For country Victorians in the coming state election – and for city people who care – it is as simple as this: if you love lentils, put Labor last and the Liberals second last on the ballot paper.

Why? Because Labor is committed to building hundreds of kilometres of transmission lines through the state’s best lentil farms. And the Liberals are hoping silence will secure enough votes for them to do the same thing after the election.

On this matter, both parties are beholden to the renewable energy ideology. They believe in the false gods of net zero. They worship the veneer of performative politics.

At least the Labor party is being honest about its commitment to transmission line projects in Victoria. They openly don’t care how dumb and dangerous their toxic battery ‘farms’ are or the honeypot projects that will proliferate around new transmission lines.

Labor doesn’t understand farms, farming or farmers. Labor couldn’t care less about country votes because the bulk of city seats could get them over the line.

But the Liberals?

Well, they are currently playing charades and shadows with country people. They are being deceptively deceptive.

VNI is the Victoria-New South Wales Interconnector. It is the northern component – the second half – of the transmission line called the WRL, the Western Renewables Link which runs from Melbourne to Stawell. The two join to become one project: you can’t have one without the other. They are opposite ends of the same line that will ultimately link to Snowy 2.0.

The Liberals and Nationals claim that they are dumping the VNI project but will ‘pause and review’ the WRL until after the election.

But here is the question: if the Coalition sees fit to dump VNI, why don’t they also dump the WRL? After all, they are the same project. All the reasons for dumping the VNI apply to the WRL. Logic demands that if one goes, the other does too. A road to nowhere is simply that.

Their energy spokesperson is a former chiropractor from inner Melbourne, David Davis. It is understood that he continues to whisper sweet somethings to renewable industry gatherings in Melbourne – a place from where the destructive transmission plans for country Victoria are not visible.

If only Davis had studied optometry.

In inner Melbourne, they are seemingly blind to the fire risks of the energy infrastructure, be it the lithium batteries, the turbines or the transmission lines which act as fire wicks across the state.

Deep in their city cellars Labor, Greens and Liberal MPs care less for the loss of useable farmland and the industrialisation of landscape. They drink their luxury beliefs from a bottle of globalised virtue. They care less for the increase in insurance costs, the decrease in land values and the lack of interest banks show in re-mortgaging. They care less for the increase in power prices and the reduction in affordable, reliable energy. And they care less that nations around the world are stopping these projects because they fail to achieve their aims.

Currently, David Davis is about as useful to Victorian farmers as ice cream is to hell. He might be a lovely man, but his transmission plan is at best vague and, at worst, bad.

The Liberals policy to ‘pause and review’ the WRL is a show for the ballot box. Nothing about the WRL will substantially change after the election. Its die has been cast with VNI. Sure, the Coalition might argue for policy marshmallow around the edges such as re-allowing appeals to the Victorian Civil and Adminstrative Tribunal, but the projects themselves remain fundamentally flawed.

The uncomfortable question is this: are David Davis and Jess Wilson keeping mum on their real plans to proceed with WRL and maybe VNI too?

Why wait, Jess? Why not be honest with the electorate and either keep or dump VNI and WRL before the election? The current policy is a bug-infested halfway house.

If ever there was a time to be honest with the Victorian people, it’s now. They are screaming for it. They are drop-dead exhausted by the spin machine that finds ever contorted ways to put lipstick on a policy pig.

Worse still, Jess Wilson is holding captive her Liberal candidates in the electorates impacted by the WRL: each is well known to their local communities for publicly fighting the renewables industry. These are the seats of Ripon, Wendouree and Eureka. They are impressive candidates and must be holding their collective breaths and hoping ‘pause and review’ means ‘done and dusted’ for both VNI and the WRL.

A thick sense of fear and hypocrisy must be coursing through their veins.

Enough. It is a minute to midnight. Farmers are done with policy fluff.

If Jess Wilson really cared about the environment, she would dump the WRL and the VNI: no ifs, no maybes, no befores or afters. These projects will not save the world, they will not impact climate change, they will do nothing to reduce global CO2 emissions.

There is a deep but silent menace written into the Coalition plan to ‘pause and review’ and that darkness emerges in their ongoing commitment to the language of ‘transition to renewables’.

You can’t transition without transmission.

One Nation has clarity on this issue, and they have candidates in these electorates. They have already announced they will dump the transmission projects. They know country people can read the room – and the policies.

And like all good country people, they know when the tail is wagging the dog.

Vote for who you like.

But if you love lentils, put Labor last. Put the Liberals second last unless they find a backbone, cough up some gumption and dump these farm-destroying transmission lines and net zero. Today.