Speech delivered on Monday 8 June 2026 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, VIC
I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land we meet on, the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung of the Kulin Nation. I pay respect to their elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all First Nations people here today.
I just want to pay tribute to the Daniher family, I think you all feel Neale’s presence here today.
There are a number of very important people here.
- The Honourable Jacinta Allan, Premier of Victoria
- The Honourable Jess Wilson, Leader of the Opposition in Victoria
- Other Members of Parliament present
- Pat Cunningham, Co-founder of FightMND
- Michael Schneider, Chair of FightMND Board, and your fellow Board members
- Matt Tilley, CEO FightMND
- My amazing slider colleagues, an incredible group of sliders who all took the challenge and had a lot of fun.
- Andrew Dillon and the other AFL executives and partners
- I particularly want to acknowledge those here that are living with MND: Emma Vulin, State Member for Packenham and
Hazmir Mohamadan, with your wife Aznie and daughter Ameera
This is a profound and vicious disease, The Beast, as Neale called it, and it's wonderful that you've been able to make it into the room on this incredible day.
I thought it would be important also to mention there was another terrible loss of life overnight, a man quite similar to Neale in Richard Scolyer, another Australia of the Year.
Richard was the Australian of the Year the year before Neale, in 2024, and to lose two Australians of the Year, two extraordinary men, within two weeks, I think, is a lot to bear.
So, I want to send our love to Richard Scolyer’s family.
I also want to acknowledge Kylie and Quentin Birt, who have made a donation of $40 million to FightMND.
Your generosity knows no bounds.
That's the kind of stuff that changes the world and changes people's lives.
I knew a lot more about Neale for a long time before I got to know him as a friend.
He had a reputation that goes over decades and decades, and our paths did cross when I was on the AFL Commission.
I'm sure it was Kevin Sheedy who first put us together to talk about coaching and what does good coaching, and what does a good person look like.
I learned a lot from him back then.
He wouldn't have known, but I was listening then.
But it's been in recent years that we've deepened that friendship.
And, last year, I had the great privilege to spending time with him and his family at Government House in Canberra.
It was the night before Australia Day 2025, when he was going to be announced as our Australian of the Year, and then, in November last year, Neale, the FightMND team, and the family came up to Sydney to Admiralty House. I was staggered that Neale made the journey. It must have been quite an effort to get to Sydney, but he did.
He came because of this book, The Power of Choice. If you have not read this book, you have to go out and buy it, buy it for everybody's Christmas, and read this book.
I've not read a better book on what it means to be human, what it means to be a generous person, and the honesty, the searing honesty in this book, written for his grandchildren and to leave a legacy, is one of the most profound things you could hope to learn from.
And he was at Admiralty House with the family to talk about the book, and to talk about what lay ahead, just as we had in Government House.
He asked me again, and just said, "What do you reckon about a walk? How about a slide?” And I said, yes, I'll be honored to do it.
And, of course, we always assumed he would be here for this Big Freeze.
But, of course, I said yes. I was never not going to do this. I know it's something Governor's-General hadn't done before, and there's probably some nervousness about the whether it brings into question the dignity of the office.
I have been asked many times whether I hesitated, and the thought didn't ever occur to me, because I've made a promise to Neale.
When I thought about dignity, I thought about the dignity with which Neale lived the last 13 years of his life.
The Beast, as he called it, took away every part of his own agency to a point where a man who had been in total control of his body, and his life, was suddenly dependent on everybody else.
The book talks about this, that when he had to work out who he was, with all that support, and how he remained a fully formed human, able to engage in the world.
That is dignity, that is extraordinary dignity.
And if Neale could do that right up to the very end, using his electronic equipment to speak to write a book, then a Governor-General sliding, I think, is the least we should do to recognise just what Neale lived through.
So it has been a great, great privilege for me to do this.
He did always ask me before, a speech, to give a ripper, and he gave me a mark after the speeches.
I said I couldn't do a coach’s speech, but I tried to do ripper speeches for him.
This one won't be a great ripper, and we don’t have a lot of time.
When people have asked me, why do this? I've always said because Neale asked me, but that's why we're all here.
Tens of thousands of people are out there and have been raising money over the last 13 years because Neale and the Big Freeze team and FightMND asked them to buy a beanie, help fight MND, and, in the process, raise almost $150 million. Because Neale asked us to.
Neale was also, as you all know, a remarkable coach on and off the field, and in a way I think he was coaching us over the past 13 years.
He was coaching us to be better, to show up for each other, to not dwell on the things that got us down.
His character was set a lot earlier than just his fight with MND.
His family knows this, and those he coached, I think, would know this.
I had a call from a great friend of mine, Mark Branagan, who was at Assumption College with Neale back in the 70s, and he described to me a game that he played with Neale. Mark was pulled in as a second reserve in the last 10 minutes. He barely got a touch, but he did get a minor smother, and he didn't think Neale had noticed. He thought Neale was a big player in a big game that Assumption won, and as Neale was coming off the ground, he looked over at Mark and said, "Well played”, and then said, "Nice smother”. Mark shared that story with me to show that Neale has never not cared about everybody, showing love and the care for people who deserve to be seen, he's always been seeing all of us.
So that character was set early, but most importantly, I think, and Bec said this last week, his belief was there are no guarantees in life, except the next step you take, the next decision you make.
So it's up to us as to how we now show up, because the mark of any of us is what we do, is not what we say, what we promise is actually what we do, and how we all show up.
I think this book is a gift to his grandkids, sharing his philosophy and teaching everybody how we should show up.
He didn't choose MND, but he has inspired all of us with his response, and while facing these challenges of The Beast, he didn't stop working tirelessly alongside his family, the Fight MND team, and brought hope.
And I've heard hope from so many people this week who've written to me or rung me to say that Neale embodied hope.
You know how much has gone on in the last 13 years, but the fight is still on. We know that the fight is on for people in this room, the more than 2,700 people across Australia living with this disease – and every day two more people will be diagnosed. And there is no treatment, no cure. What we've got is hope, and Neale's legacy is hope, but also courage and compassion.
I know it will continue to be felt in the Daniher family, across the AFL community, and among Australians, absolutely everywhere.
I can't tell you just how many people have contacted me to talk about their family story, they go back to the 70s, 80s, 90s, about who they lost, how they lost them, and why this game and us showing up matters to them, and they want us to play on, just like Neale wants us all to play on.