Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026

Mr NG (Menzies) (16:17): I rise again today to speak on the Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. Like a lot of Australians, I like a glass of wine at the end of a long day or sharing a bottle with friends over dinner. It's part of our culture.

We bring a bottle to a house warming. We gift it on birthdays or special occasions. But Australia hasn't always been a wine drinking country.

Around Federation, the Australian official yearbook stated 'Australians are not a wine drinking people.' That changed in the postwar period, when a new generation arrived—a generation of European migrants. It is another example of how multiculturalism has enriched and benefited our nation. In 1965, our newfound love of wine and the Australian spirit of innovation combined to create our own globally significant invention: the wine cask.

It keeps wine fresher for longer. It's a staple of many pantries and kitchen benches for when you don't want to commit to a whole bottle of wine, but you just want a quiet glass or two. Wine has become such a part of life in this country that we don't always stop to think about where it comes from: the hardworking grape growers who spend months worrying about frost, if rain is going to fall at exactly the wrong time or a market that might not pay a fair price when the harvest finally comes in.

This bill is about getting a fairer deal for them. For too long, many growers have carried the weather, the water, the years it takes for a vine to mature and the debt that comes with all of it or having almost no say in the price they are ultimately paid or when they are paid it. Growers have described turning up to sell a season's harvest without knowing the price until the truck is already loaded.

There were payment terms that stretched out over months, sometimes almost a year, while their own bills were due and continued to pile up, and a voluntary code of conduct that was fair on paper but meant almost nothing in practice because nobody was required to follow it and nobody could enforce it if they didn't. That is not a fair go. That is not the kind of marketplace Australians expect us to build.

We are a government that wants businesses to thrive and wants our primary producers to be fairly compensated for the hard work they do and the risks they take to produce great Australian wines. This bill is about levelling the playing field, about providing the same basic protections we would expect for anyone dealing with a much larger, more powerful buyer. In August 2024, the government asked Dr Craig Emerson to test whether the market was genuinely failing growers and to look closely at contracting practices and how risk is shared across the supply chain.

His review, delivered in mid-2025, made 14 recommendations. It found what growers had been saying for years: that small growers hold too little bargaining power against large winemakers and a concentrated retail sector and that the existing voluntary code simply cannot be enforced. His central recommendation was to replace that voluntary code with a mandatory code, enforceable by the ACCC, applying to large winemakers in their dealings with growers.

The government accepted that recommendation in December 2025 and has since been developing the code with an advisory group, bringing growers and winemakers to the same table—maybe over a glass of wine. This bill is the groundwork that the code needs to function. It confirms Wine Australia's role running industry surveys, building on the longstanding National Vintage Survey, and allows that information to be shared with the ACCC, which would otherwise struggle to identify which businesses the code applies to.

The bill also lets the government's independent agricultural research bureau pass on survey contact details to a mailing provider, solely to send out survey letters, lift response rates and improve the data this sector relies on. Put simply, this bill does not write new rules for the wine industry; it builds the infrastructure for the rules to work, giving the ACCC the information it needs and giving growers the data they need to know whether they are getting a fair price.

My electorate of Menzies is not typically thought of as a grape-growing electorate, but we do have our winemakers. Last year I had the pleasure of visiting Rebecca and Adrian at Santolin Wines in Warrandyte South. They were kind enough to walk me through their business, and it was clear how much passion and hard work goes into every bottle they produce.

They told me how they had both worked in the wine industry for much of their working lives, and they took the risk of stepping out on their own, starting out with just a single barrel. They bet on themselves, and their hard work paid off. They received armloads of awards for their wines, which allowed them to grow and eventually expand their facility into the one they're in now in Warrandyte South.

They walked me through some of the challenges that they have faced, showing how they managed to make their business work despite these challenges. They took the time to walk me through the three stages of making a bottle of wine. First, of course, comes the harvest, picking the grapes at exactly the right moment, because picking too early or too late means the whole batch can be affected.

Then comes fermentation, where the grapes are crushed and the sugar in the juice is slowly turned into alcohol. Finally, there is the ageing and bottling, where the wine is left to develop its character before it is ready for someone's dinner table. Each of the three stages demands patience, skill and a fair bit of risk.

