Helen Dalton MP

June Newsletter

Independent Member for Murray

A World First

A World First for Motor Neurone Disease

"We have never had hope like this before, and now we do."

After seven years of pushing, New South Wales is about to become the first place in the world to set up a proper system for tracking Motor Neurone Disease, and I still can hardly believe I get to write those words. When I started this fight, families across the Murray were burying loved ones from a cruel disease nobody could explain, in towns where the numbers were far too high to be a coincidence, and there was no way to even count what was happening, let alone understand it.

That changes now, because this framework creates a statewide MND Register so that every diagnosis is formally recorded for the first time ever, which means researchers can finally see the patterns, ask the right questions and chase down why this disease takes hold where it does. You cannot solve a problem when you are not collecting the evidence, and for decades we have been flying blind.

I want to thank Professor Dominic Rowe AM, Australia's foremost MND specialist, who has stood beside this campaign every step of the way and confirmed that no jurisdiction anywhere on earth has done anything like it, so this is a genuine world first built right here in NSW. I think too of Neale Daniher, who has spent years turning his own diagnosis into a movement and raising millions through every Big Freeze so that one day a family might hear a different answer than the one his did, and this honours all of it.

To every patient, every carer who has watched someone they love slip away and every advocate who kept pushing when it felt like nobody was listening, this one is yours, and I have never been prouder of what we can do when country people refuse to give up.

Coleambally

A Win for the Coleambally Post Office

I have great news for Coleambally, because Australia Post has finally opened the search for a new operator to run a full Licensed Post Office in our town again, and they have called for expressions of interest that close at 5pm on Friday 19 June. Any local business that wants to take it on can register by emailing EOINSWACT@auspost.com.au.

Back in February they shut our Licensed Post Office without warning and dropped us down to a community postal agency run out of the pharmacy, where we lost our PO boxes, our banking, our bill payments and our parcel tracking all in one hit. The doors are not open yet and there is still a way to go, but this is a massive step, and it only happened because this town refused to take it lying down. More than 200 of you turned up in the main street at 8 in the morning before work and school, you filled in the survey and you made the case, and I took it all the way to Australia Post's chief executive Paul Graham and had it out with him face to face in Parliament until he agreed to act.

If you run a business here and you could run the post office, please put your hand up before 19 June so that a local gets the job, and I will keep pushing until the worker who was sacked for speaking up gets theirs back, because that part is not finished.

To everyone who stood up, thank you, because you did not just fight for your own town, you stood up for every country community that has ever been told it is too small to matter.

Deniliquin

A New Childcare Centre for Deniliquin

Deniliquin is getting a brand new childcare centre and I could not be happier to share it, because the Perrin Park Early Learning Centre is now fully funded and going ahead with 110 places for local kids, after more than a year in the making.

I have been fighting for this since I first sat down with Felicity Michael and her team at River Region Early Education at the start of last year, because so many young families in Deni simply cannot get a childcare place and that holds the whole town back, with more than 300 children on waiting lists across the district right now. Getting here took real work, because the 2 million dollars I secured from Origin Energy lifted this project to the point where it could win the 4 million dollars that was just announced, and together that is the full 6 million we needed to build it.

This centre will keep young families in Deniliquin, help parents get back to work and give our littlest locals the best possible start, so to Felicity and her team, to Origin Energy and to everyone who got behind this, thank you, because Deni has well and truly earned this one.

Working Together

Working with David Farley on Water

I am pleased to be working with the newly elected Federal Member for Farrer, David Farley, on water and the future of our food-producing communities, because the two of us covering the State and Federal side of the same fight gives our region a much stronger voice.

We are focused on making sure both the State and Federal Governments wake up to the fact that in an increasingly uncertain world food security matters, and if Australia wants to remain strong and self-sufficient then we need sensible water policies that support the farmers and communities who actually produce our food.

Griffith

The Griffith Sikh Games

What a turnout for the 28th Griffith Sikh Games, the Shaheedi Tournament, held at Ted Scobie, which was first run back in 1995 and has since grown into Australia's biggest Sikh sporting and cultural festival, drawing more than 25,000 people.

There were two days of kabaddi, volleyball, soccer, tug of war, Indian martial arts, turban tying and athletics for the kids, and the food was fantastic, so it was the kind of weekend that shows just how much our multicultural community brings to Griffith.

Refugee Week

Welcoming 54 New Australians

During Refugee Week we welcomed 54 new citizens as they received their Australian citizenship at the Griffith Regional Theatre, and it is one of my favourite ceremonies to attend because the room is always full of so many happy new Australians, so congratulations to every one of our new citizens.

