfight; at trial, two co-defendants were acquitted after they claimed self-defence. When Peltier was tried separately in 1977, no witnesses who could identify him as the shooter were presented, and unknown to his defence lawyers at the time, the federal government had withheld a ballistics report indicating the fatal bullets didn't come from his weapon, according to court documents Peltier filed on appeal.

Rather than concede their complicity in a miscarriage of justice, the FBI re-grouped and claimed that a subsequent search and new testing had – surprise, surprise – come up with extractor marks on a casing found in the boot of one of the agent’s car boot that allegedly did make a match with Peltier’s AR-15. Funny the FBI found that shell casing only when faced with Peltier’s acquittal, and had not presented it at the original trial.

Peltier has been in jail since 1974, despite decades of calls for his release from his family, local support groups, legal aid organisations, celebrities, the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis.The Pope Francis intervention may have been what finally swayed Joe Biden – a staunch Catholic – to use his presidential powers on his last day in office to commute Peltier’ life term in prison. Biden’s action will allow Peltier – at the age of 80 – to spend the time remaining to him in home detention on the reservation, in the care of his family. As the Minnesota Star-Tribune reported last week :

The signs along U.S. Hwy 281....read “50 years of resistance,” and “About damn time” and “Welcome home Leonard Peltier.” Kids wrapped in blankets held signs adorned with glitter spelling out “Welcome home grandpa.” They waited to meet their grandfather for the first time, alongside nieces and nephews who were meeting an uncle they’ve only ever seen in photographs.

Censoring (and self-censoring) music

Over 30 years ago, Rage Against the Machine released a protest song about the injustice being done to Peltier. It makes one wonder why there are no current equivalents of Rage Against The Machine. Some of this is due to censorship both direct, and indirect. For example: Youtube initially hid Macklemore’s “Hind’s Hall” protest song against the deliberate IDF killing of the six year old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab behind parental warnings and an age-restricted wall, even though anti-Palestinian content on Youtube faces no such warnings or restrictions.

Even now, almost a year later, the “Hind’s Hall” video has had only 4.1 million views on Youtube, as against 38 million views on X. Clearly, censorship works. For good measure, a Las Vegas music festival recently dropped Macklemore from the show for saying “Fuck America” at a pro-Palestine rally.

More subtly, the networks excised the footage of the Palestinian and Sudanese flags from replays of Kendrick Lamar’s recent half-time show at the Superbowl. In one sense, this was a bit like muzzling a sheep. Lamar’s “Not Like Us” has been festooned with awards as the best rap track of the past year. This is partly because at the height of the carnage in Gaza, Lamar chose to deploy his verbal skills in a bitch fight with Drake, his only real rival for rap supremacy.

Even then, punches were pulled in the rendition of “Not Like Us” at the Superbowl. The problematic word “paedophile” was not rapped by Lamar, since that claim is now the subject of a lawsuit that Drake has brought against Lamar’s label, Universal. All of which has meant that the banner of pop music’s role as a vehicle for moral and political outrage is being carried almost entirely by Macklemore, previously written off as a lightweight pop rapper with limited skills.

Macklemore’s “Hinds Hall” and “Hinds 2” (the latter being recorded with Palestinian rappers) were almost the only rap songs last year to reference the genocide in Gaza, and call out those responsible for it. Earlier this month, Macklemore put that outrage into a wider context – Trump II, Netanyahu, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and on the West Bank, Musk’s fascist salute and so on. If only Kendrick Lamar would apply his immense verbal skills and insights to what is happening in the world beyond his bubble. In the meantime, here’s that latest track by Macklemore:

© Scoop Media