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 chief executive officer, 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?

Farmers have received pro-forma documents to help them prepare their own submissions to the NSW Government in support of the national exporter SunRice keeping its unique status. It has the exclusive rights to sell overseas on behalf of the NSW Rice Marketing Board, the single desk providing benefits for growers and the communities.

I’m an ex-grape grower. The MIA Grapes Marketing Board had the power to negotiate with the wineries on the price of wine grapes per tonne and in 2000 the state government deregulated the wine industry and took the power away from the board. Farmers now have to go cap in hand and ask “what price will I receive for my wine grapes?”

Farmers create the wealth outside the farm gate.

The dairy industry is another example, in 2000 the federal government deregulated the dairy industry. In 2016 farmers are receiving below cost of production for their milk, the company and shareholders are making a profit, yet farmers are working hard to put milk on our table at a great cost to themselves and their families.

Farmers need their rice board to work on their behalf and not work for shareholders, or the rice industry to be taken over by an overseas company. 

Australian farmers need a fair go at what they do best.

In response to Paul Bosman (It's all Milk and Honey, October 11), there is nothing unjust about eating birds eggs per se. The injustice occurs when we inflict suffering on birds in order to eat their eggs. This is what we do when we buy commercially produced eggs.

All male chicks hatched by the industry are either minced up alive or gassed and females have their beaks agonizingly burned off with lasers or red hot blades.

Most hens are condemned to lives of intolerable suffering inside cramped wire cages where they are constantly feather-pecked by their half-crazed “cell mates”. Their deaths are terrifying and painful.

Paul asks who determines if eggs are “designed” for humans. If you think about it you can work it out for yourself. Hens ovulate for the same reason women do - to reproduce.  A chicken’s egg is expelled through the same orifice as her urine and faeces. Does it really sound as though eggs were “designed” to be food for us?

And no, Paul, I don't eat honey. As you rightly point out, it's unjust to steal the food bees have worked so hard to make.