At Albury Airport, the member for Farrer wheels a Cessna 182 out of a hangar and commences a series of pre-flight checks.

Sussan Ley represents a seat which covers a quarter of a million square kilometres and stretches the entire length of western New South Wales, and considers her pilot's licence a vital tool.

"It's a third of New South Wales, and I love every inch of it," she said of the seat.

"If I don't have the chance to talk to my constituents, my contribution is of a lesser value, I feel."

With the travel expenses of MPs firmly in the spotlight, she pre-empted the inevitable question.

"It's not an extravagant form of transport," she said.

"This little plane was built in 1979, the year I graduated from high school and the interior hasn't changed since."

She praised the aircraft's durability and practicality: "It can land on all sorts of outback and dirt strips."

And she revels in the solitude it provides.

"I'm usually in the plane by myself and that always feels really good. As my staff say, I go off the reservation," she said.

She worked several jobs to pay for her training and cut her pilot's teeth in the difficult and dangerous world of aerial mustering.

Banking on approach to Tocumwal Airport in the New South Wales Riverina, the former sheep farmer and shearer's cook said looking down on the paddocks below took her back to her time on the land.

"I often miss the simple life, there's nothing simple about politics," she said.

In Berrigan, where the population is 920 people, Ms Ley meets with Mayor Bernard Curtin, who reflects jokingly about the challenge of getting a politician's attention.

"The big issue we have ... is trying to explain to them where we geographically are," he said.

At the town's clinic, Ms Ley is both local member and minister, listening to a series of concerns and promising to take up the case of one woman concerned about a relative's treatment.

Farrer set to grow as electoral boundaries re-drawn

But this juggling act is likely to get more difficult for Ms Ley, with electoral boundaries being re-drawn ahead of the next election.

Under the quota for allocating MPs, Western Australia will gain a seat and New South Wales will lose one.

Farrer already has the fewest voters of any seat in the state and that means this quarter-of-a-million square kilometre electorate is set to grow even bigger.

ABC election analyst Antony Green said it is likely the seat will absorb the towns of Tumbarumba and Tumut, on the edge of the Snowy Mountains.

"If they leave Broken Hill in the electorate then the solution would be to actually increase the area of the electorate as well and it would be an enormous electorate for any MP to cover," he said.

Ms Ley said while she considered herself "ready for anything", the prospect of more ground to cover was daunting.

"For me it could mean that I'm effectively standing on the ridgeline of Mount Kosciuszko and looking at the Queensland border — that is a bit crazy," she said.

Ms Ley counts the women of rural Australia as amongst her most hardy constituents.

Like most in her party, she does not support quotas or targets but agreed the Liberals must do more to encourage them into politics.

"Nine out of 10 women that I speak to absolutely can do it and many of them really should, and I think to myself, 'we really want you'," she said.

"So I'm going to talk to my female colleagues about putting a mentoring network in place."

Ms Ley said her Cabinet colleague Julie Bishop was also a supporter of that idea.