The Wimmera Southern Mallee is entering a period of structural change. The investment pipeline is real. So is the demographic trajectory. Whether this community is better or worse off in a decade depends on decisions that have not yet been made.
A study commissioned by nine north-west Victorian councils, including all six Wimmera Southern Mallee councils, gives the clearest picture of what is coming. The Resource Ready strategy, produced by Urban Enterprise and noted by councils across the region, identifies more than $24 billion in confirmed and near-confirmed investment in transmission, renewable energy, mineral sands and food processing arriving over the next three to five years. That is not a projection or a hope. The projects are in planning approvals, environmental assessments and construction timelines now.
At the same time, five of the region’s six local government areas are losing people. The state government’s own population modelling, Victoria in Future 2023, projects the region falls from 54,538 people to 53,001 by 2036, while Victoria as a whole grows by 28.7 per cent. Over that same period the region loses four thousand working-age residents. Three councils, Buloke, West Wimmera and Yarriambiack, are on track to have more dependants than people of working age within a decade. Victoria in Future 2023 models a continuation of current trends rather than a fundamentally different regional trajectory. It is also one of the primary planning tools government uses to guide infrastructure and service investment decisions.
The region’s farming sector is genuinely strong. Output is up across every local government area. In Yarriambiack, gross regional product grew by 83 per cent over the past decade. In Buloke, by 70.8 per cent. Population fell in both. That gap between farm-level performance and town-level outcomes is not a contradiction and it is not agriculture’s failure. Farming has become more efficient through capital investment and technology. That is a genuine achievement. But efficiency in farming, almost everywhere in the world, means fewer people per hectare. The farm thrives. The town around it faces a different set of pressures.
The question the region has not yet answered is how to build the connection between a productive farming base and thriving communities. The incoming investment is the first serious opportunity in a generation to attempt that.
The region produces wealth. It is not keeping it.
The incoming investment creates a real opportunity. But opportunity and outcome are not the same thing.
Regional Australia has seen major project waves before where construction activity surged temporarily but long-term population, service capacity and local business growth remained weak once projects moved into operation.
That outcome is not inevitable. But it is common when housing, procurement, infrastructure and governance decisions are treated as secondary questions rather than core conditions of growth.
Whether this region ends up stronger or simply busier will depend on choices that are still live now, before projects move fully into construction.
They are the decisions this region needs to be thinking clearly about, right now.
This article begins a series that will work through the structural questions the region faces over the next six months. The series is not an argument for or against any particular project or technology. It does not ask communities to suppress concern or trust institutions that have not earned it. It acknowledges that implementation has been poor, that trust has been damaged, and that some of the frustration in circulation is entirely legitimate. What the series will argue is that reaction alone is not a regional strategy. A community that responds project by project, without clarity about the outcomes it wants or the conditions it expects, risks having major decisions shaped largely by others. The harder and more useful question is: what does growth need to look like for this community to be better off in 2036 than the business-as-usual trajectory suggests? The state’s own modelling maps that trajectory. It is not catastrophic in any single year. In aggregate and direction it is grim. Fewer people, older population, thinning services, widening gap with Melbourne. That is what staying on the current path delivers. Growth on the right terms is the alternative. Not growth at any cost, and not growth as a rhetorical gesture. Growth that leaves settled population, capable infrastructure, strengthened services and real local ownership of the economic benefits. That is achievable. But it requires the region to be organised, clear about its priorities, and capable of negotiating for outcomes before the leverage disappears.
Next week, a series of scenario planning workshops will run across the Wimmera Southern Mallee, hosted by WSM Development and facilitated by YoBou. These workshops, scheduled to the week of 15 June, are designed to do exactly that kind of thinking. Participants, drawn from business, agriculture, local government and regional services, will work through three different near-future scenarios for the region, not to predict what happens but to surface the real constraints and the choices that cannot be deferred. The workshops are designed to build the kind of shared regional judgement that makes it possible to negotiate on terms, rather than simply react project by project. Subsequent articles in this series will report what the workshops found, then work through the specific structural questions the region faces, on agriculture, housing, energy, workforce and economic retention, one at a time. The situation we are in is real. So is the opportunity. What determines which matters more is whether this community is prepared to make deliberate choices rather than wait and see what is left when the projects are done.
Further reading
The VIF analysis brief and the Growth Is Not Neutral evidence deck are available at wsm.org.au. The scenario planning workshop synthesis report will be published following the June workshops.