The Sun-Herald

WHO WE ARE: Just smart enough?

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A column about Australia by David Dale, published in The Sun-Herald, 12/7/2009
By now Australia was supposed to have changed from the lucky country to the clever country. But the Bureau of Statistics keeps releasing data which suggests most of us are too dumb to function in the 21st century.

The bureau's latest discovery is that we don't even know how to look after our own bodies - 59 per cent of Australians "have difficulty with tasks such as locating information on a bottle of medicine about the maximum number of days the medicine could be taken, or drawing a line on a container indicating where one third would be". This follows the revelation last year that 69 per cent of adults lack problem-solving skills that are "the minimum required for individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work in the emerging knowledge-based economy" (go here for that column).

Clearly we should not be too hard on the Shadow Treasurer, Joe Hockey, whose office had to apologise earlier this month for putting out a nonsensical press release based on his wrong reading of an economics graph.

The term "the lucky country" was coined in the 1960s by the writer Donald Horne, and it wasn't a compliment. He meant that through sheer dumb luck, Australians had stumbled onto resources that allowed us to prosper among world economies, and we'd been coasting ever since. Here's his entire quote: "Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck."

Horne said later: "I had in mind in particular the lack of innovation in Australian manufacturing and some other forms of Australian business, banking for example. In these, as a colonial carry over, Australia showed less enterprise than almost any other prosperous industrial society."

In the 1990s, Horne joined a campaign to raise education standards, aiming to make us a "clever country" with the skills to thrive without such props as iron ore and coal. He said: "I think we should realise that the lucky country provides a descriptive phrase, condemning Australia for what it was, whereas the clever country is a pre-scriptive phrase, suggesting to Australia what it might become."

Are we there yet? The latest Social Trends report from the Bureau of Stats has good news about young Australians. Here are the results of the latest testing on 8,000 students in what is called TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study):

"Australian students performed well in 2007 when compared with other participating countries, but were outperformed by England, the United States and most of the Asian countries, especially Singapore and Chinese Taipei. Australian students achieved an international ranking of 14th (out of 49) for Years 4 and 8 maths and 13th for Years 4 and 8 science." In science, our kids were equal to students in Germany, Italy, Lithuania and Sweden, which doesn't sound too bad at all (go here for the details).

But in the same Social Trends report, the bureau reveals the results of another test called ALLS (Adult Literacy and Life Skills), conducted on 9,000 people aged 15-74: "The ability to access and use health information is a fundamental skill which allows people to make informed decisions and helps them to maintain basic health ... Skill level 3 is regarded as the minimum required to allow individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life. In 2006, 41 per cent of adults were assessed as having adequate or better health literacy skills, scoring at level 3 or above. At this level, people could generally perform tasks such as combining information in text and a graph to correctly assess the safety of a product." (Go here for the details.)

Only 41 per cent have "adequate" literacy? So if Joe Hockey had been able to understand that graph, he'd have been unAustralian.

Go to Comments to discuss whether Australians are as dumb as the data suggests.

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.