LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Sir, 

It was not unexpected that we should find in the Examiner today the City of Launceston’s ‘smoothed over’ 2018 in review report card. All of us out here in voter land who have been called upon to write such reports know the drill all too well. Consequently, we can read between the lines. ............... This report could have been abbreviated to something like: attendance, adequate; application, must try harder; fiscal outcomes, disturbing; result generally, suboptimal. In fact, it could have been even harsher but hard truths are as unpalatable to give as they are to receive. ............... The real issue here is that the City of Launceston’s Council is not up for anything like criticism or critical review. Council operatives also know that in order to get advertising placement these days newspapers are no longer able, or willing, to engage with criticism of any kind. So by necessity, they are up for smoothing over histories. ............... Actually, governments, newspapers, corporations, universities even, will take whatever content they can get just so long as it does not cut too deeply and doesn’t challenge what passes for in-house wisdom or expertise on any level. ............... It is speculated that Launceston Council has a fully staffed ‘media department’ with an ‘operating budget well in excess of $1Million’ to enable it to get over this critical review issue. ............... The Vladimir Lenin quote that goes “A lie told often enough becomes the truth” underpins this class of marketing but it was Adolf Hitler who knew that the lie had to be “…big enough lie and [told] frequently enough, [for it to] be believed.” ............... Ever since ordinary people, with fingers crossed, have had to trust the Ancient Greek fable teller, Aesop, when he said, “a liar will not be believed, even when he speaks the truth.” ............... So, the really, really big question here is, why bother burdening us at all with this unbelievable tosh? It is a really good question when all that is happening is one year is merely turning into another. ............... Ray Norman Trevallyn

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The fable The tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking wolves are attacking his flock. When a wolf actually does appear and the boy again calls for help, the villagers believe that it is another false alarm and the sheep are eaten by the wolf. In later English-language poetic versions of the fable, the wolf also eats the boy. This happens in Fables for Five Year Olds (1830) by John Hookham Frere, in William Ellery Leonard's Aesop & Hyssop (1912),[5] and in his interpretation of Aesop's Fables (1965) by Louis Untermeyer.[6] The moral stated at the end of the Greek version is, "this shows how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them". It echoes a statement attributed to Aristotle by Diogenes Laërtius in his The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, in which the sage was asked what those who tell lies gain by it and he answered "that when they speak truth they are not believed".[7] William Caxton similarly closes his version with the remark that "men bileve not lyghtly hym whiche is knowen for a lyer"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf