With a flagship ‘Regional Rail Revival’ nearly entirely federal government funded – $1.6 billion of the $1.75 billion is Commonwealth money – and botched delivery of the once-in-a-generation Murray Basin Rail Project, Daniel Andrews has shown again and again why he’s the Premier for Melbourne.

By contrast, a Liberal Nationals Government will invest in fast, reliable and comfortable new trains for country Victoria that will get you where you need to be, when you need to be there.

Our plan for better regional rail also includes investigating a dedicated Gippsland rail line out of Melbourne’s south-east, we’ll double the number of return trains to Shepparton and do the work needed to return passenger trains to Mildura.

The solution to Melbourne’s congestion has to include regional Victoria.

Peter Walsh, leader, The Nationals

ASK Australians to name our natural wonders and quickly you’ll hear a list of national treasures like the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, the Daintree and the Bungle Bungles. All these are truly remarkable and form part of our national identity.

But there is another truly remarkable natural wonder in Australia that deserves to be mentioned – the Murray-Darling Basin.

I urge Australians this World Rivers Day to find out a bit more about this critically important and hard-working river system.

Inland from the Great Dividing Range is a vast area that isn’t pristine wilderness, and all more amazing because of it. It’s pivotal to so much of Australian life and yet so familiar and productive that it’s easy to take for granted.

It’s one million square kilometres – stretching across the bottom third of Queensland, taking in most of New South Wales and Victoria, all of the Australian Capital Territory and the south-east of South Australia. Its 23 rivers and more than 30,000 wetlands traverse fabulously diverse landscapes from the Snowy Mountains in the east to the arid red expanses west of Broken Hill.

The thing that connects each corner of this extraordinary national asset is the flow of our great inland rivers, which come together and travel more than 3000 kilometres all the way to the Southern Ocean in South Australia. That means managing the health of an area the size of France and Germany combined as one system. It traverses five jurisdictions, is home to 2.6 million people, produces 40 per cent of Australia’s food and fibre, and hundreds of species of birds, mammals and native fish depend upon it.

Management of such a big, diverse and variable system is an important challenge. And variable it is – in 2006 the River Murray recorded the lowest inflows on record at 7000 billion litres when 50 years earlier the inflows reached 118,000 billion litres.

Those low inflows in 2006 shook the assumptions that had underpinned the management of the rivers. For the first time it was recognised that there may not always be enough water to go around. Water extraction had increased six-fold between the 1920s and 1995 when a cap on diversions was introduced. The millennium drought showed us that managing this vast interconnected system on a state by state basis was not sustainable.

And so the Basin Plan was born. Internationally, this system of management is world first policy. Other nations are looking to our example and watching our progress closely as they look to manage water availability and quality issues of their own.  

The Murray-Darling Basin is important historically in the development of modern Australia as well as for the people of our first nations. It works hard as Australia’s main food bowl and in generating tourism dollars for our rural and regional communities. And it is important ecologically for the native flora and fauna found nowhere else on earth.

Neil Andrew, chairman, Murray-Darling Basin Authority

IS GLOBAL warming, aka climate change, still in vogue? If so, the recent record frosts in the Wimmera that are putting downward pressure on farm incomes must also be putting downward pressure on the religious faith in the dud science that condemns carbon dioxide emissions without evidence.

Ron Fischer, Horsham

IT IS critical new solutions are found to Australia’s huge crisis with opioid drugs.

The latest Australia’s Annual Overdose Report 2018 reveals a massive 87 per cent increase in pharmaceutical opioid deaths from 2008 to 2014 in Australia. We are talking about drugs like oxycodone, codeine and fentanyl – which is around 100 times more powerful than pure morphine. Heroin overdose deaths are increasing too. There were 2177 lives lost to overdose in 2016.

One answer lies in a very important drug that we are not hearing enough about. Naloxone. Put simply, naloxone saves lives and temporarily reverses an opioid overdose. It also reverses a heroin overdose.

We say naloxone should be provided free of charge through mental health services, pharmacies, hospital emergency rooms and needle and syringe programs. The drug has few side effects and – in an emergency – will literally save a life. Naloxone is – in essence – an emergency medicine.

I urge readers to ask your local MP what role they are playing in getting naloxone into the hands of people who need it most – and ask their local MP what actions are they really taking to help reduce accidental drug overdoses in the local area?

John Ryan, chief executive, Penington Institute