We were told by prominent Queensland physicist Peter Ridd that extensive studies show Barrier Reef coral bleaching is not going to kill the reef (you may recall he was sacked from James Cook University for expressing this scientific view).

There were more articles about the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which is increasingly being exposed as a political con with insufficient scientific modelling, which is now coming at great expense to taxpayers and rural communities.

And we had revelations that despite what the animal welfare lobby groups tell us, the average Australian continues to eat eggs and that their push against the egg industry has exposed this group as not being representative of the average Australian.

During 2019 we must spend more time questioning the scientific and inner-city elite communities who are trying to force their social engineering on the rest of the population, though never at their expense.

Many of their ideologies are based on false premise, yet the political power they pull has unfairly and unnecessarily affected the livelihoods of many hard-working Australians.

Let’s work to swing the pendulum back towards common-sense, for the sake of our nation and those who have helped make it great.

It is with a sense of immense pride that I thank everyone who supported our recent Speak Up Campaign rally in Melbourne.

This was an amazing event that highlighted the concerns our communities have with implementation of water policy, in particular the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

It achieved our two aims: (a) Insist that water ministers, in their MinCo meeting, adopt strong criteria around their proposed socio-economic neutrality test; (b) take our message to Melbourne and attract media attention to the issues we face. No doubt the rally was successful on both counts.

Special thanks, of course, to everyone who participated in the rally. We had people travel from throughout the Murrumbidgee and Murray Valleys in NSW, plus northern Victoria and the Goulburn Valley. For many it was a very early start – up before the rooster, as they say – to get to Melbourne in time for our march at 9.30am.

This was a show of community strength – country and city together – because Speak Up is a community organisation. We will support a Basin Plan that protects communities and the environment, the current Basin Plan is falling well short and is in fact destroying communities.

It is communities that are at the forefront of wearing pain from the Basin Plan’s impacts, with job losses and subsequent reduced populations having a snowball effect that ultimately leads to fewer teachers, health services, community services, police – the list goes on and on.

That is why we must stay united and keep fighting this flawed Basin Plan and its poor implementation.

If we are to achieve this goal, the ball is firmly back in their court. We look forward to hearing from our government departments at federal and state level, as well as the MDBA, in the new year.