19/06/2026
Yesterday we bade farewell to our General Manager Natalia Cowley who has been such an impactful leader of the Moree Plains Shire Council ship for the past 17 months.
Without Natalia and her steely determination urging our team on, I am not sure that we would have seen our Moree Memorial Hall or our Moree Artesian Aquatic Centre hot pools reopened, or such progress made on a bunch of projects.
She has also put our council on a path towards better financial sustainability.
This is no small feat.
At the council meeting yesterday I highlighted to our council and our community that there are two paths for NSW councils - who are receiving half the money we once did from the Australian Government in Financial Assistance Grants.
Either we do what many councils have done, and, in order to simply maintain the status quo, or deliver a little extra, we increase rates. Looking around our region you can see so many councils have had to go down this path. Gunnedah, Tamworth, Glen Innes, Uralla, Tenterfield, Liverpool Plains, Armidale have all increased rates anywhere from 30% to 58.8%.
Or we do our absolute darnedest to try and avoid that situation. But to do so, we need to be strategic in how we manage our finances, and shrewd in our decision-making. Sometimes that means making tough choices.
Natalia is recognised as a guru of local government finance, recently being appointed as a Fellow of the Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand. We’ve been lucky to have her.
However, selfishly, I didn’t want her values and expertise to walk out the door with her yesterday.
So I asked her to give us one last gift - what I would call the Natalia doctrine, but what our council has called our Financial Sustainability Policy.
If we want to be spared a significant rate rise, we need to make the right commitments to it.
This policy takes Local Government best practice financial management and puts it into guardrails in terms of how we manage our organisation’s finances on a daily basis.
As far as I’m aware, it’s the first of its kind for our shire.
It should set us up for a strong future.
But a nice surprise? It wasn’t actually Natalia that wrote it. There’s a lot of Natalia in it, but it was one of our own team members. Someone from the Moree Plains, who is still part of our organisation, who also cares greatly about our community and whom I hope will stay with us a long time.
We adopted the policy yesterday.
You can view it here:
https://moreeplains.resolve.red/portal/meeting/574/6421
Natalia, thank you for all you’ve done for our shire. It’s been an honour and a pleasure to work alongside you as your Mayor, and our organisation is all the better thanks to your time at the helm.
Just like our outdoor staff’s lovely billboard message, we thank you and wish you the best of luck with your next adventure.
