Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026

Dr RYAN (Kooyong) (17:58): This bill, the Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026, implements part of the government's response to Dr Craig Emerson's review of the wine and grape sector by establishing a mandatory code of conduct for wine grape purchasers and expanding Wine Australia's powers to collect industry data. Dr Emerson's review found what growers in the community and across the country have told us for years: a voluntary unenforceable code has left too many growers exposed to unfair contracting practices and imbalances in bargaining power with winemakers.

So a mandatory code backed by ACCC enforcement is a sensible and overdue correction. I'm glad that this bill clarifies the objects of the wine act as a precursor to the mandatory code commencing on 1 January 2027, but I also want to use this debate to raise a fairness question that the bill does not yet address—a question which this parliament has not yet addressed but which has been put in front of the inquiry of the Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Disability into alcohol and other drugs by a number of expert groups and stakeholders.

I have the honour of serving as the deputy chair on that committee, and I feel that I need to raise the issue in the House at this time. That issue is how we tax wine. Every major alcohol category in Australia other than wine is taxed volumetrically, with a fixed rate per litre of alcohol scaled to strength.

Wine is the exception. It's taxed under the wine equalisation tax, a 29 per cent levy on the wholesale value, with a rebate for small producers. That structure does not tax harm; it does not tax alcohol strength; it just taxes price.

As a result, a high-value boutique wine from the Yarra Valley or the Mornington Peninsula incurs proportionately much more tax per standard drink than the cheapest cask wine on the shelf. The consequences of that are pretty stark. Cask wine is the cheapest alcoholic beverage available in this country.

The mean price for cask wine is 54c per standard drink, but at the bottom end you can get it for as little as 24c for a standard drink. You can't buy a schooner, a can or a nip of spirits for anywhere near that price. The gap is not an accident of the market; it's a direct product of how this parliament has chosen to tax wine.

And it matters because Australia is, right now, experiencing the highest rate of alcohol induced deaths in over two decades. The Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education has documented in depth what that cheap, high-volume product does in practice. The harm caused by too easy access to rubbish, cheap alcohol is the direct and foreseeable result of a tax system that this parliament has left unreformed for 50 years.

None of this is a new issue. None of this is news to Treasury or to Australia's peak health bodies. Ken Henry's 2010 review of Australia's tax system recommended a volumetric tax on alcohol based on evidence and based on the social cost of that harm.

It singled out the wine equalisation tax because of its perverse effect on the price of cheap wine. The Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists have jointly noted that replacing the WET with a volumetric tax has now been recommended by nine separate sequential government reviews. The RACP has put the problem pretty bluntly.

It says that the current wine tax actually provides preferential treatment for cheap wine. Cancer Council Australia's position statement calls for a volumetric excise tax across all alcohol products, together with abolition of the wine equalisation tax. Cancer Council warns that a tax based on the wholesale value rather than the alcohol content has already contributed, and continues to contribute, to an oversupply of cheap, high-volume wine products, including cask wine.

When the current National Alcohol Strategy was released in 2019 without a volumetric tax, the then President of the Australian Medical Association said that that was most disappointing and that doctors treating the short-term sequelae and lifelong complications of alcohol fuelled harm deserve a response as serious as the problem itself. Addiction medicine specialist Professor Kate Conigrave, who is a director at the Foundation of Alcohol Research and Education, has pointed to the fact that we have broad agreement amongst virtually all Australian health bodies that reforming alcohol taxation should be a key priority for this government.

In her words, we shouldn't be treating alcohol 'like it's flour or wool'. The National Alcohol Strategy 2019-2028 itself lists volumetric taxation and a minimum floor price amongst the reform options which we should be considering to manage the price and availability of alcohol. FARE's recent submissions to the health committee's ongoing inquiry into the health impacts of alcohol and other drugs set out exactly what that reform should look like.

We should continue to index the excise on beer and spirits, replace the wine equalisation tax with a volumetric rate and introduce a properly indexed minimum unit price in every state and territory. The Northern Territory's experience with the minimum unit price has already shown measurable reductions in alcohol related harm. Modelling shows that a minimum unit price of at least $1.30 per standard drink could reduce alcohol use in Australia by 1.5 standard drinks per week, on average, per Australian.

So I put it to the House: this is not just a public health argument; it's also an argument for the very wine growers that this bill is seeking to protect. The code of conduct in this bill exists because growers of quality products are being squeezed out by a market that simply does not value what they produce. A tax system that rewards the cheapest possible bulk product at the expense of quality does the same thing from a different direction.

Fixing the contract is not enough if our tax settings keep subsidising the product that competes hardest against what our better wine growers are actually trying to sell. I support this bill and the fairer trading arrangements that it will deliver for wine grape growers, but I ask the government not to treat fairness in this sector as finished business. Growers deserve a market that isn't distorted against quality.

Communities deserve a tax system that doesn't quietly subsidise the cheapest and most harmful product on the shelf. Twenty-six years after the wine equalisation tax was designed and 16 years after the Henry review told us that we need to fix it, it's well past time that this parliament did. To that end, I move: That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: "whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House: (1) notes that: (a) the Wine Equalisation Tax (WET) taxes wine on its wholesale value rather than its alcohol content, unlike every other major alcohol category, which are taxed volumetrically; (b) this structure subsidises the cheapest, highest-volume wine products, including cask wine, which can be purchased for as little as 24 cents per standard drink; and (c) reform of the WET has been recommended by at least thirteen separate government reviews, including the 2010 Henry Tax Review, and is supported by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, Cancer Council Australia, the Australian Medical Association, and the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education; and (2) calls on the government to bring forward, without further delay, a plan to replace the WET with a volumetric tax on wine, consistent with the taxation of beer and spirits".

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Aldred ): Is the amendment seconded? Dr Scamps: I second the amendment, and I reserve my right to speak.