It has been refreshing to be back in the electorate after a feisty sitting fortnight in Canberra, which I referred to in last last week’s column.

Mallee residents, their councils and farmers have provided very positive feedback on how The Nationals are fighting the good fight for our regions.

Councils are concerned about coping with the legitimate community expectation to make submissions on various statutory processes like state Environmental Effects Statements (EES) reviews concerning mining or energy projects.

The scales are tipped against local communities - as one former mayor put it to me this week, why can a company can spend 6 years preparing an EES proposal but the public, and their council, get just 6 weeks to respond to a 6,000 page, highly technical document?   Is the system is set up so the projects just sail through?

That’s why I am proactively bringing the federal Shadow Minister for Resources Minister, Susan McDonald, to Mallee on Monday 22 September to hear from the community and their views on mining proposals in the region.

I hope to also bring along a soils expert to speak to mining proponents’ claims that they can rehabilitate farmland back to the same, if not better, agricultural productivity than before the mine began.

Call me idealistic if you like, I still believe that facts matter and the public ought to be equipped to navigate through public relations spin to where the truth is.

The Albanese Government’s recent productivity roundtable was a flop and coincided with the peak agricultural reporting agency ABARES declaring on 1 September that agricultural production across the nation will rise to $94.7 billion thanks largely to improved livestock prices.  When you consider the former Coalition Government backed agriculture’s target of $100 billion by 2030, you have to contrast our track record on targets with Labor’s destructive and anti-agriculture path to net zero targets by 2050.  Labor plans to set an interim 2035 ‘renewable’ energy target this month, even though clearly they will not reach their 2030 target.

The contrast between the Coalition and Labor on productivity on the land cannot be starker.