DEAR News Of The Area,

Climate change is an all encompassing disaster.

Proofs have made headlines for 40 years.

In right wing circles, particularly the National Party, denial drags on.

There’s an audience for rejection, folk who dismiss research as existing in a rarefied field beyond “common sense”.

It’s a catch all phrase, an excuse for illiteracy.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reveals truths.

Forty four percent of Australians have low levels of literacy.

They couldn’t, wouldn’t read this newspaper, no chance of the truth generating offence.

Sadly, illiteracy becomes intergenerational; Doctor Suess is denied at bedtime!

Further, 39.4 percent read at a nine to eleven year old level.

Complexity, cross referencing of subjects doesn’t happen; Australia 2023 is an illiterate backwater.

Back to the National Party.

The topic in this electorate, the formation of the Great Koala National Park, stopping the ongoing logging and simplification of once giant forests, eludes them.

Across related subjects, history, ecology, hydrology, to name a few, they counter with denial. Can they possibly be that uninformed, or, is denial a tactic to harness the statistical illiterate?

The fob off comes with cliches, repeated endlessly; flat earth truths.

Sadly, for the ill read, “wood is a renewable resource”, and, “growth and regrowth”, counters an informed opinion.

Cliches can’t displace truths.

Widespread illiteracy is the great Australian tragedy.

Regards,
Warren TINDALL,
Bellingen.