WHAT IF BONDI LOOKE DLIKE THIS?

If the water at Bondi Beach looked like this, it would be a national emergency by lunchtime. Helicopters overhead, the Premier at a press conference, the beach shut and a team of scientists sent in to find out exactly what was in it.

This is blue-green algae and it has been blooming in our lakes for years. In Lake Wyangan, right on the edge of Griffith, it carries a neurotoxin called BMAA that researchers have linked to Motor Neurone Disease.

What that has meant for us is hard to take in. Macquarie University found the rate of MND in the Riverina is up to seven times the national average. Professor Dominic Rowe, one of the country's leading neurologists, has treated 889 MND patients over the past decade and a huge share of them come from right here. Dozens of locals have died from this cruel disease in ten years and many of them spent their lives living near that water.

Seven times the national average and our government still does not formally count a single case. NSW Health does not class MND as a notifiable disease, so nobody is required to record where it strikes or how often it hits. Cancer is notifiable, silicosis is notifiable and we track those because counting a disease is how you find what causes it. Motor Neurone Disease gets none of that, which leaves the cluster sitting in our own backyard invisible on paper.

We are not asking the government for much. We are asking them to count it. Make MND a notifiable disease so we can map the hotspots, find every case and finally give researchers the data they need to work out what is killing our people.

Neale Daniher gave the last years of his life making sure this country could not look away from MND. We owe it to him and to every Riverina family who has buried someone to finish what he started. Count it, track it and find out why a disease that should strike one person in forty thousand is tearing through our community at seven times that rate.

Make Motor Neurone Disease notifiable.