As the leaders of regional Australia, our members share these concerns. Our regional routes must not be left at the boarding gate with reduced services and severely increased fairs.

When the dust settles on COVID-19, our aviation industry must have competition that is committed to maintaining existing or, even better, extra regional routes and services.

As a leader of a thriving regional capital city I know in no uncertain terms that a competitive airline sector, that continues to service the needs of our regions, is fundamental to the current and future success of regional Australia.

Prior to COVID-19 restrictions, many of our member cities had daily Virgin Australia services running through their airports, connecting them to other parts of Australia and then to the rest of world.

These cities, which have a combined population of 650,000 (and estimated wider service area of 2 million people), are facing the detrimental impacts of reduced connectivity (including price gouging) if regional needs are overlooked in negotiations surrounding the future of Virgin Australia or a new airline entrant.

Air connectivity enhances the quality of life for those who work and live outside metropolitan areas, overcoming the often-discussed tyranny of distance.

Better connections allow regional Australians access to specialist health, and education services not available locally and also provide better remote working opportunities for those Australian's who are looking to escape the crushing congestion of our nation's big cities.

As a nation we must insist that any solution to maintaining competition in the Australian aviation industry, also means maintain competition outside Sydney and Melbourne.

The continued connectivity, liveability and competitiveness of our regional cities depend on this outcome.

Shane Van Styn,

Mayor of the City of Greater Geraldton and Chair of Regional Capitals Australia

With Tamworth and New England, through our local press, now the centre of world democracy - embryonically - I should explain democracy as a religion more directly. My previous letter (15 April 2020) understated the central importance of unity of the people, long clear.

Political democracy, allocating power for functions like parliament to govern, bureaucracy to administer, press to inform, all for the people, isn't democracy. The French Revolutionaries and their Enlightenment forebears knew this, having a different vision.

You can't have two powers in the nation when one of them is all the people ruling equally. That makes other powers silly, doesn't it? So, people, you want something done properly, do it yourself.

The politics of the western societies, as I say in the Introduction of churchofdemocraticenlightenment.com is like the politics of the Vatican - the government and leader of the Church, its elections, progressive and conservative factions, etc. Catholic Christianity is 1.2 billion Catholics. Islam is 1.8 billion Moslems, not "political Islam", aptly named.

Democracy is a spirit, just "human spirit", (no need to make this sound more religious than it is), whereby the people exercise their will, their abilities and their faith in themselves to rise to earthly supremacy - popular rule. It's a moral rather than a material rise, as to how things ought to be, if we are to be free. It has a funny twist that the rise and rule are collective, or communal, even though the will and faith are individual. Earthly virtue seems to be about what good you can do others.

So democracy is based in the individual, but properly exists outside and around each of us as a shared power and spirit. A bit weird, but religions tend to be supernatural, and in terms of the earthly natural, this is.

An overriding universal faith in the reason and humane love of others is a faculty we don't seem to have yet. But it's like you can't expect to get it if you don't take the first step. Like trust. The thing seems indistinguishable from your belief in it and action accordingly.

Among sources of the democratic religion of human upliftment - self and mutual - I previously mentioned J S Mill. On rereading On Liberty I'm convinced an ambivalence between human improvement and human limitation in it can only be resolved by democracy as a religion, although our pre-eminent democratic theorist doesn't actually go beyond political consideration to this conclusion.

Stan Heuston, Oxley Vale

As a supporter of car racing, I was sad to read that Channel 10 and Foxtel won't be renewing their broadcast deal after this year and Channel 7 aren't interested. They say it's a losing sport.

With major sponsor Virgin bankrupt then the V8's appear dead in the water. Many factors to blame but maybe the virus killed them off.

We may go to the Bathurst 12-hour in February but won't be the same and sad to see an Aussie icon disappear after 60 years.

Graeme Reeves, Calala

The outbreak of COVID-19 at a Melbourne slaughterhouse shows the urgency of dumping the meat habit.

Slaughterhouses not only put workers and the public health at risk but also cause the agonising, bloody deaths of hundreds of millions of animals every year. Factory farms and slaughterhouses are as filthy as China's "wet markets," their floors covered with blood, urine, faeces, and offal.

The novel coronavirus originated in a Chinese wet market where live and dead animals were sold for human consumption, swine flu began on a U.S. factory farm, and other influenza viruses have been traced to chickens.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that approximately 75% of recently emerged infectious diseases affecting humans originated in other animals.

Closing slaughterhouses doesn't mean a food shortage, because no one needs meat. Consuming it is linked to heart disease, cancer, strokes, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.

The only thing at risk when slaughterhouses close is the meat industry's bottom line. PETA's free starter kits and recipes are available on our website, to aid people in preventing the next pandemic by going vegan.

Mimi Bekhechi,

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

I don't understand people who would abuse Chinese Australians because of the coronavirus. The Chinese Communist Party and what happens over in wet markets in China has nothing to do with Chinese Australians.

Racists disgust me; they are scumbags as far as I'm concerned.

While the Chinese government needs to be criticised for its mishandling of the coronavirus, as the WHO does too, but people who use this crisis as an excuse to abuse Chinese or Asian people; those racist scumbags are the ones who should be deported, perhaps to our territory in Antarctica.

That's what I think anyway when I read the news article 'Chinese Australian abused' (16/4/20 NDL).

There is something seriously wrong with people who would attack someone just because they are Chinese. People should be protesting at the Chinese embassy, not attacking fellow Australians.

Daniel Peckham, Tamworth

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