Australia has a national speech problem that nobody is talking about. Despite a healthy rise in literacy and numeracy rates over the past century, most people, including the Prime Minister, still have poor speech skills. Yet this is not widely acknowledged as a problem.

Though verbal expression training is an essential skill for everyone, it is largely absent from our school system and, on the whole, standards of communication are unacceptably low. While Australians are usually more charmed than bothered by this, it should be considered as a national speech impediment.

A leader with laboured speech skills: Tony Abbott.

But it is not the Australian accent that is deficient. Aussie accents that fully articulate all words, even with regional inflections, can be great. Our many varied city and regional accents can be musical, intriguing and worthy of appreciation.

The unified Aussie accent is a complex soup of many accented languages – including English, German, Aboriginal, Irish, Scottish, Italian, Greek, as well as more recent regional influences. But just like slurring drunks, most sober Australians pickle their speech with lazy, restricted and heavy articulation.