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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2015-09-23 Daily Xml
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Parliamentary Committee on Occupational Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation: Barossa Valley Visit

The Hon. S.W. KEY (Ashford) (11:17): I move:

That the 20th report of the committee, entitled Regional Visit to Barossa Valley, be noted.

In May this year the committee visited the beautiful Barossa region to learn firsthand about work and life in that region. The Barossa Valley is the most recognised wine, food and tourism region and is known for its six generations of winegrowers, winemakers, butchers and bakers. The 22,964 people who live in the Barossa make a significant contribution to the South Australian economy. According to the Bureau of Statistics, the gross regional product of the Barossa was over $1 billion in 2014, derived from the 2,160 local registered businesses. While manufacturing is reported to be the largest industry, other major industry sectors include agriculture, retail and health care.

On our inaugural visit to the Barossa Valley, we were privileged to visit three businesses where we met local business leaders and workers at Pernod Ricard Winemakers, Vinpac International and Barossa Enterprises. I would like to share some of the committee's learnings and experience from the undertakings of our visit to this important regional centre.

Pernod Ricard is the global leader in the spirits and wine sector, with headquarters based in Paris. Its Australian operations are located in Rowland Flat, Barossa Valley, where it produces wine for 65 international markets, with key brands being Jacob's Creek, St Hugo and Wyndham Estate. Not only is Pernod Ricard a global leader in the wine sector but it has been recognised by SafeWork as a national leader in injury prevention and injury management. It is a self-insured employer under the Return to Work Act, with strong commitment to the health, safety and wellbeing of its employees, their families and the community.

The company's Active Choice Health and Wellbeing Program provides workers at all levels and senior executives with the opportunity to improve their health, fitness and general wellbeing. As well as leading to reductions in lost time due to injuries, the program has resulted in important and unexpected strategic benefits for the company. It also provides direct benefits to employees and their families through a series of events such as their skin cancer program called Don't Blame It on the Sunshine—I feel like I should sing that—mental health and stress management, Beat of the Heart and Let's Get Physical.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. S.W. KEY: I can hear a few people singing now. These events are aimed at diabetes checks, boot camps and dance classes. The committee was impressed by the demonstrated commitment of Pernod Ricard to the health and wellbeing of not only their workers but also families and the community.

The committee next toured Vinpac International, which is a specialist wine bottling, winemaking, laboratory and warehouse/dispatch service located in Angaston. Vinpac is a very impressive and large operation and is part of the Woolworths group of companies. It provides specialist bottling expertise in a wide range of bottle shapes and sizes and caters to bottling needs of wineries throughout Australia. Their warehouses use the latest technology to manage the logistics of over 35,000 pallets of finished goods and seven million litres of bulk wine in indoor storage tanks.

Vinpac is also a self-insured employer with almost 300 employees engaged in such roles as administration, production, maintenance and logistics. The company has a number of early intervention and prevention programs in place aimed at maintaining a safe and healthy workforce, such as remedial massage, occupational therapy and dedicated specialist safety personnel.

For our last visit to local businesses, we were privileged to tour the Barossa Enterprises site at Nuriootpa. They also have a site located at Clare. Barossa Enterprises provides services to individuals and families who live with a disability and to local businesses through their Woodwerx and Community Lifestyle Connexions programs. Woodwerx specialises in wine packaging of premium wines for export using environmentally sustainable products.

Barossa Enterprises provides developmental training to all its supported employees as part of a regime of work health and safety, machine operation and general workplace wellbeing. Training is developed around easy to read, pictorial formats that link practice with theory. WHS is at the forefront of all operations and is specifically designed around the individual and the job. Competency-based small group training in manual handling is also provided.

It was enjoyable to meet the very engaging workers who themselves are committed to health and safety. They have their own health and safety committee and elected health and safety representatives. It is obvious that they love their work, and many friendships have been made there. The committee's visit to the Barossa region was the first field trip undertaken by the Parliamentary Committee on Occupational Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation and, hopefully, will not be the last. In fact, we are calling on the member for Chaffey to help us organise a visit to the Riverland shortly.

Being able to visit businesses, talk with business leaders and workers and observe operations adds much to the committee's understanding of the challenges and achievements associated with business operations in regional South Australia. The committee was impressed by how each business invested in the health, safety and wellbeing of their workers and the benefits derived from this commitment.