Winemakers were also consulted on this bill and will also benefit from the clearer market information and the mandatory code. Of course, the wine industry benefits people across our community in a whole range of ways. When growers are paid fairly and the sector is sustainable, that flows through to the businesses on our high streets that depend on a reliable, well-priced local product.

My community may not grow the grapes—that's nearby in the Yarra Valley and further beyond—but we are part of the reason there is a market for what the growers produce, and we have a stake in making sure that market is a fair one. Wine, of course, is served in the fantastic pubs and clubs in my community, like the Sporting Globe Bar & Grill at Shoppingtown, Shoppingtown Hotel, the Blackburn Hotel, Cherry Hill Hotel, Templestowe Hotel and many others.

I'd like to congratulate the Grand Hotel Warrandyte, who recently won not one but two awards in the 2026 Australian Hotels Association Victoria awards. They won the Heart of the Community award and the best overall hotel of the year award for the metropolitan area. As these accolades show, they are absolutely at the heart of the community in Warrandyte.

Locals go there to watch the footy or the World Cup, for birthdays, for New Year's Eve or to catch up with friends and family. They've got a fantastic restaurant—I can testify to the quality of their parmas—and they even partner up with local suppliers like Warrandyte Quality Meats to host their popular meat tray raffle for our local champions the Warrandyte Pink Ladies, who have raised so much money for cancer around our community.

Alongside these raffles, the hotel runs charity drives, live auctions and community dinners and donates the proceeds from the monthly menu features, such as 'parma of the month' and 'cocktail of the month', to very worthy causes. Wine sits at the table of the many restaurants my community fills every weekend, from Bulleen to Templestowe and from Surrey Hills to Box Hill.

It sits on the shelves of local bottle shops and it sits at the centre of the festivals that define who we are, from Lunar New Year celebrations to the countless community dinners that bring people from every corner of Menzies together. A division having been called in the House of Representatives— Sitting suspended from 16:26 to 16:43 Mr NG: Wine is also served in our great local restaurants in Menzies, like the Doncaster Greek Tavern in Jackson Court.

I was at the Doncaster Greek Tavern last Friday night with the Jackson Court Traders Association, who were holding their regular networking dinner. It was clear what a great sense of community the traders association have created, with not just the owners and operators of the businesses but also their families and their children in attendance. I say thank you to Con, Diana and all the members of the traders association for bringing our community together and supporting each other's businesses to thrive and grow, creating jobs and servicing our local community.

Australia is also an exporting nation, and the quality and ingenuity of Australian winemakers has elevated our wines to be iconic, luxury brands that are known around the world, particularly in places like China. In our Chinese Australian community, Penfolds Grange is often given as a gift for special occasions or in gratitude. We as a government are supporting our local winemakers by keeping our export market strong and keeping our trade strong.

When they were last in government, those opposite mishandled our relationship with our largest trading partner. As a result, growers and winemakers found their largest export market suddenly closed to them after tariffs of up to 218 per cent were imposed on Australian wine in 2021. Growers, winemakers and their employees and communities paid the price for that.

It was the Albanese Labor government that did the patient, methodical work of repairing that relationship, and, in March 2024, those tariffs came off. This was a huge relief for an industry already sitting on serious oversupply and falling global consumption. It is one thing to talk about backing regional Australia, and it is another to do the delicate work of rebuilding a relationship built on mutual respect and mutual benefit.

This bill continues in that same spirit. It continues doing the important, practical work that actually changes the conditions on the ground for growers, rather than just talking about supporting them. This bill sits within a much broader program of support.

Since coming to office, the government has provided more than $90 million to the wine industry across trade, research, tourism and viability programs. The free trade agreement and the wine agreement finalised with the European Union in March remove tariffs of up to 32 euros per 100 litres and cut the certification costs that have made exporting harder than it should be, while protecting Australian winemakers' right to keep using terms like 'prosecco'.

None of these measures alone solve every challenge facing the wine sector, but they are addressing them. They represent a government that is showing up for an industry that has too often been left to fend for itself. This bill is the foundation of a fairer, more enforceable set of rules governing one of the country's great agricultural industries.

It backs in growers. It backs in winemakers—like Rebecca and Adrian, from my community, and thousands like them across the country—who spent years being told to wait for a fair deal that never quite arrived. This bill makes sure we have fairness in the paddock and fairness at the negotiating table.

I commend the bill to the House.