Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026

Ms PENFOLD (Lyne) (17:02): I rise to speak on the Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026 as a local MP with a small but valuable wine industry and with communities that were part of the founding and development of the Australian wine industry. I'm also an Australian who is deeply passionate about this industry. While I'm not directly related, I'm certainly proud of the history of what the Penfolds name and brand stand for in Australian wine excellence.

Australia was always earmarked as a wine-producing nation. From James Cook's Endeavour voyage, Australia was identified as an ideal place for producing wine. Vines were planted within the first months of the First Fleet landing at Sydney Cove.

I'm particularly proud that part of the story of Australian wine begins in the electorate of Lyne. The Paterson Valley, and particularly Tocal, played an important role in the very early development of viticulture in colonial Australia. James Phillips Webber took up Tocal in 1822, and during the 1820s and early 1830s he established a vineyard there as part of what became one of the Hunter's pioneering agricultural properties.

This was about the time my own Penfold ancestors came to Australia as farm labourers to work on the Bona Vista property in Paterson, which is very close to Tocal. By 1832, Webber had three acres of vines at Tocal. That might sound modest today, but at the time there were only 15½ acres of vines recorded across the entire Hunter.

What happened at Tocal did not stay at Tocal. In 1834, Webber supplied oporto and gouais grape cuttings from Tocal to another pioneering Hunter grower, George Wyndham at Dalwood, which is just on the other side of the Hunter River from my own electorate. Wyndham would go on to become one of the great early names in Australian wine, so there's a direct historical thread running from those early vines at Tocal through the pioneering vineyards of the Hunter and into the development of one of Australia's most famous wine regions.

Long before Australian wine was winning international awards or becoming a major export industry and long before Hunter Valley semillon was known around the world, pioneers were experimenting with vines in the Paterson Valley in my electorate of Lyne. They were sharing cuttings, testing varieties against Australian conditions and learning through plenty of trial and error how to grow grapes and make wine in this country.

I'm very proud that Tocal and the Paterson Valley, in my electorate, have their place right at the beginning of Australia's wine industry. The coalition supports the Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. We support it because there's a genuine imbalance in bargaining power in parts of Australia's wine industry, particularly between grape growers and large winemakers.

Where voluntary arrangements have failed to deliver fair outcomes, there's a legitimate role for government to establish clear rules of engagement. That has long been the coalition's approach. Coalition governments introduced and strengthened mandatory codes across agriculture, including the dairy code, the horticulture code, and the food and grocery code, so we support the direction of this legislation, but we should also be clear about what this bill does and what it does not do.

The Emerson review found that grape growers have too little bargaining power against large winemakers and that the existing voluntary code is no longer fit for purpose. The government accepted those recommendations in December last year and committed to developing a mandatory code of conduct. This bill is not that mandatory code, but it lays the groundwork for it.

Schedule 1 amends the Wine Australia Act to give Wine Australia an explicit function to conduct grape and wine industry surveys and allows information to be shared with the ACCC to help determine which businesses should be covered by the mandatory code. There are safeguards around that information and civil penalties for its misuse. Schedule 2 amends the Primary Industries Levies and Charges Collection Act to allow ABARES to share levy payer contact information with authorised contractors to improve participation in agricultural surveys.

Importantly, this bill does not change agricultural levies, who pays them or how they are calculated. The coalition welcomes the fact that important safeguards around personal information have been placed in the legislation itself rather than simply being left to regulation, but greater transparency could be provided to farmers. There is no requirement for levy payers to be notified when their information is shared with a third party and no mechanism for them to opt out.

That is something the government should continue to look at. But the broader point is that this bill is a small piece of a much bigger problem. Australia's wine industry is in serious trouble.

There are around 262,000,000 litres more wine sitting in storage than can be commercially sustained. The 2026 grape harvest was the smallest in 25 years, yet grape prices continue to decline. Domestic wine consumption is at its lowest level in more than a decade, and global wine consumption has fallen to its lowest level since 1961.

Australian Grape and Wine is right to describe this not simply as a temporary downturn but as a structural crisis. Behind those numbers are growers, winemakers, cellar door operators and families who've spent generations building their businesses. That matters in my electorate of Lyne.

When people think about wine in New South Wales, they often think about the Hunter Valley. The Hunter is one of Australia's great wine regions, and its geographical indication stretches much further than the cellar doors around Pokolbin that most tourists know. The electorate of Lyne reaches into the northern Hunter, and across the Mid North Coast we have a diverse collection of smaller vineyards, wineries and cellar doors.

Cassegrain, Old Inn Road, Tranquil Vale, Bago Maze and Wine, Great Lakes Paddocks, Villa d'Esta Vineyard, Jacaranda Estate, Gloucester River Wines, Faulls Ridge Wine, Mograni Creek Estate, Mill Creek Vineyard and Gap Hill Wines are all part of our local wine story. They're not necessarily the names that many people speak about but still very valuable contributors to the Australian wine industry and to the regional economy across the Lyne electorate.

