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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-04-28 Daily Xml
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FOODBANK SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Mr PISONI (Unley) (16:42): I rise to highlight a very important program that runs in schools all over South Australia to provide nourishing and sustaining breakfasts to many of our disadvantaged school students. The main supplier of these services is Foodbank SA, which was established in September 2000 by the then minister for human services and former Liberal premier, Dean Brown, to provide a one-stop food and grocery centre, where community support agencies can access a constant supply of nutritious food to be distributed to those who need it.

Foodbank receives about 80 per cent of its food and products from donations, and another 20 per cent is funded through hard-won grants, as they become available, and money from donations, together with robust negotiations with manufacturers, so that Foodbank can keep sufficient supplies of food available for the needy at all times. Of course, Foodbank is not just there for school breakfast. It serves many thousands of South Australians who are disadvantaged in our community.

An amazing one million kilograms of food is sourced, warehoused and moved around the state by Foodbank each year. Following research that showed 40 per cent of Australian schoolchildren go to school without breakfast, which ultimately results in poor behaviour, lack of concentration and poor academic outcomes, Foodbank joined with the Red Cross and Save the Children Fund, Rotary and other service groups to establish school programs which provide breakfast to hungry and disadvantaged children.

Most importantly, the children also learn about healthy eating and hygiene, as well as gaining good social and life skills as they interact with each other before school. Red Cross and Save the Children then train local groups to set up and run their own breakfast clubs in partnership with Foodbank. So, not only does it move in initially and set up and run the programs for a short time, Foodbank also works towards making breakfast clubs self-sufficient so that they can be run by their own school communities.

Currently, Foodbank is delivering breakfast foods and products to 110 schools around the state, from the APY lands to the north to Mount Gambier in the south, as well as across the metropolitan area. A conservative estimate indicates that these wonderful people feed breakfast to about 15,000 hungry students each week in South Australia. I applaud and congratulate everyone involved in providing breakfast each day to our needy children.

However, with the global financial crisis biting hard, these charities and other groups are finding it increasingly difficult to raise the funds necessary to keep the programs going. Everyone is tightening their belts when considering financial assistance, including the Rann Labor government, it seems. I was shocked to learn that Foodbank's annual $75,000 subsidy from the government was terminated last year.

That small amount made a big difference to this organisation, located at Edwardstown and run by a small but dedicated band of six people. At a time when more and more South Australians are struggling to make ends meet, this is just a cold and callous act on the part of the government, particularly when you consider that Foodbank in Queensland, which delivers the same amount of food to the needy as South Australia, receives $650,000 from its government. Victoria receives $450,000 from its government, and in Western Australia they get a share of lotteries for their Foodbank.

We should hardly be surprised that Mr Rann endorses such actions when his Minister for Education tells us that these services (breakfast in schools) are not her responsibility. In response to a question I asked in parliament last June, minister Lomax-Smith expressed a view that she had no interest in such school breakfasts as follows:

The Department of Education does not run breakfast programs. They are not part of our funding package.

I suggest it should be. It is time to do something about breaking the poverty cycle and ensuring that all children have their fair go in education and that these programs are properly funded.

Now is not the time for Mr Rann, the social inclusion minister, to play Mr Scrooge. If the self-proclaimed education Premier wants South Australia to produce sufficient numbers of skilled school leavers to meet our state's needs, as he stated in an article in The Weekend Australian just last month, then he and his Minister for Education should take an interest in school breakfast clubs and school communities, if South Australia is to take part in the post-recession recovery.

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