Bigger than your lunch box

Like many, I get a daily chuckle out of the news story that keeps on giving – the school lunches disaster. This was supposed to be an easy win for the free-market coalition: an opportunity to showcase how much better National and Act are at financial management, how wasteful Labour was and generally how everyone wins when you let competition and the free market rule.

Except they picked the wrong target group. School kids. Had this been about meals delivered to rest homes, we would have never heard about the problems. The residents would have complained to the staff, some staff may have complained to management and management may have written a strongly worded letter to the food company. But the rest of us would never know and the government could have claimed the money savings as a success.

But kids are different, in particular teenagers, who are very good at two things: complaining about how tough they have it and posting things on social media, especially pictures of food. Amplified by the mainstream media who love getting a free story every day, this became the perfect storm that no government can ignore.

So there is hope. Maybe the kids learn from this that they have the power to cause real problems for a government if they really want to and start fighting for changes that are bigger than their lunch box.

peppertree

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