I have recently read two letters to the editor claiming the restaurant has a capacity of 300 people and will have a huge impact on parking in Fitzmaurice Street.

As the owner of the property, I can assure you the capacity will be only 198.

This is not many more than when the building operated as a brewery.

The building has not increased in size and the parking area at the rear still has space for 16 vehicles.

Giuseppe’s owner is very much looking forward to opening soon.

The new restaurant and bar will complement existing eateries and bars in the area and give a further boost to the local economy.

You may as well have a couple of garden gnomes looking after the welfare of our exported cattle and sheep.

Seeing cattle being bludgeoned to death with sledge hammers is a disgrace.  

Both Barnaby Joyce and ex-pollie Simon Crean, who are responsible for their welfare, should hang their heads in shame.

These two incompetents must be given the boot.

WATER is the lifeblood of our beloved Riverina – cattle graziers, fruit and vegetable irrigators, and “townies” alike, we all need water to survive.

We also need to know where this water will come from in the future.

This federal election, the future of our own water resources is under threat.

This time, federal politics is striking very close to home for all of us, thanks to the job cuts at the CSIRO.

While predictions of the future climate are very robust for some parts of the world, for our region of south-eastern Australia they are not.

The latest research reports a wide range of likely changes in rainfall in south-eastern Australia.

Some results show that as soon as 2030, we could see a 22 per cent reduction in surface water resources, while others find little to no change.

How can we plan the future of our farms or town water supplies with this range of possible outcomes?

I have personally completed a research project that could make strides towards resolving this uncertainty.

In an honours project at the University of NSW, I worked with world-class leaders in climate variability.

We developed a system to automatically locate and study rain systems in past weather data, just like the ripper we had on the Mothers Day weekend.

This tracking scheme is, to my understanding, the first of its kind in Australia.

However, because the Coalition government is systematically dismantling anything with the word “climate” in it, I now cannot get a job to continue developing that work to improve rain forecasting.

To cut research into the vital topic of rainfall variability is to accept that our present estimates are fine, and that we are happy with the current capability of our prediction systems.

It is all well and good for politicians to throw money at relief packages to solve short-term problems in an election year.

But unless they invest similar money into the long-term future of our water and restore the research at the CSIRO, the future of farming communities all over south-eastern Australia will simply get worse and worse.