Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026

Mr BIRRELL (Nicholls) (18:21): Thank you to the member for Riverina for his comments in relation to the Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. His constituents—and the ones he has represented over the years before there were boundary changes—are suffering in a similar way to my constituents, my communities, member for Mallee, because of the disastrous water policies of the Labor government.

I'm speaking in support of this bill because I'm very supportive of it, and the coalition is supportive of it. It's sensible, it's proportionate, and it does what needs to be done. But I want to make this point, too.

A person could read this bill from end to end—the schedules, the explanatory memorandum, every clause—and they would come away not knowing about the significant pressures that the wine industry is facing at the moment. There's nothing about how a grower at Nagambie can't find a buyer for his fruit this year. There's nothing about the family at Echuca, growing wine grapes, who can't afford to keep farming but can't afford to stop.

And there's nothing about the 262 million litres of wine sitting in tanks across this country that nobody can sell. Whilst I'm supportive of this bill, the Albanese government is not going far enough to assist an industry that is on its knees. In fact, some of what they're doing is actively making the situation worse, and irrigation water is a big part of this.

The member for Riverina talks about Labor's buybacks and the 450 gigalitres that were supposed to be subject to a socioeconomic neutrality test, which the previous and some Labor states as well insisted upon. Socioeconomic neutrality means the socioeconomic effects—the effect on the society, the effect on the economy—must be neutral. The socioeconomic effect of these water buybacks is not neutral.

It is significantly negative. These purchases should never have gone ahead. The previous minister in the last parliament was disastrous on this, and the current minister, Senator Watt, isn't any better.

They're coming in and buying all of this water out of the most productive irrigation regions of our nation, including the irrigation regions that grow a large proportion of Australia's wine grapes now. It's the egregiousness of taking this water away from these communities that rely on the produce, and, as has been pointed out many times, it's not just about the produce that's grown.

Let's take wine grapes. It's not just about what a wine grower gets paid for the grapes that he or she has irrigated. When those wine grapes go to the winery, there are a whole swag of people employed in that process.

When that becomes a bottle of wine, there are a whole host of people who are involved in the marketing, the sale and the export of that product. The value of the megalitre of water that grew the crop expands massively, and it's really important for Australia's economy. So taking it away and putting it into an environmental account that sits somewhere in Hume or Eildon and can't be used is not only economic vandalism; it's just silly.

I have one more thing about this, and the Weekly Times reported on this today. When the Albanese government go in and buy this water, they are paying a huge premium for it. They're not getting it at market value.

So the government go in to buy this water on behalf of you, the Australian taxpayer. A high-reliability water share in the Goulburn system of the GMID is approximately $4,000. The Albanese government are going in and paying $4,800 for it.

So they're not getting good value. They're paying a massive premium. In many cases, because of the way that certain companies have managed to arbitrage this system, the companies that have sold all this water to the Albanese government for $4,800 or whatever it is—that's what's been reported in the Weekly Times today—go back into the market and buy it from someone else for $4,000 to stock up their portfolios again.

So the taxpayer ends up paying much more than they ever should have. In relation to this bill—it's largely administrative, but I'm supportive of it. The bill has two schedules.

Schedule 1 amends the Wine Australia Act and gives Wine Australia an explicit function to conduct industry surveys. That builds on the National Vintage Survey, and there's a framework that Wine Australia can establish to share relevant information with the ACCC. Schedule 2 amends the Primary Industries Levies and Charges Collection Act to allow ABARES to share levy payer contact details with authorised third-party contractors so that agricultural survey participation improves.

So there's no financial impact of this on the budget. It doesn't change the levies, who pays them or how they are calculated, but it does lay the groundwork for a mandatory code of conduct, and we do need a mandatory code of conduct in this industry. We need a fair playing field between large producers—I'm not demonising them; they do a great job—and the wine growers, who are trying to use what little irrigation water the Albanese government has left in the system to grow a really good quality product that is respected the world over.

The wine industry is really hurting at the moment. I drive around the electorate of Nicholls, and I have the wine region of Dookie and part of the wine region of Heathcote, which is renowned for its shiraz. It's got a magnificent hillside which has soils and a climate that produce a shiraz that is known far and wide across the world.

