KEY POINTS:
As a lover of language, an avid reader and a weaver of words, I was deeply saddened to read the heading in this newspaper this week "Some can't read to save their lives".
But not surprised.
That most articulate of women, Helen Clark, revealed in the article under that headline that some 380,000 New Zealand adults' literary skills are so poor they would be unable to determine how to use a fire extinguisher from the instructions written on it.
And, she said, quoting last year's Adult Literacy and Life Skills survey, another 750,000-odd Kiwi adults had a literacy level at which they could understand simple language but would not, for instance, be able to transfer information printed in a catalogue on to an order form.
The PM's main concern seemed to be that such people were ill-prepared to join the workforce and that they did not have the skills to function in the "knowledge society".
My concern is much broader and deeper than that, for I believe that it is the lack of language skills, oral and written, that are among the fundamental causes of many of our social problems, including, to name just a few, delinquent youth, violence and child abuse and poor parenting.
If we lack language skills and an understanding of the meaning of words, then we cannot communicate effectively with ourselves or one another.
As the American novelist Leo Posten put it: "Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood."
How right he is. If we cannot communicate, if we have not the words to tell others who we are and what we need or desire, or understand those messages from them, then we quickly become frustrated, angry and alienated from the society in which we live.
And that alienation will more often than not lead to antisocial behaviour of one sort or another, including, of course, dropping out, joining gangs, violence and crime.
Anthony Robbins, the internationally noted American motivator, considered the father of the life-coach business, summed it up when he said: "The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives."
So Helen Clark's concern about illiteracy - for that is what it is - leaving young people unsuited for the workforce is probably the least of our worries and I doubt whether raising the school leaving age to 17 and cracking down on kids who want to leave school early will do any good.
Remedial action will need to start many years before then and surely there are people among us who can figure out how to do it.
* And now, on a lighter note. Did you get as big a laugh out of Helen Clark's speech to the Labour Party conference as I did?
It was hilarious, and it proved once and for all that our leaders must think we are all as thick as two short planks.
She wants us to believe that for the first time in eight years - and, significantly, just 12 months out from an election - the Labour-led Government can afford to give out tax cuts. The PM, having just rearranged the deck chairs on the sinking ship of state, told the conference that Labour had thought of introducing across-the-board tax cuts for the 2005 election but had not received the advice from Treasury it now had - that the Government's surpluses are "structural", not one-offs.
Can you believe that?
Does she mean that it has taken Treasury bureaucrats until now to understand that eight consecutive Budget surpluses, all of them large and some of them massive, were not simply "one-offs"?
And that no one in the Cabinet was bright enough to question that?
The first surplus under Michael Cullen's reign as Minister of Finance was $1.46 billion in 2000. In his Budget years since, the surpluses have been $1.46 billion (again), $2.3 billion, $1.966 billion (he must have been inattentive), $7.424 billion, $6.247 billion, $11.473 billion (wide awake that year) and $8.66 billion. Which adds up to Government profiteering at the expense of all us taxpayers of just under $41 billion over eight years, or $40,993,000,000 to be exact, representing $10,248 for every man woman and child, taking four million people as an average.
Now there's an old saying that goes "Once is a chance, twice is a coincidence, third time is a pattern".
And I would have thought that the Labour leadership, and even Treasury bureaucrats, must have seen the pattern.
So I suggest that Clark, Cullen and co cut the bullshit and simply admit that tax cuts are anathema to socialist governments, but faced with poor poll results and a looming election, needs must.
