MURRAY River area MPs Justin Clancy and Helen Dalton have clashed in NSW parliament while debating a motion to acknowledge the "ongoing resilience of our border communities".
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The latter used her speech to blast the border closure and say Mr Clancy as a government MP had acted shamefully and "rubber stamped this rubbish".
"The member for Albury has put his party ahead of his community," Mrs Dalton told the Lower House on Tuesday night.
"He betrayed the most loyal Coalition voters in the country."
But Mr Clancy said for Mrs Dalton "to suggest that there was a rubber stamping from the Albury electorate is an absolute falsehood".
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He pointed to a social media post made by the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers MP in winter which stated: "Ten days ago I wrote an urgent letter to the Premier asking her to put arrangements in place to manage the influx of Victorians."
Mr Clancy said: "I was strongly against border restrictions.
"I pushed the views of my community and spoke to the Premier, and I had the member for Murray next door saying, 'We need restrictions'.
"She needs to own up to that and she needs to speak to her community and answer why she was in the media saying, 'I want restrictions for my community'."
Mrs Dalton told The Border Mail on Wednesday her post was not calling for the border to close, it was aimed at having tougher measures to stop travel from COVID hotspots.
The rubber stamping barb reflected her belief Mr Clancy "went along with" the closure and "didn't really stand up to the government and what it was doing", she said.
In his speech, Mr Clancy said there would continue to be trauma until the border re-opened on November 23 but he hopes there will be fresh understanding and action in response to the shutdown.
"For our government, our challenge is now to no longer see border issues as something to place in the too-hard basket," he said.
Hunter Valley Labor MP Jenny Aitchison spoke of the difficulty of her godson having to negotiate the closure to travel from Melbourne to Albury for cancer treatment.
Sydney Labor MP Sophie Cotsis said it was terrible to read The Border Mail headline in August stating 'Upper Murray farmers told to book 40 sheep on flight to Sydney amid border closure'.
"The government had closed the border without putting a plan in place," she said.