On the Road

On the Road in Wentworth

I went out to the Perry Sandhills near Wentworth to see FOSO, the Fibre Optic Symphonic Orchestra, and it is something special, because as the sun drops, columns of fibre optic light rise out of the dunes and glow, shifting colour as the sky darkens while the soundscape rolls across the sand. It was great to be joined by Wentworth Shire Mayor Daniel Linklater, whose council helped bring this to life in partnership with Mildura across the border.

This is the work of Bruce Munro, the British artist behind the Field of Light at Uluru, and he created it just for our dunes, where it will stay for two years and is already drawing visitors from across the country and overseas, which means real money flowing into Wentworth's accommodation, restaurants and shops. If you have not been yet, make the trip, take the kids and take your visitors, because it is sitting right there on our doorstep.

I had a wonderful couple of days in Wentworth all up, such a beautiful and vibrant town with so much to see, and a big thank you to Mayor Linklater for taking the time to show me around and make me feel so welcome, because it is always good to get out and about, meet locals and hear what is on their minds.

Regional Television

A Reprieve for Regional Television

A reprieve, but the fight is far from over, because WIN Network has confirmed a short-term three-month agreement with Network 10 to continue broadcasting across Griffith, South Australia's Riverland and Mount Gambier, which means services will not cease on 1 July 2026 as previously announced, and that is welcome news for our communities.

I will not be taking my foot off the accelerator on this though, because three months is not a solution, it is a pause, and WIN were clear about that themselves when they said the agreement gives them time to attempt to find a path forward and address the structural challenges facing regional broadcasters, challenges that reflect the commercial realities every regional broadcaster in Australia is grappling with right now. I will keep lobbying Minister Wells along with the WIN and Network 10 bosses until our communities have a permanent answer.

Good News

Good News from Across the Murray

There is so much doom and gloom in the feeds these days that I like to stop and share a bit of what is going right across the Murray, because there is always plenty of it when you go looking.

Jesse Ryan at just eighteen took on the 50th Finke Desert Race out in the Northern Territory, which is about as tough as racing gets in this country, and the young bloke from Griffith came home with a win in his class against 750 riders while finishing 11th outright in the whole field, which takes a lot of grit and the whole MIA can be proud of him.

The Rankins Springs Dragons turned 100 years old, with their very first game going all the way back to May 1926, and to mark it the boys pulled on the original royal blue and gold jerseys and ran out against Barellan before making a day of it with the community cup round and a centenary jersey auction at the Conapaira Hotel, because a hundred years of a footy club in a small town means generations of families turning up and looking after each other.

Thank A First Responder Day at the Griffith Community Centre saw local kids hand thank you notes to the firies and police who look after us, including Senior Constable Naomi Wilmot, who left Sydney 18 years ago and has given this district every day since while saying she could never go back, and we are lucky to have people like her.

The Deniliquin Business Excellence Awards have just opened for nominations with the gala set for August, which is a chance for the whole Edward River to celebrate the local businesses that keep our towns ticking along.

Rayma Torresan of Griffith was named the 2026 Counsellor of the Year by the Australian Counselling Association, national recognition for a woman who has spent her career helping mothers heal from trauma so their children can stay safe at home with them, and as Rayma puts it, the parents fly the plane, so when you give a struggling mum the right help the whole family gets a chance.

Miah Weymouth of Leeton, a year nine student at Leeton High, pulled on the boots for the Riverina Open Girls at the NSW state soccer championships in Newcastle, where she was one of the youngest players on the field and still got noticed for her leadership, captaining both the under fifteens and the open girls at school.

If something good has happened in your town, a milestone, a win or a small act of kindness, send it through and I will share it on the next Good News Sunday.

Accountability

The Deniliquin Seedbank Closure

The local workers who run our native seedbank in Deniliquin were told their jobs are gone, with no public announcement and no plan for what comes next, and this is the largest publicly owned native seedbank in south-western New South Wales, where for years the team has collected, cleaned and stored the local native seed that gets used to bring our landscape back to life. The last few seasons have been some of the biggest on record, and at their end of season meetings the talk was about new equipment and growing the program, so nobody breathed a word about money being a problem.

The casuals at Deniliquin have been let go along with another seven or so at Corowa and Albury, seed collection has stopped, and while the Government says it will explore partnerships and community groups to take the work over down the track, nothing is in place and nobody can tell these workers or this town what actually happens now. What walks out the door with them is decades of hands-on local experience in collecting and caring for our native seed, built up over years in the field, so scattering this team is a real loss to our landscape and our community that money cannot easily replace.

What really gets under my skin is that twelve days before those workers got the news, Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty stood in Wagga and opened a brand new 1.1 million dollar seed vault for grain, so the Government can find that money for crop seed up the road while it strips the people who collect our native seed here in the Murray. I am writing to Minister Moriarty to demand answers on why these local jobs have been cut and what the future of our seedbank actually is, because the people of the Murray deserve a straight answer.