These wineries stretch from right down in the south-west of my electorate in Luskintyre all the way up to just east of Wauchope. These aren't just places that make and sell wine. They also attract visitors.

They employ local people. They buy from other local businesses and support restaurants, accommodation providers and tourism operators. Some of them also host weddings.

Perhaps the member for Casey one day may need additional employment—hopefully not. He's also welcome to come and see some of these wineries in my electorate. These wineries are part of the character and diversity of our regional economy, and it's fantastic to trace my electorate's contribution over two centuries to the vineyards, winemakers and cellar doors operating across my electorate today.

Nationally, wine related tourism attracts around 7½ million visitors each year, with visitors spending around $11.6 billion in Australia's wine regions. The broader grape and wine industry supports more than 203,000 direct and indirect jobs, and contributes more than $51 billion in gross economic output. When this industry hurts, regional Australia hurts, and communities like mine feel it.

That is why I'm disappointed that the Albanese government's response has been so inadequate. Earlier this year, Australian Grape and Wine went to the government with a serious, practical and costed plan. It proposed support for business viability and transition, concessional loans, mental health and rural wellbeing, rebuilding export markets, stimulating domestic demand and regional tourism and properly implementing the mandatory code.

The total package was $139.25 million over the forward estimates. But the Albanese government didn't take it up. Instead, at precisely the time the wine industry needed help attracting people into regional wine communities, the government moved to pause or cut the Wine Tourism and Cellar Door Grant Program for two years out to 2030.

That program provides eligible wine and cider producers with grants of up to $100,000 linked to cellar-door sales. That decision made absolutely no sense. If we have too much wine and insufficient demand, why reduce support for businesses bringing consumers directly to wineries and tourists into regional communities?

The government cannot control a decline in global wine consumption, but it can control how it responds, and we should remember how dramatically the industry was hit by the loss of the Chinese market. Before China's tariffs, that market was worth more than $1.2 billion a year to Australian wine exporters. It collapsed to less than $10 million.

You can't simply switch off wine production. Grapevines remain in the ground, wine remains in tanks and barrels, and businesses still have debts, wages and bills to pay. That surplus puts pressure on winemakers and ultimately flows back to the prices growers receive, which brings me to another problem this bill does not address: market power doesn't stop winery gate.

The government is looking at the bargaining imbalance between growers and winemakers, which is fair enough, but what about the bargaining imbalance between winemakers and the major liquor retailers? The four largest liquor retailers have been estimated to control around 70 per cent of the market. Endeavour Group, through Dan Murphy's and BWS, is one of the dominant players, and major retailers increasingly compete with their suppliers through private-label and vertically integrated wine businesses.

As Australian Grape and Wine has pointed out, that can leave a winemaker in the extraordinary position where a major retailer is simultaneously their biggest customer and one of their biggest competitors. That matters because pressure at the retail end of the supply chain eventually flows back to the grower. There's little point addressing the balance between growers and winemakers while ignoring concentrated market power further down the chain.

We need competitive markets. We don't need government setting the price of a bottle of wine, but competitive markets only work when competition is genuine and small businesses have a realistic ability to negotiate. Australian Grape and Wine has also pointed to the barrier small businesses face in challenging unfair conduct—that is, the cost of litigation, the imbalance in resources and fear of commercial retribution.

Those issues need to be taken seriously as the government considers the next stage of these reforms. While the government is suddenly discovering the merits of mandatory agricultural codes, perhaps it could dust off the work already done for the poultry industry. Poultry growers—many of them in my electorate—have been waiting for action on their own code of conduct and their own bargaining power problem for years.

Maybe the chickens will come home to roost before the government finally gets around to dealing with this one. The coalition supports this bill. A properly designed mandatory code can improve transparency and provide clearer and fairer rules between growers and winemakers, but nobody should pretend this legislation fixes the Australian wine industry.

It doesn't address the enormous wine surplus, it doesn't rebuild international demand, it doesn't address concentrated market power further down the supply chain, and it doesn't provide the structural support the industry itself says it needs. Our wine industry is a great Australian industry. It turns Australian agricultural produce into a high-value manufactured product, exports an Australian brand to the world and brings millions of visitors into regional communities.

In places like Tocal and Paterson, its history reaches back almost to the beginning of European agriculture in this country. So, yes, let's give growers a fairer deal and get the mandatory code right, but, if the Albanese government is serious about the future of the Australian wine industry, it needs to look at the whole supply chain and the structural challenges facing the industry.

Australian grape growers, winemakers and regional communities deserve much more than this bill alone.