OPINION: Jacinda Ardern can hardly claim free (taxpayer-funded) school lunches are her idea. But who cares, right?

For a prime minister that desperately needs some wins, and for one that promised to fight, if not end, child poverty, a free hot meal a day goes a long way towards that goal. 

Fill a tummy with good healthy kai and all roads lead to Damascus. Well, not quite, but the roads in Dargaville, Dunedin and Dannemora will be better. That is if Ardern rolls this out past Rotorua and Hawke's Bay. Why wouldn't you, Jacinda?

You need a big win, you need a project that resonates with families, and this is surely it. It fits the bill, you can add schools to it year on year. Corporates can climb aboard.

This could be your legacy. The year of the delivery could have just taken a sharp turn. You could name it "KiwiLunch". Like it?

Decent healthy food makes it easier to learn, to concentrate and to be healthy, therefore more of our children will succeed. And naturally we should see a reduction in truancy, obesity, and more success in school leavers passing exams and being prepared for the outside world. 

Of course, I make huge leaps of judgment and even bigger leaps of faith in my joining of the dots, but Treasury and all other economists get away with such wild predictions every day.

Taita College, in Lower Hutt, already receives free nutritional meals every day.

I've seen this work in America, in schools and in corporate life where lunch is provided. One size fits all, it's part of their culture, no-one moans, it's standard and it's uniform. And the Yanks hoe it down. Yet here we angst. And for good reason.

I grew up being told and seeing first-hand that Mum made us lunch every day. The Chesdale cheese triangles were my favourite, litebread​ and alfalfa sprouts were my pet hates, yet they continued for some time to sneak into my lunch box.

But that was then, this is now. Thirty years ago New Zealand didn't appear to have an industry of hungry kids. I can't recall it. Even the poorer kids had money for fish and chips on the top field. We thought they were flash, but only in recent years did I realise they came from the state house block over the school fence and were largely left to their own devices by their parents.

There was certainly no private charity like KidsCan​, and no welfare state feeding us lunch daily. 

There was no children's commissioner, and little high-level advocacy for kids. It was mum and dad and the $6-a-week per child benefit and, of course, dad had the full-time job.

Yet fast forward 30 years and what on earth happened? We've gone nuts. We're cutting our own throats with how we have shaped our own communities. Those responsible please stand up.

Yes, we've got climate change and social media and any number of apps and devices that are screwing us anyway. But now we have parents who no longer work, care or who are so absent due to work, life, addictions – you name it – but suddenly we have more than 100,000 kids every day who don't get lunch, breakfast, shoes, warmth, a bed and love.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at Kaitao Intermediate School in Rotorua, where she announced on Thursday that children in 30 primary and intermediate schools will begin receiving a free lunch every school day from term one next year.

But is the Government the right body to be rolling this out?  I'd say KidsCan boss Julie Chapman is your woman for this, and way more qualified than any government to roll this out, yet something tells me this Government treats her with suspicion.

Chapman's KidsCan is in more than 700 schools. That's not success. That's poor parenting, bad choices, low wages and a cost of living that can no longer be justified and is out of control. 

Add to all of that that 100 pre-schools are sadly on her waiting list too, and we have got a problem at home. It's time for a serious chat.

I worked it out, and $3 million would feed all the kids in those 100 pre-schools. Who would pay? The banks. All of the big banks could  give $500,000 each from their $1 billion annual profits. How hard? Exactly.

Let's go further. Feed all preschool kids and the cost is $30m. It's nothing really. The price of the Pike River re-entry. Let's save a generation and feed them now. Bugger it, do secondary schools too.

Yes, I know it's the job of parents, but some can't be saved from themselves so let's bite the bullet now. Ardern can call it KiwiLunch and hope it has no resemblance to KiwiBuild.

Hell, if we fork out for prisoners to have three meals a day, then surely we can do it for our kids too. Ardern may have just stumbled on a brilliant policy that all of us can understand. 

Never mind that her idea started 14 years ago with Julie Chapman and a few schools. Who knew that successive Labour and National governments were taking us to hell in a handbasket, aided and abetted by the worst parents in the land.

I don't agree with it, but I say do it. We can't afford for our kids to fail. They are already surrounded by enough of that.