Water Watch

Water Watch

Here is the run of water decisions I am watching this month, because while our farmers are told there is not a drop to spare, our water and the money tied to it keep ending up in places that should make every one of us stop and ask questions. Every one of these leads to the same place, which is why I keep calling for a Federal Royal Commission.

Cost of Living

Why Your Food Is About to Cost More

Your food is set to get 10 per cent more expensive every single year and it has nothing to do with the farmers who grow it, because it traces straight back to water, with the dams that feed our food bowl nearly empty as Hume sits at 22 per cent and still falls, and IPART lifting the bulk water bill again by up to 10 per cent a year. Water is the one thing you cannot grow food without, so the irrigators, the ACCC and the government's own experts all agree those costs land straight at your checkout, and when you strip the water you do not just empty a paddock, you empty the supermarket shelf and what takes its place is food shipped in from overseas.

Follow the Money

Ten Million Dollars to a Foreign Cotton Giant

A 10 million dollar grant meant to help our towns survive the damage of water buybacks has been handed to the Chinese textile giant that owns Gundaline Station, the same notorious farm that workers blew the whistle on and that sits on more than 16,000 megalitres of our water bought for 121 million dollars. So the government strips the water off our family farms, sets up a fund to say sorry for it, and then according to The Weekly Times hands 10 million of that fund to the very kind of foreign operator that helped cause the mess, and honestly you could not make it up.

The Buybacks

A 430 Million Dollar Buyback

Australian food security has been sold off for 430 million dollars of our taxpayer money, with the government paying close to double what the water was even worth, because Murray Watt has pulled almost 86 billion litres off our farms, close to a tenth of everything the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area uses to grow food in a year, and sent it hundreds of kilometres downstream to be flushed out to sea. They are doing it 13 years into a plan that has failed, with the science against them and their own reviews not even finished, yet the buybacks keep coming.

The Science

The Science That Money Bought

The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists likes to present itself as a neutral panel of independent scientists, but it is a lobby group set up and bankrolled by Robert Purves, a man who pocketed 835,000 dollars in a single year from his stake in a water trading firm called Duxton Water and who owns more than 16 million dollars of shares in it, where every buyback the government signs off makes that fortune bigger. His own foundation tips money into the Group and his own company keeps their books, so the circle starts with Purves and ends with Purves, which is why I am calling for this outfit to be defunded and for everything it has produced to be done again by people with nothing to gain.

The Hypocrisy

Water for Data Centres or Farmers

While our own farmers are told there is not a drop to spare, governments are waving through new data centres that will drink billions of litres of clean drinking water every year, and I am not against the technology because the country genuinely needs it. But you cannot look a farmer in the eye and tell them their water is too precious to grow food and then pour that same water into a shed full of computers, so if we are going to find water for new projects then the honest place to start is the water we already waste, not another raid on the people who feed us.

Worth a Read

A Book That Puts Water on the Record

For nearly twenty years we have been told that pulling water off our farms is saving the environment, and a new book called Caught in the Current by Patrick Byrne finally puts the facts on the table, laying out 125 years of basin history and footnoting every claim so the people who got us into this mess cannot just wave it away. It shows how the balance between water for food and water for the environment got flipped from roughly half and half to 71 per cent environmental and just 29 per cent productive, and how irrigated food production has fallen 29 per cent in six years while we stare down becoming a net food importer within five to eleven years, so grab a copy from your local newsagency and read what they would rather you never saw in black and white.

The Case

The Case for a Royal Commission

Country Australia is being hollowed out one water buyback at a time, and the people making the decisions have never had to answer for it, which is exactly why we need a Federal Royal Commission into water. Here is what happens every time another chunk of water is bought back and sent out of our region.

The work dries up first. Less water means fewer crops in the ground, which means fewer pickers, packers, truckies and farmhands with a reason to stay.

The value adding leaves next. Our packing sheds, cotton gins and food processors all need a reliable local supply, and when the water goes the jobs inside those buildings go with it.

Local businesses feel it fast. The mechanic, the cafe, the farm supply store and the contractor all rely on a working irrigation economy, so when the farms wind back the whole main street takes the hit.

Then the town starts to shrink. Families follow the work out of the district, the school roll drops, the footy team struggles for numbers and the shopfronts go dark one by one.

And nobody can tell us where the water went. It gets traded, moved and profited from, and not one decision maker in Canberra has ever been put under oath to explain who gained while our communities lost.

These towns grow the food and fibre for the whole nation and they have earned the right to know the truth, because a Royal Commission is the only thing with the power to follow the water, follow the money and finally hold someone to account.

Representing an organisation? Email murray@parliament.nsw.gov.au to add your name to the public list of supporters.