Further, that the village operator, RetireAustralia, is not doing enough to address these incidents and that our village is no longer a safe place to live.

Don't get me wrong, the increase in burglaries at our village and at other retirement villages in Wagga is of great concern. However, inferring that the crime issues in Wagga are somehow our village operator's problem to solve and that we seniors are not capable of looking after ourselves is outrageous.

We are a capable group of independent living retirees and our village operator is proactively working with us to implement additional security measures and to educate our community on the simple steps we can all take to keep our homes safe.

A little known fact is that often burglaries, both in our village and in the broader community, occur because an offender was able to walk in through an unlocked door.

They're looking for an easy target. Offenders take note, at Riverina Gums we're no longer going to be an easy target.

I encourage you to come along to our lovely village and see for yourself. I also encourage you to take a look at why there's been a spike in burglaries targeting retirement villages and what can be done more broadly to solve crime issues in Wagga, aside from turning our village into Fort Knox.

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There is so much talk about increasing food prices and the impact on cost of living. Why aren't we talking about the missed opportunities to grow more food and in doing so take some pressure off the increased demand? A major Australian food bowl is in northern Victoria and southern NSW, where our forebears invested in world's best practice irrigation infrastructure to drought-proof the nation and ensure we could grow food during the inevitable dry periods. This benefits the prosperity of the regions where it is grown, and provides an economic boost to the nation while also putting food on kitchen tables.

A knee-jerk reaction to the Millennium Drought was the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which was developed not to 'save' the iconic Murray River and its environs as the politicians would have you believe, but rather to solve a political problem in SA and guarantee the cheapest possible water supply to Adelaide - ie using the Murray River as a drain to transfer water from Hume and Dartmouth dams at the top of the system, to the lower reaches in SA.

As a result we are growing less food because water has been taken away from farming. We are also destroying the Murray River, as its banks collapse under the strain of these huge flows. Alarmingly, it is proposed that under the basin plan even more water should be acquired and delivered to SA and this will lead to even more food shortages, higher food prices and more environmental damage. If our nation wants food to be grown domestically by the best farmers in the world, we must force a change to the present nonsense and demand a basin plan built on science and common-sense.

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