Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026
Mr SMALL (Forrest—Opposition Whip) (17:14): It seems relevant, while we're talking about the Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026, to say, if we could get a little of what the member for Lyne has and bottle it, this place would be better off! It gives me great pleasure to rise and talk about wine yet again in this place, coming as I do from the little patch of Western Australia called Forrest, which is home to unquestionably the greatest wine grown in Australia.
There are many in this place who join me in a little friendly rivalry as we compare and contrast little emerging regions like the Barossa and the Hunter with Margaret River. Nonetheless, when it comes to this bill, I think the problem is in the bill's snapshot, and that is that there is no financial impact on the budget, as the explanatory memorandum makes clear.
The problem with that is that the wine industry, as many speakers today have lamented, is going through a tough and sordid time. It is not due to one bad growing season or one bad vintage in one region but, rather, a structural surplus of wine in the Australian market across all categories, from that very premium wine grown in Margaret River right through to the more mass produced wine and the fruitgrowers who provide that fruit through the Riverina and other areas.
The industry has been calling for sensible, targeted and limited financial support. But that's not what we're here to talk about today, and that is a great shame. Nonetheless, the coalition is supportive of this bill, because it responds to the findings of the Emerson review, and the member for Lyne was just discussing that imbalance whereby fruitgrowers have such little bargaining power with larger winemakers and how the existing voluntary code of conduct in that space is no longer fit for purpose.
The coalition has a proud history when it comes to codes of conduct across the agricultural, viticultural and horticultural spaces. When we were last in government we introduced and indeed strengthened mandatory codes of conduct for the dairy industry, the horticultural industry, and the food and grocery sector. We did that to improve the transparency, fairness and confidence that need to exist in our agricultural supply chains.
As we see it, mandatory codes have an important role where there is a significant imbalance in bargaining power. These codes do that by providing clear rules of engagement that allow markets to continue operating competitively. So, given that the government accepted the Emerson review's findings in December and committed to developing a mandatory code of conduct alongside industry—and that's most important, that this was done in close consultation and collaboration with industry, with bodies like Australian Grape & Wine—we find ourselves in a position to support the bill.
Of course, that mandatory code itself is not in this bill, but the important legislative groundwork has been laid by enabling information-sharing that the ACCC needs in order to determine who the code should apply to ahead of the commencement of that code at the start of next year. Importantly, there was movement from the government through that process to ameliorate legitimate concerns from growers, which I'd certainly heard in my patch, around the mandatory collection and provision of information and ensuring that that process was something industry could get around.
Fairer commercial arrangements between growers and winemakers that will flow from this code of conduct—at least the intention is that they will flow from this code of conduct—represent an important step towards restoring confidence in the sector, which, as I said has been through a very tough couple of years. Those structural challenges—the structural surplus that we see across wine in Australia and indeed globally—extend well beyond this legislation.
The sector is currently carrying some 262 million litres more wine than is otherwise commercially sustainable on current consumption, which is placing enormous downward pressure on prices through the supply chain. That's, of course, if winemakers are able to move their product at all, and the feedback that I have from certain growers and winemakers is that they've got storage sheds full of produced wine that's been labelled and that's obviously incurred all of that capital cost upfront, and then years later there's simply no market for it.
The heartbreak of those providers in having to make decisions to either destroy stock because they can't afford to keep storing it or face insolvency as a business is pretty hard to listen to, I can tell you. The 2026 grape harvest was the smallest in 25 years across Australia's growing regions, yet grape prices continue to decline. Think about that for a second.
This is the smallest yielding season in a quarter of a century, yet prices fell. That underscores the nature of the challenge facing the wine industry in Australia, and it's why that challenge extends beyond one bad season. This is an industry facing very, very serious headwinds.
At the same time, of course, it's not just limited to Australia. We've seen wine consumption fall into its lowest level globally in over half a century as well. Whilst I'm not the biggest fan of the Albanese government, I'm certainly not going to hold them accountable for fighting against those very strong international market pressures.
