St Arnaud is a tiny speck on the map of Australia. The western Victorian town is surrounded by farmland and some of the best cropping and livestock country in Australia.

It hosted a meeting of farmers from the region last week. They had dinner and they talked about two big issues looming dark and ominous over their paddocks: the impact of the Victoria Treaty and the threat to their livelihoods by renewable energy projects.

The VNI West – a huge transmission line project linking ‘renewable’ energy projects – is the Goliath in this story. The Victoria-NSW Interconnector is already tearing hope, democracy and human rights apart. This is one of the key projects for which the autocratic Victorian socialist government has implemented never-before-seen rules.

These include rules that mean farmers cannot stop people associated with the transmission line projects from entering their properties. Gone are the country niceties like knocking on one’s door, having a cuppa, talking weather and grain prices, shaking hands, politely requesting access to the land and promising to close the gates behind you. No, none of that.

It is the same government that will compulsorily acquire whatever farmland it wants for the transmission line project, even before environment effects statements are done. Try and get away with that in the private sector.

The farmers are the Davids in this battle. And it is a battle. An almighty fight that they must win. For losing will end their generational embrace of the land and the future they planned for the loves of their lives.

And so it was that the faces of those farmers at the St Arnaud meeting were engraved with angst lines furrowed deeply like a freshly ploughed field. The anger throbbed from the back row to the front.

Why wouldn’t it when they are being told everything they have ever worked for – that their grandfathers worked for – is about to fall apart around them thanks to the ideologues in Canberra and Spring Street? Their sole purpose is to out-virtue-signal Greta Thunberg with a performative act of national environmental vandalism and economic lunacy.

Story after story in St Arnaud went like this: farmers are seeking insurance for their properties but can’t get it. No company wants to deal with the fire risk of these lines. Firefighters won’t fight fires near them, and so the transmission route will effectively act as a candle wick across the country. There go the homes in their way, the crops, the stock, the fence lines, the trees, the machinery.

If insurance is granted, the costs are so exploitative that any quote is unaffordable.

Then to land values: prized farmland, the former glory of the Country Stock and Land pages, is now being priced as rubbish. With the value of their own land reduced, the possibility of a bank lending money to buy out the neighbouring farm is all but gone. It has completely dismantled the natural growth trajectory of all farmers looking to survive.

These matters do not just impact those farmers upon whose land the transmission towers and wires will go. The St Arnaud meeting was told that this story of fire risk, rocketing insurances and land devaluation is just as relevant to those places who are simply within sight of the ‘green energy’ superhighways.

This project is a torment to country Australia. The tormentors are led by Chris Bowen, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan and her vacuous Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio. They have votes to win and nothing personally to lose.

But the Victorians have questions to answer. How is it that the state government can be a 51-per-cent owner in an electricity company, the revived State Electricity Commission (SEC), and simultaneously be able to forcibly take people’s land for the purpose of creating energy? One should not forget that the owners of the other 49 per cent of the SEC are the likes of union super funds headquartered on Collins Street.

Is this compulsory acquisition not a commercial and governance conflict of interest?

Say nothing, of course, for the total obliteration of human rights – and property rights – in Victoria. The 2006 Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities specifically addresses property rights and Premier Allan should perhaps do a little night-time reading of the document. It is illuminating. Even when the lights are out.

But socialist governments usually have a poor connection with farmers. In the cities their supporters can be rallied together more easily: the mob is just a tweet away.

Farmers are independent and live apart.When it comes to resource allocation the Victorian Labor government has reached an all-time low. Put simply, it is the farmers’ land which turns renewable ideology into reality.

The same land is also needed to produce food and fibre and provide farmers with an income. When the lefties gobble down on lentils in Fitzroy, they would do well to remember where they come from.

The crisis meeting in St Arnaud comes at a time of true reckoning as farmers struggle with the legislation that removes the sanctity of their land rights and allows government contractors unfettered access to their paddocks. The Victorian government is using its power to not just threaten, but make real, a complete recasting of the agricultural economy.

It is no longer dramatic to say that this type of relocation is in keeping with the reforms of Stalin and the Chinese communists. Many millions starved to death in those examples.

We in Australia have become used to the welfare state. It would seem apparent that the federal and Victoria state Labor governments would be rather happy for farmers to do likewise. They can trade stories about the dole instead of the dirt under their fingernails.

But farmers are the wealth creators. If they go, who will make the money that the government needs to hand out to the queue?

Just like the farmers who are being told by the banks that they can borrow no more money, maybe the state will soon get a similar comeuppance. No one will be the winner then.

The gnarly anguish obvious on the faces of the St Arnaud farmers is not just a sign of the fear they hold for their own futures. It is because they know they are front row in the deliberate and avoidable destruction of the nation they love.

Their forebears went overseas to fight for survival, democracy, freedom.

Today, with another Anzac Day not far from dawning, they stand by their farm gates looking for a government sanctioned foe to arrive. The fight, in today’s trenches, is being battled literally on home soil.