Currently I am using this to grant permissions:
grant select on all tables in schema public to ;
alter default privileges in schema public
To grant default privileges, you need to grant to the user you are creating the table with.
You are creating the tables as SA_user, but reading the tables as READ_user. Your code needs to look like:
ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES
FOR USER SA_user
IN SCHEMA schema_name
GRANT SELECT ON TABLES TO READ_user;
So whenever the SA_user creates a table, it will grant select rights for the READ_user.