As for building at Mildura, my main concern has been getting...

As for building at Mildura, my main concern has been getting suitably qualified long term employees. If I had been making the decision, I would have canned the idea of Mildura just on that aspect, let alone the issues you cited. No offence whatsoever about the hard-working people in Mildura, but CAN are after high calibre tertiary trained engineers, etc and I doubt you are going to find many of those ready-made on every Mildura street corner out of work or looking for work CANN Group have to somehow lure people there. And I wouldn't move to Mildura for any job, purely on account of the relative isolation and climate (I am sure that socially it is as good a place as any regional area - again not knocking it but as soon as you go regional, you are going to face employment problems when you are courting highly skilled and qualified labour).