That’s right – up to one in five people have lost their job as a direct result of the Basin Plan.

This is not acceptable in rural Australia and certainly would not be tolerated by our city cousins, and nor should it be.

Every job is valuable, regardless of where you live.

The Murray-Darling Basin Authority CEO, Phillip Glyde, has recently acknowledged that the original modelling in 2012 was not able to provide localised impacts through water recovery.

With this new information, is it time to reassess the plan and work out better ways of achieving environmental goals?

What if we can make changes to the plan which still achieve environmental outcomes, while at the same time reinvigorating our rural and regional communities by putting them in a better position to take advantage of increased global demand for produce?

Worth considering?

I have known for some time that we get very little from the petroleum resource rent tax. However, I only became aware of just how little we do get compared to what some other countries get for their non-renewable gas resources.

In The Age on Monday, there was a story about how in 2021 Australia will become the world’s biggest exporter of  liquefied natural gas, eclipsing the current largest exporter Qatar, a Persian Gulf state.

In 2021 Qatar will export 100 billion cubic metres of LNG and receive an estimated $26.6 billion, from the multi-national companies exploiting their non-renewable gas reserves.

In 2021 these same multi-nationals will export the same amount of Australia’s non-renewable gas reserves and Australia will receive an estimated $800 million. It is estimated that this figure is unlikely to change for at least two decades.

This is a major fraud on the Australian people by the current and previous governments of both persuasions. As we are being admonished to live within our means, I have written to the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Minister for Finance asking what they plan to do to ensure that Australia is adequately compensated for the sale of our non-renewable resources.

If we only received half the money Qatar gets for its gas and then we were able to get say half the corporate tax avoided, estimated at between $6 billion and $50 billion annually, the debt and deficit would be quickly eliminated.

All this without attacking the living standards of those deserving of support in our community. Please do not let them tell you that they have fixed the corporate tax avoidance problem by the introduction of the Multinational Anti Avoidance Act. I understand that the big four accounting firms have already worked their way around this piece of tax legislation. 

According to David Leyonhjelm, every male born just past WWII is a disgusting misogynist and should be given a fair amount of slack (‘PM Turnbull blasts ‘loathsome Trump’, The Border Mail, October 11).

Well, I'm sorry, Mr Leyonhjelm, I and my friends were brought up to respect womanhood and all they embody, which is far more than later generations do, including, I suspect, yours.

I do wish politicians would keep their silly comments to themselves and save it for the courtroom which is where most of them belong. Perhaps that is why we are seeing so much injustice being played out in the name of democracy recently.