I also have the Nagambie region, which has Tahbilk and Mitchelton. So there are great quality wines and there is great history. I was actually an agronomist before I came to parliament.

I did soil testing, I did advice on nutrition and I did advice on managing those grapevines. Now as a member of parliament I drive around and see excavators pulling those vines out of the ground and pulling the pine posts out. Just thinking about the work that went into all of that is really quite heartbreaking.

I implore the Albanese government to look at whether there are ways we can manage what is a very difficult transition for an industry, and most of it's not their fault. The China tariff thing is not their fault. I agree there was a coalition government at the time, which was well before I was in parliament.

I am critical that some of the managed investment tax laws meant that there was too much of a boom in the wine plantation in the early 2000s, and I think that has created some issues. But the reality is there are people, agriculturalists, who have tried their hardest to produce a great-quality product that we're trying to export and find new export markets for and send around Australia and send around the world, and they are struggling to survive.

There's a huge amount of wine, both red and white, that is just sitting in tanks around Australia. Unless we can find something to do with that wine—maybe it's not drinkable, but we need to work together to try and find something to do with it so that that tank space becomes empty and it can be filled with a product that is saleable—then the situation's not going to get better and the pain is going to be huge.

So, whilst I accept that this bill is something that is a positive step and I support the Albanese government in bringing it forward, I implore them to do more to help this industry. We sit in question time, and there are people from different political persuasions. The Albanese government likes to talk a lot about helping people like aged-care workers and childcare workers, and that's okay.

That's fair enough. They're workers in the system. These people who run small businesses are workers in the system too.

They've had an industry fall apart around them and they're not asking for massive handouts, but they are asking for a strategic plan and some assistance to come in and try and right the ship that is the Australian wine industry at the moment. I think there are a lot of things we could do to do that. That's really important, and I implore the Albanese government to stop being so ideological when it comes to irrigation water and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

This is one of those issues that I've watched from outside the parliament because I've been in incredibly involved in it in the Goulburn Valley and the Goulburn-Murray Irrigation District. It's one of those things where common sense keeps evaporating and evaporating; pardon the pun. There is no reason to be taking more irrigation water out of the GMID, out of the southern connected basin or out of the northern Murray-Darling Basin because there's a limit to which the people who use that environmental water can use it.

One of those organisations is the Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority. It is a wonderful organisation that is very interested and very committed to making sure that environmental water gets used as well as it can be used to give us environmental outcomes. Carl Walters is the CEO of that organisation.

He has said, 'I wish the government would just stop buying environmental water because we can't use what we've already got.' So what's happening is all this water is sitting up there in Hume or Eildon and taking up space. Irrigation—the price volatility has massively risen because the government's taken so much out of the consumptive pool. This has put pressure on a lot of industries, but it's put a lot of pressure on the wine-grape-growing industry, and all for what?

If we were seeing these massive increases in environmental outcomes from the megalitres that have been bought back, there might be an argument, but we're not seeing any purpose to take any more water out of these systems. I was born on the Goulburn River and grew up there and I've watched its environment ebb and flow. I've watched people use environmental water to try to turn it into a channel to artificially push water down to South Australia.

When you love as an industry as much as I do irrigated agriculture and you see what used to be these incredibly productive dairy industries, as well as peaches, wine grapes and apples, and—in relation to the wine industry particularly—you see an excavator go in and start ripping those vines and those posts out and piling them up for a bonfire, it's really heartbreaking.

I think we can do better. I'm supportive of this bill. It's just a start, though.

Agriculture is important to this country. Irrigated agriculture is essential. The communities of the Murray-Darling Basin are worth fighting for and worth appreciating, and policies that damage them deserve our strongest condemnation.

I condemn these policies of taking more irrigation water out of our beautiful Murray-Darling Basin. I hope that we can all work together to try and right the ship that is the wine industry and get it back to a sustainable footing, but that is going to take some assistance. This bill helps, but it's nowhere near enough.