Hi can you tell me how to sort selectlist on the text column?

Sorry for now not possible, we plan to develop this in future.

The only way I can think of now is to change the model to include $query->order('text'); is that correct?

No sorry, to do this is more complex.

But you can do this:
Create many user list menu item, for each menu set different orders. Now with a module or template override you can add a button for differents orders, or with select+minor javascript code you can do this.

All I need is to show text-values in alphabetical order in the dropdown list. This I will set in back-end or in code, no need for frontend users to change the sort order.

I edited models->fields->selectlist.php. In the getOptions function I added $query->order('text'); and now all dropdown select from database are sorted from a-z.

I apologize I did not realize.
In the next release we will add this line to our code.

Thanks.