Discussions around our problems; crime, housing, health and mental health, infrastructure failures etc, always come back to money.

New Zealand supports an ever growing welfare system with an ever diminishing pool of tax payers. There is no problem we face today that would not benefit from extra funding.

Countries lucky enough to have a saleable resource such as oil or minerals can sell them on the world market and so enrich the country of origin.

NZ has an ample supply of one of the world's most valuable resources and we are allowing it to be drawn out of the ground and sold off at no profit to our nation.

Clean, pure, drinking water is a commodity which, considering the deteriorating global environment, is becoming ever more valuable.

I would like to propose a two-fold solution.

Leave the ownership of the water alone but introduce an export tax on water

In the interests of the global environment, introduce a tax on bottling water (or indeed anything else) into plastic bottles. The revenue from this tax will be used to develop our waste management and recycling methods and for the protection of our waterways.

I understand that billions of bottles of our water are being exported, vastly enriching a small number of people, many of them not even New Zealanders. All of the people of New Zealand should enjoy a much improved standard of living from any revenue that can be gained out of this resource.

Annette Bertora, Otumoetai (abridged)