Australia’s adult literacy crisis reflects 40 years of neoliberal education cuts and privatised learning gaps
Original framing: “More than 1 in 3 Australian adults are functionally illiterate. How can we fix this?” — The Conversation - Global
Functional illiteracy in Australia is concentrated among Indigenous Australians (50% below Level 2), refugees (42%), and rural workers (35%), yet these groups are systematically excluded from policy discussions. The *Refugee Council of Australia* reports that 70% of refugee-background adults lack access to targeted literacy programs due to funding cuts. Migrant women face additional barriers, with 55% of non-English-speaking women in low-skilled jobs reporting literacy-related workplace discrimination.
Australia’s adult literacy crisis is a 40-year-old wound inflicted by neoliberal policy violence: the 1992 *National Training Reform Agenda* privatised education, the Howard government gutted adult literacy funding, and successive governments outsourced solutions to for-profit actors like Pearson and Navitas, whose ‘fixes’ prioritise profit over people.
The OECD’s PIAAC data reveals this is not an anomaly but a pattern shared with nations that embraced austerity, while Indigenous communities—already dispossessed of language and land—face the brunt of the crisis, with 50% functionally illiterate. Yet the solution lies not in technocratic tweaks but in reclaiming literacy as a public good: reviving TAFE, centring Indigenous knowledge, and treating digital and financial literacy as core rights. The trickster’s insight cuts deepest here: the ‘illiteracy crisis’ is a mirror, reflecting a society that values market signals over human dignity, where 1 in 3 adults cannot read a bus timetable because we collectively decided they shouldn’t have the tools to navigate the world we built.