We do welcome steps that make our domestic market as fair and transparent as possible, which, as I said, this bill is a small step towards. The other thing that is good about it in our view is that there is a civil penalty for the misuse of shared information, which, as I said, is an important movement from the government in relation to those concerns from industry through the consultation process, and we're very pleased to see that.
It narrows the restrictions and includes safeguards requiring third parties to not further disclose information, which ensures that when they do so it's the minimum necessary information that's being shared and it is de-identified. That keeps the commercial sensitivities of the industry, which are understandably heightened at a time of great structural challenge, somewhat ameliorated.
The bill doesn't change agricultural levies, who has to pay them or how they're calculated. It's confined literally to the information-sharing and the technical administrative amendments that enable this to happen. It is a good response to the Emerson review's finding that the voluntary code of conduct that had previously existed was no longer making the market function and its finding that the mandatory code was an appropriate and, importantly, proportionate response.
Where those safeguards around personal information are contained in the legislation itself, it basically eliminates future regulations either undermining the confidence of industry or allowing the commerciality of the industry to be undermined through some sort of leak, intentional or otherwise, and it does tend to happen of course. We see bad actors exploiting data being held by any major organisation, government notwithstanding.
The government has advised that similar arrangements for this which have existed for many years mean that this bill is not creating an entirely new practice, and that's a fair enough argument to make. But we do think that these growers deserve that greater transparency around how their information—their sensitive, personal, commercial information—was being handled, stored and promulgated to third parties.
Supporting the bill that's before the House today should not prevent the government from strengthening those transparency measures into the future, and I do think that's an important point to make because, as I said, the very commerciality of the industry which is undergoing that great structural challenge is perilous. While we are supportive of the legislation, this bill alone is not going to be the magic silver bullet that restores the fortunes of our wine industry.
As I said earlier in this very scintillating contribution to the House, the greatest shame of this is that there's no budget impact, because earlier this year the wine industry, through Australian Grape & Wine which is a very active and engaged peak body for the industry, put forward a very practical, costed and sustainable package of measures in its pre-budget submission to help resolve the structural challenges that the market is facing.
The simple reality is that we've got too many vines growing too much fruit. Those proposals that Australian Grape & Wine put forward which had a very limited budget impact would have seen those structural forces change over time. This is actually helping growers to pull grapes out and, as the member for Lyne was touching on earlier, through the Wine Tourism and Cellar Door Grant program, find additional markets to distribute their fruit, for example, through their own cellar doors.
Now that was a program that helped wineries attract visitors. Certainly in my electorate, it grew regional tourism and diversified the income for smaller producers. It's important for the House to remember that not all wineries are huge enterprises with big showy cellar door operations with dozens of staff.
Indeed the cellar door grant program was targeted at those producers to support them in maintaining a viable cellar door when such an operation wasn't otherwise viable, and it is a great shame it was pulled in this year's budget. That was a $10 million saving, which, in a context of an industry already doing it tough, I thought was pretty mean and nasty. As I say, this is a global factor, and removing that support for cellar doors sends exactly the wrong sort of message to one of Australia's most important regional industries.
In a regional electorate like mine, it supports those local jobs and helps to diversify the economy away from just things like mining. We consistently talk about being a dig and ship economy. We should be digging more, drilling more, growing more, catching more, and these sorts of programs are important to support that.
So, as I say, it's not a silver bullet. This is an important small step in the right direction. We will be critical where we have to be and supportive where we can be.
Seeing the continued move to shift more costs onto Australian wine producers through higher export cost recovery charges under the government and increasing regulatory costs is akin to asking these growers, who are literally bleeding cash, to pay more while they're getting less support from the government they're paying tax too. That seems to me to be a real slap in the face, and I'm very pleased that the member for Barker has joined us to provide some sort of a rebuttal to my claims about that little-known emerging wine region called Barossa.
Producers are paying more, and they're getting less. We're seeing reduced support for agriculture across the board. But, indeed, the wine industry is facing some of its toughest times, and this is really, really unacceptable to us.
We'll back sensible reforms like this, but it can't be seen as the entire solution. That's why members on this side of the House will continue to fight tooth and nail for their growers.