the answer was no at the time because it was deemed that Mildura was still too small to support three commercial networks without being disproportionately subsidised by other regions across the aggregated market which in turn would have impacted the viability across the aggregated market.
(When you looked at market sizes at the time, Ballarat, Bendigo, Albury, Shepparton and Gippsland were sort of around the high 100,000s or 200,000s mark. Mildura was something like 50,000)
So Mildura was cut and isolated from aggregation. There’s no guarantee that things would have looked any rosier by including Mildura in the aggregated market.