Recently this paper reported that 20 projects across the southern Basin will share $50 million from the latest Sustainable Communities round.
Our Mayor called the program “a disgrace and debacle”.
Helen Dalton called it “a pathetic betrayal of the communities most harmed by water buybacks”.
They are right to be angry, and I congratulate Yurunga Farms and Rivbeef on the funding that did come to this district.
But in all of that coverage, one Deniliquin application was never mentioned: the Aboriginal-led hemp processing hub that Yarkuwa Indigenous Knowledge Centre submitted in August, for the second time.
In July you published my letter asking who really benefits from the $10 million Gundaline grant.
After that first round, Yarkuwa says it was told in meetings with the program that its application was sound, that it had lost on competing priorities rather than on any flaw, and that Aboriginal-led projects would be a priority next time.
It was encouraged to apply again. So it did.
The second application asked for a hemp processing hub in Deniliquin and a manufacturing site at Wentworth, on the farm of innovator Gavin Hopkins, with every piece of grant-funded equipment owned by Yarkuwa.
It included an Australian-built Ashford processor, a training classroom, a target of half the workforce Aboriginal, and projected payments to local farmers of about $2.6 million over three years for a crop grown without a drop of irrigation water.
Think about what that means this year.
As the rice mill sheds jobs and partly closes, that Deniliquin training classroom could have reskilled those workers, and idle rice-industry infrastructure could have been retooled for hemp.
In June the NSW Government finalised a Hemp Industry Development Plan.
In July a Senate committee named regional hemp processing as one of the things a national industry most needs.
Edward River Council's chief executive Jack Bond backed the application in writing.
Council's own figures show that since 2016, grain milling wages in this shire have fallen 79 per cent, manufacturing output 23 per cent, and our population aged 25 to 49 by 22 per cent.
Regional Development Australia Murray backed it too, and welcomed Aboriginal leadership of the project.
It was not funded.
I should be plain about my own stake.
Our team volunteered hundreds of hours to both applications.
Had this one been funded, my company, Carbon Capture Shield, would have been paid for future work making sure the Deniliquin and Wentworth projects were delivered well.
So weigh my words accordingly, and check them. Every figure here is in the application or the public record, and I will show the workings to anyone who asks.
I am asking for two things.
First, that the department publish the full list of funded projects, with the reasons this round was decided the way it was.
Second, that when an Aboriginal organisation is told to come back and does everything asked of it, the department explains to that organisation, and to this town, what more it needed.
And to our leaders, who are rightly fighting for Deni's share: next time you list what this town was denied, please include Yarkuwa.
I still believe in happy endings. I would like to know what this one is waiting for.
Yours etc.
Darryl J. Nicke II
Deniliquin
15°C