Economy
There is certainly no silver bullet, but …
Regular readers by now will know I am a bit of a political junkie – and a holiday away from newspapers, Twitter and the local gossip while the federal election outcomes were playing out was a bit like going cold turkey.
It has meant though that I’ve come back to work with a clearer head and hopefully a better perspective. This was brought home to me last weekend when listening to a report on ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing. The program focused on what they call the Tasmanian ‘literacy deficit’: the fact that this state has the worst literacy and numeracy performance of any state in the nation.
The Australia Bureau of Statistics looked at literacy and numeracy levels here in 2011/12 and found that half of all Tasmanians aged 15 to 74 are functionally illiterate, and more than half are functionally innumerate.
That doesn’t mean they can’t read or write. It means they don’t have the skills to operate as normal, competent individuals in our modern society. They have difficulty filling in forms, reading the instructions on their medicine and doing basic mental arithmetic.
We also have the largest number of people whose highest level of education is year 10 or lower; and the largest number of people whose highest post-school qualification is a certificate III or IV.
On the basis of these outcomes, it is perhaps surprising to learn that Tasmania spends more on schools per head of population than any other state. Clearly, we need to look more at value for money and outcomes, rather than simply assuming throwing more money at issues will make them go away.
There’s a strong correlation between low literacy, poor health, and low socio economic status, with more than a third of Tasmanians living on welfare. Unemployment in the state is the nation’s highest, at 8.6 per cent; and we have some of the worst health outcomes in the country. These problems are now intergenerational – and for any young person to break this cycle is tough. They have to be both motivated and unafraid of breaking from the norm.
Professor Jonathan West has said that ‘the problem is not that we can’t go on like this; it is that because we can’. And, while we do, Tasmanians are falling further and further behind, propped by the other states. There is no simplistic explanation for these problems; and there is certainly no silver bullet.
I don’t know what the solutions are; but I do know we are unlikely to achieve improvements if we don’t dedicate enough resource to addressing the issues.
I was amazed that there was very little mention of this report by our politicians or in the mainstream media.
If we accept that our leaders are prepared to completely disregard perhaps the most sobering news delivered to this state in a generation, we become complicit. We need to come together as a community to start to address this unacceptable situation – and we need to do this now. Otherwise, we can all be judged guilty of fiddling while Rome burns.