Wooley: Tassie needs to lift its game when it comes to literacy

With figures revealing Tasmania’s literacy levels are the worst in the country, what’s the point of getting voters to make a decision on a complex issue such as the Voice, asks Charles Wooley.

The news on Tuesday, that Tasmanians are top of the national class when it comes to illiteracy was no surprise to me.

I’ve been banging on in this column for years about the Australian Bureau of Statistics data that reveals, amazingly, that half of Tasmanians over 16 years are “functionally illiterate”.

I say “amazingly” because to some extent the problem is invisible. We know about homelessness when people are sleeping in cars, parks and in the street. Illiteracy is less obvious.

The illiterate move around in a shadow world, unable to fully participate in society and often too embarrassed to declare their problem.

A state parliamentary committee was told this week that almost half of us lacked the “basic skills needed to understand and use information from newspapers, magazines, books and brochures”.

Even as the bad news was reported I had broken a long and sensible habit and read the online comments on last week’s column on the Voice. It was an instructive but sorry lesson. I only took a look because a mate said, “Charlie, take a squiz. They are really piling on you, but I read it and I think they’ve got the wrong end of the stick.”

I don’t want to go into it again. My mate could read, and clearly most of the folk “piling on” couldn’t.

ABS data that was released this week, revealed that half of Tasmanians over 16 years are “functionally illiterate”.

I’m not going to be accused of being elitist and patronising by parsing their sentences and correcting their grammar.

What we need to do in Tassie is lift our game. If we can’t rescue the adults let’s at least save the kids. Literacy is the cornerstone of all social improvement. If you can’t read you can’t find a well-paying job, your health suffers, and your life expectancy is compromised.

And you are excluded from the role an informed citizen should be playing in our democracy.

You are prey to the lowest forms of misinformation.

Your only news is fake news.

It’s no coincidence that with half our population unable to properly engage with words, we have the lowest incomes in Australia, 26 per cent below the national average.

No coincidence either that we have the longest hospital queues and the highest per-capita cancer and coronary artery disease rates. It would take more space than I have here, but all our socio-economic indicators tend to be the worst in the nation.

Today as a journalist I write more in sadness than in anger. If our people have low-level literacy, they have equally low comprehension rates.

Stay with me. That means you have trouble following and understanding the written word, its context and its meaning.

And in the discordant world of social media, you will be more likely to echo the comments of the bellowing mob than you will be to formulate your own opinion, because, again, you cannot follow a written argument.

The line “If you don’t know, vote No” was especially formulated for the illiterate.

There are many credible reasons for voting No, but failing to understand the facts and the arguments is not one of them.

By putting the Voice to a vote in the Referendum, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has inflicted upon us the greatest division since the Vietnam War, writes Charles Wooley. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Contention and argument is the stuff of life for a journo. I don’t want people to agree with me. I know this is merely an opinion column. The more insults thrown at our columnists, including those redoubtable, armour-plated scribes Barns and Boyer, might even be good for circulation (though literacy would be better for selling papers), but in the end a lack of civility, comprehension and logical argument bodes ill for democracy.

When the under-educated distort the understanding of an important, complex and sensitive political issue like the Voice, our society is courting a Trumpian disaster.

I have repeatedly said in this column that Albo made a big mistake calling this referendum (the bigots don’t seem able to read that far), so please consider this: we have elected a parliament to rule. We pay the least of them a couple of hundred thousand bucks a year. For some it’s a job for life, and we provide them with researchers and staff, so perhaps they should do their job and not expect you and me to do it for them.

If they get it wrong, we will chuck them out at the next election. The Voice, whether you are Yes or No, is surely as important as procuring nuclear subs and American missiles.

But did anyone ask for your permission and advice on that?

It is pure political cowardice with a dollop of incompetence to expect the electorate to carry the can on big decisions. Government by referendum, as we are seeing now, does nothing but harm the integrity of representative democracy.

Albo has inflicted upon us the greatest division I can remember since the Vietnam War. We were more literate back then, and we settled the argument at the polls by tossing out the government of the day.

Today, given so many people can’t read or follow a written constitutional argument, why would you ask voters to get involved in such a complex issue of social engineering?

It’s like asking the passengers to choose the runway and land the airliner.

We should reasonably expect our elected representatives to do their job. It should have been made a campaign issue before the election, not sprung on the public as an afterthought in an election-night victory speech. Our public, in the case of Tasmania, half of them can’t even read either the Yes or the No cases.

And remember that although we are the worst, the other states aren’t too far behind us.

But now it’s too late. Albo has opened Pandora’s box and the conspiring demons of illiteracy, ignorance, indifference and bigotry have been released.

In Albo’s foolhardy and ill-conceived referendum, I fear that what I call “unsociable media” might have the casting vote.

But don’t bother posting me. I won’t read it.

Where social media is concerned, I am enthusiastically functionally illiterate.

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist.