Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026

Mr VENNING (Grey) (17:43): I'd like to associate my words with the words of the member for Barker. The wine industry in Australia, particularly in the region of South Australia, is on its knees and it is not getting any support from this government. Wine Australia put in a very decent pre-budget review to this Labor government.

Not only did the government ignore it, but they actually took out the cellar door program that's keeping some of them alive. It was very, very disappointing, and the industry is rightly frustrated. Regional South Australia, Grey, is home to the world leading Riesling vineyards of the Clare Valley.

Ask most people what the Clare Valley is worth to this country, and they'll tell you it makes fantastic wine. It absolutely does. Ask them to put a number on it, and most won't even be close.

Grape production in the Clare Valley is worth around $30 million to $40 million a year, and given the issues we're having, we're actually at a 25-year low in both production and exports from this region. Wine sales add another $150 million per year. Tourism, built around that wine industry, brings a further $162 million to the sector.

That's a staggering $300 million in a regional economy. Now that is not a boutique industry. That's jobs in vineyards, cellars, hospitality and tourism.

This is the reason that towns across the Clare Valley have a tourism trade at all. I raise those numbers because they show exactly what's at stake and what I want to talk about today—wine, and not just the wine industry but also what's happening to the people who grow the grapes and make the wine in regional South Australia, and what this government is doing and not doing about it.

Let's turn to the Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026 in front of us. It amends the Wine Australia Act to allow information sharing with the ACCC. It amends the Primary Industries Levies and Charges Collection Act 2024 to let ABARES share levy payer details with authorised contractors.

It's a technical bill. It doesn't fix the wine industry's problem, but it does one useful thing. It gives the ACCC the information it needs to work out what a mandatory code of conduct should apply to, ahead of that code starting 1 January 2027.

The coalition supports this bill. We support it because it responds directly to the Emerson review, which found that grape growers have too little bargaining power against large winemakers and that the voluntary code we have now is no longer fit for purpose. The government accepted that finding in December last year and promised to develop a mandatory code during 2026.

This bill is a step on that path, but it's not the destination. I want to be clear about what this bill does. It gives Wine Australia an explicit function to run grape and wine industry surveys on top of the National Vintage Survey that it already runs.

It sets up a framework, so Wine Australia can share relevant information with the ACCC. It introduces a civil penalty if that information is misused. It narrows an existing restriction on ABARES sharing levy paper contact details with third parties, with safeguards attached.

Now, those third parties can't pass information on further, and only minimal necessary information can be shared, or it must be de-identified. This bill doesn't touch the levies themselves. It doesn't change what growers pay, or how those levies are calculated.

I will say, though, that while I welcome that the safeguards are written into this bill itself rather than left to future legislation, there's still no requirement to notify levy payers when their information is shared, and there's no way for them to opt out. The government tells us this kind of arrangement has existed for years. Maybe so, but growers deserve to know how their information is being used.

Supporting this bill today shouldn't stop the government from fixing that gap later. Now to the industry itself, because that's really what I came here to talk about today. Australia's wine industry is in serious trouble.

We are sitting on around 262 million litres more wine than the market can absorb. That's not a minor imbalance. I go back to the wool crisis last century.

Farmers stored wool on their farms, in their sheds, and the price of wool never increased until we got rid of that backlog. That's what we're facing in this country right now. It's a wall of oversupply, pressing down on prices right through the supply chain, from the grower to the cellar door.

And here's the part that should worry every member in this place. The 2026 harvest was the smallest in 25 years, yet grape prices still fell. When the crop shrinks and prices fall away, that tells you that the problem isn't a bad season; it tells you that it is structural.

Growers in our inland regions have been hit the hardest, like in the member for Barker's region of the Riverland. On top of that, global wine consumption has dropped to its lowest level in more than 60 years. We can't fix that from Canberra.

But we can make sure our own domestic market is fair and transparent, and right now it isn't. A few weeks ago I sat down with Senator Anne Ruston in Clare for a wine industry round table. We sat down with growers and winemakers from across the region.

They were telling us in plain terms what's happening to them. These are people who've been in the industry for decades, who've built family businesses over generations, telling us they can't get a fair price, can't get a buyer and do not know how much longer they can hold on. That's what I heard sitting across the table from them.

On that note, I want to talk just briefly about the container deposit scheme. This is what really frustrates winegrowers today. They are under so much pressure, and this will be the final straw that breaks the camel's back.

The container deposit scheme was brought in during the 1970s in South Australia to fix the problem of littering. But there is no problem to be fixed in the wine sector. Wine is consumed at home, in private, or it's consumed in a restaurant.

There is no issue with littering of wine bottles in our nation. But these rules impose up to $2 per wine bottle on our industry, which simply cannot afford that. If this deposit can't be removed, it must be harmonised across our states and territories.

Regional South Australia has some of the finest wine country in this nation, and Clare Valley is known around the world. These aren't marginal industries in my electorate. They are the backbone of towns.

They employ people in vineyards, in cellars and in hospitality. They bring visitors into regional towns, who then spend their money at the local bakery and the local pub. When the wine industry struggles, it's not just a statistic.

It's a grower in Clare who can't move his or her fruit. It's a family winery wondering whether they'll open the door next season—and I tell you what, a lot of them are leaving town. It's a town that depends on the tourists that those businesses bring in.

What has this government done for these people, at a time when they are asking for help? Earlier this year, Australian Grape & Wine put together a comprehensive and sensible submission ahead of the budget. It wasn't a wish list.

It was industry doing exactly what we asked industry to do: to come to government with practical, considered proposals to help grapegrowers and winemakers get through a difficult period. What did the government do? Nothing.

There was not one dollar of new funding for the wine industry in this budget. It was worse than nothing, actually. Instead of backing the industry, the government has decided to phase out the $10 million Wine Tourism and Cellar Door Grant program.

This is a program that helps small wineries attract visitors, build their cellar door experience and diversify their income away from just grape prices. For a lot of these businesses, the cellar door is what keeps them viable when grape prices are down. It's tourism income, direct sales and a reason for people to make the drive out to the Clare Valley in the first place, or indeed the Flinders Rangers, which makes some fantastic wine.

And this government's answer, at that exact moment the industry is under pressure, is to take away that support. I don't think the government has thought this one through—or, if they have, they've decided that regional wine just isn't a priority. Either way, the outcome is the same for the people I represent.

Growers who already can't find a buyer for their fruit will now watch as the tourism support that helped their neighbours survive gets wound back, too. That's more pressure, at the worst possible time, on communities that are already doing it tough. And it doesn't stop there.

This bill makes some administrative changes to how levies work, but it does nothing about the bigger problem of the levy system as a whole. The government's own Productivity Commission found Australia's agricultural levy system to be—a word that I can't pronounce. Around 248 different levies are administered through roughly 70 separate arrangements.

That's not a system; that's a maze. It creates unnecessary complexity, adds to the administrative burden on producers and drags on productivity. Producers already put millions of dollars into that system every year to fund research, biosecurity and development.

They're entitled to expect it to be efficient and transparent. Instead, this government keeps making piecemeal changes around the edges while the fundamental problem sits there untouched. At the same time as all of this, the government has increased export cost recovery charges and other regulatory costs on producers.

So the message to our wine growers over this term has been pay more and get less: high costs, cuts to the programs that actually helped and no new funding. I want to be fair here. The coalition has a long record of backing mandatory codes where there's a genuine imbalance of market power.

A voluntary code isn't cutting it. We introduced and strengthened the dairy code of conduct, the Horticulture Code of Conduct and the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct because, in each of those cases, we recognised that without clear rules of engagement, the party with the least power in the chain gets squeezed. The Emerson review found the same imbalance in wine.

A mandatory code is an appropriate response, and this bill is one piece of the groundwork for it. That's why we support it today. But supporting this bill cannot be where this government's response to the wine industry begins and ends.

A mandatory code that starts in January next year is welcome, but it will not put money back into growers' pockets. It will not replace the $10 million this government is taking out of the cellar door program, and it will not undo a budget that gave the wine industry nothing despite that industry doing everything right. If this government is serious about the future of Australia's wine industry, serious about towns like those in the Clare Valley that depend on it, then it needs to do more than pass a technical information-sharing bill and call it a day.

It needs to reverse that decision to phase out the Wine Tourism and Cellar Door Grants program. I'd also like to remind this House that the Minister for Trade and Tourism lives in the Clare Valley—he lives in the electorate of Grey—and the wine growers are calling on him to do something. I'm calling on him to do something!

This government needs to actually engage with what Australian Grape & Wine have put forward, and it needs to stop loading additional costs onto an industry that is already carrying more oversupply, lower prices and less global demand than it has seen in decades. I've heard what this feels like for growers and winemakers in Clare. It isn't a crisis they've created; it's a product of global market conditions well beyond their control.

The government response here at home has, so far, taken support away rather than add it. The coalition will keep supporting sensible, practical reforms like the one before us. Regional wine communities in South Australia and right across the country deserve better than what this government is giving them.