Your message has definitely taken the heat out of our reaction to the Fair Australia report and we’re all feeling heartened by your continued support.

As you can see from our media release http://www.alia.org.au/media.room/2010.02.01.html, we were still very much in favour of the findings in the report and you can be assured of libraries continuing to give it their all in the community.

I hope your overall impression of the Conference was that the government has a very purposeful social inclusion agenda. You know that I believe in the pivotal role of libraries in communities - I refer to them as essential social infrastructure - so don’t be disheartened that libraries per se don’t jump out of the Fair Australia document.

And of course, reading to children from birth has been proven, as Sir Michael said, to improve their life chances significantly. Our challenge ( both the government and ALIA) is to continue to hammer the message that literacy is the key to learning, to a productive and healthy life, to a world beyond our borders, to transformational thinking, to opportunities to grow, to learn, to engage and to have a voice.