General News
6 July, 2026
Event sets scene for future growth with lasting benefits
More than 70 Wimmera Southern Mallee residents spent two days asking one hard question: how can incoming investment create lasting local benefit?
Last month (JUNE) more than 70 people from across the Wimmera Southern Mallee spent two days at Longerenong College working through three plausible futures for the region.
The sessions were independently facilitated. No one was asked to back a project or pick a favourite future.
The question was harder. Can the investment now arriving be turned into lasting benefit for the people who live here?
The answer came back consistent across all three workshops.
Not one table argued to turn investment away. Every table argued about the terms.
That distinction is the finding. The region is not debating whether growth should happen.
It is asking what growth must deliver, who carries the cost, and how the benefit stays local.
As one participant put it, “we were playing checkers while others were playing chess".
Underneath sits a paradox the room kept returning to.
The region already produces 23 per cent more economic output per person than the Victorian average. Its farms are more productive than at any point in their history.
Yet income per person sits $6701 below the Victorian median, and that gap has widened since 2003-04.
The region makes wealth. It does not retain it in people, services or local investment. More output, on its own, will not change that.
Housing was the constraint; everything else turned on.
Jobs need homes; homes need infrastructure; infrastructure needs upfront investment; investment needs coordination; coordination needs trust.
No single party can carry that chain, and the room was clear that none would.
The hardest question was the one with no clear owner.
A project can be made to pay for its own direct impacts.
The roads, housing, childcare and health that several projects need at once are a shared load that no individual proponent owns, and no single council can carry alone.
Holding that whole picture, and deciding who funds it, was the gap the room named most often.
The full report on these discussions is being finalised and will be available on our website in the coming weeks.
We are sharing with the participants.
It does not hand the region an answer.
It sets out the conditions the region would need to put in place for growth to leave something behind.
In the coming months, we will provide more articles that will address those conditions one at a time.