Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026

Senator HUME (Victoria—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (12:18): I rise to speak on the Wine and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. The coalition will be supporting this bill. This bill has already passed the House of Representatives without amendment, and it comes to this chamber as a sensible and practical piece of legislation.

But before I go into the details of what it does, I want to spend some time on the context that surrounds it, because this bill cannot be properly understood in isolation from the crisis currently facing Australia's wine industry. The bill contains two schedules. Schedule 1 amends the Wine Australia Act 2013.

It gives Wine Australia an explicit function to conduct grape and wine industry surveys, building on the work it already does through the National Vintage Survey. It also establishes an information-sharing framework that allows Wine Australia to share relevant information with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the ACCC, to support the implementation of a mandatory code of conduct for the wine sector.

Alongside that new sharing power, the bill introduces a civil penalty for the misuse of shared information. That's an important safeguard and one that the coalition welcomes. Schedule 2 amends the Primary Industries Levies and Charges Collection Act 2024.

It allows the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences to share levy payer contact details with authorised third-party contractors in order to improve participation in agricultural surveys. I want to be clear about what this bill is not. It is not the mandatory code of conduct itself.

That code is still being developed following the government's acceptance of the Emerson review's recommendations in December last year, with an intended commencement date of 1 January 2027. What this bill does do is lay some of the legislative groundwork for that code, principally by giving the ACCC the information-sharing pathway that it will need to determine which businesses the code should apply to.

Nor is this a broad new information-sharing power. It in fact narrows an existing restriction, and it comes with safeguards. Third parties who receive information under these new provisions are prohibited from disclosing it further.

Only the minimum information necessary can be shared, and, where possible, it must be de-identified. Critically, this bill does not touch the substance of our agricultural levy system. It does not change who pays a levy or how much they pay or change how those levies are calculated.

This is confined to information sharing and administrative housekeeping, nothing more. So why does the coalition support this bill? It responds directly to a real problem that was identified by the Emerson review—namely, that grape growers in this country have too little bargaining power when it comes to dealing with large winemakers and that the voluntary code that has governed that relationship for years is simply no longer fit for purpose.

Fairer commercial arrangements between growers and winemakers are an important step towards restoring confidence in a sector that badly needs it. That brings me to the heart of what I want to say today. This bill, sensible as it is, cannot be viewed as anything more than one small piece of a much larger puzzle.

Australia's wine industry is in the grip of a genuine structural crisis, and no amount of information sharing between Wine Australia and the ACCC is going to fix that on its own. Let me put some figures on the table. The sector is currently carrying around 262 million litres more wine than can be commercially sustained.

That's an extraordinary oversupply, and it's placing enormous downward pressure on prices right through the supply chain, from the grower all the way to the bottle. The 2026 grape harvest was the smallest in 25 years. Yet, even with that smaller harvest, grape prices kept falling.

That tells you something very important. This is not a problem that will fix itself with one good or one bad vintage. It goes much deeper than that.

Growers in Australia's warm inland wine regions have been particularly hard hit. Many of them cannot find a buyer for their fruit at all. This is happening against a backdrop of collapsing global demand, with worldwide wine consumption having fallen to its lowest level in more than 60 years.

Australia cannot single-handedly fix global drinking patterns, but we can absolutely make sure that our own domestic market operates as fairly and as transparently as possible. That's exactly what this bill seeks to do. The coalition has a long and proud record when it comes to supporting mandatory industry codes when there is a clear and demonstrated imbalance of market power.

We introduced and strengthened mandatory codes across a number of agricultural sectors under coalition governments. They included the Dairy Code of Conduct, the Horticulture Code of Conduct and the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct. In each case, the objective was the same: to improve transparency, fairness and confidence in agricultural supply chains while still allowing the markets to operate competitively.

The Emerson review found that the existing voluntary wine code was no longer sufficient to protect growers. On that basis, a mandatory code is an appropriate and proportionate response. Supporting this bill is entirely consistent with that approach, which brings me to the government's broader record on this industry.

While the coalition will support the bill, I want to be very clear that this legislation on its own does almost nothing to address the crisis that our wine growers and winemakers are actually living through. Earlier this year, the industry put forward a practical and costed package of measures through its pre-budget submission. It was seeking a $139.25 million three-year package to address that structural oversupply crisis in the sector.

This marks the third consecutive year that the industry's calls for targeted support have gone unanswered. The government's response was silence—worse than silence, in fact; instead of backing regional wine communities, the Albanese government used this year's budget to abolish the Wine, Tourism and Cellar Door Grant program. That's a program that helped wineries attract visitors, grow regional tourism and diversify their income at exactly the time—the very time—when they needed every possible avenue of support.

Australian Grape and Wine chief executive Lee McLean did not mince words. The budget was described as 'a bitterly disappointing outcome for an industry under significant and sustained strain'. Australian Grape and Wine made the point that the industry did not ask for a handout but had instead put forward practical and targeted measures to support an orderly transition.

Earlier in the year, ahead of the budget, Australian Grape and Wine urged the government 'to heed the evidence, heed the warning signs and work with us now'. That call, like the prebudget submission, before it went unanswered. At a time when wineries are grappling with oversupply, weak global demand and falling prices, removing support for cellar doors sends exactly the wrong message to one of this country's most important regional industries.

Regional wineries are often the economic heart of their communities. They support local jobs, hospitality businesses and tourism operators well beyond the vineyard gate. Supporting cellar doors is not just about wine.

It's also about backing regional Australia full stop. It's not just funding cuts. Labor has also continued to shift more costs onto producers through higher export cost recovery charges and increasing regulatory costs, asking farmers to pay more while giving them less in return.

Australian producers already contribute millions of dollars every year through statutory levies to fund research, development and biosecurity. They rightly expect those funds to deliver real value and to be administered transparently. While I'm on the subject of levies, I do want to touch briefly on the broader problem with our agricultural levy system because this bill, while it makes some targeted changes, doesn't do anything to address the structural issues identified by the government's own Productivity Commission.

The commission found that Australia's levy system had become what it described as a bureaucratic 'levyathan', with around 248 levies administered through approximately 70 different arrangements creating unnecessary complexity, adding to administrative burden and dragging, of course, on productivity. Rather than undertaking the comprehensive reform that is so clearly needed, this government continues to make piecemeal changes around the edges while the bigger challenge facing levy payers goes unaddressed.

The coalition believes the focus should be on reducing the cost of doing business, cutting unnecessary red tape, supporting our regional industries and making sure that levy funds are used effectively, efficiently and transparently. In closing, this bill is a sensible reform. It will help deliver fairer commercial relationships between grape growers and winemakers, and on that basis the coalition will support it, but I want to leave the chamber in no doubt that this bill should be seen as only one small part of the solution to the challenges that this industry is facing.

If this government is serious about securing the future of one of our great regional industries, it needs to pair reforms like this one with practical and meaningful support for growers, for regional wineries and for wine tourism rather than cutting successful programs and continuing to load costs onto the very producers that it claims to support. The coalition will continue to support practical and sensible reforms that strengthen Australia's wine industry.

We will also keep standing up for our growers, we'll also keep standing up for our regional communities, we'll also keep standing up for family businesses and we will keep holding this government to account for the industry it continues to let down. I commend the bill to the Senate.