On behalf of myself and the members of the committee—the member for Fisher, the Hon. John Dawkins, the Hon. Gerry Kandelaars, the Hon. John Darley—I would like to especially thank the member for Schubert for hosting the committee's visit to Pernod Ricard Winemakers, Vinpac International and Barossa Enterprises, which are all unique businesses with a clear commitment to achieving success and support for the region.

I extend my sincere thanks to the business leaders at Pernod Ricard Winemakers, Vinpac International and Barossa Enterprises for making their operators and key staff available for the committee's regional visit. I would also like to comment on the exceptional work that is done by our committee's executive officer, Ms Sue Sedivy, and thank her for helping organise this inaugural field trip. I commend the report to the house.

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (11:25): It does seem that my electorate is an electorate that people want to visit and I am more than happy to facilitate these visits. First, I would like to thank the businesses that participated in this—

Members interjecting:

Mr KNOLL: —and you will notice, Deputy Speaker, I am not responding to these interjections—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am so proud of you, member for Schubert.

Mr KNOLL: —the three employers that we managed to visit over that wonderful day. It was quite cold as we got there first thing in the morning but we headed off first to Pernod Ricard, better known as Jacob’s Creek at their facility there at Rowland Flat. That facility is the second largest employer in my electorate and a real contributor to the Barossa Valley's industrial heart. It is quite a sizeable facility and something that you do not really notice when you first drive past it, but it is extremely high tech.

This is a bottling line that produces 24,000 bottles an hour, and when you see these things move down the bottling line, it is a real sight to behold. In fact, and I do not think I am speaking out of school here, Pernod Ricard moved to bottling some of its product that it sells in the UK market to the UK and exporting them here in bulk. That meant a loss of quite a number of jobs in my electorate, probably two to 2½ years ago I think now. They are actually looking at bringing that work back because of some of the improvements and productivity improvements that Pernod Ricard at Rowland Flat have been able to make. If that work came back that would be absolutely delightful and it would show a real confidence in beverage manufacturing in the Barossa Valley.

We then headed across to Vinpac International, which is, as the member for Ashford said, owned by Woolworths. They run four different bottling lines, and I think they have a separate sparkling line (or that may be one of the four). They run a completely different style of operation. Whereas Pernod Ricard is very much one type of bottle—it is your standard 750 ml with either a Stelvin or a cork in it—Vinpac specialises in all the weird and wonderful, whether they be six packs bulk packs, whether they be a lay-down box, or whether they be different patented bottles of which the Barossa has quite a few.

Murray Street Vineyards I know, has a patented bottle, as does Kalleske. The funny thing is that, with a lot of these bottles, they all move differently down the line, and it has been suggested to me that the reverse taper on some of the bottles, especially the Murray Street Vineyards one, where it is thicker in the centre than the bottom, presents a lot of challenges, because as the bottles move down the line they tend to fall over. Having said that, this is where the hard-headed production side needs to find solutions to what the designers would like, but those distinctive bottles do make a difference in the marketplace.

Vinpac is an extremely impressive business. They spent $8 million increasing the size of their warehousing facilities and it seemed that the warehousing facilities were not even finished being built before they started to put wine in there, and now those facilities are full. There is a lot of wine sitting in storage in those facilities for not only Woolworths' own production but also for the clients that they have bottled for, and they then subsequently hold that production stock on site.

We then moved across to Barossa Enterprises, which is slightly different because it is a different style of workshop, but one no less impressive—and I want to touch a bit more on the disability sector more broadly in a second. One comment that I have about the three businesses that we visited—and I have had the fortune of being through all three of them previously—is that they have a commitment to safety that is really quite impressive. Each of the three of them deals with safety in a different way, but all three of them have a very strong commitment to safety and, in the case of Pernod Ricard, it has been recognised as being a leader in safety.

Another thing that is quite interesting to me is that we often associate our rural areas with being agricultural vast farmlands with very little built infrastructure, manufacturing infrastructure or industry. The Barossa is a place you would associate with being a beautiful, idyllic, working agrarian landscape with lots of vineyards and pretty colours depending on the season—at the moment we are just coming into bud burst and those vines that may look a little bit bare and sparse are starting to green up and come through the next phase into spring—but behind that is a lot of industry. To talk about employers who have 300, 400 staff on site and produce billions of dollars worth of product is really quite amazing.

The ability for that industry to blend into the landscape I think is a real testament to the planning that has gone on in the Barossa because that sort of heavy industry you would not associate with the Barossa Valley. The truth is that these are big buildings and large manufacturing operations that have to deal with trade waste implications, high energy use and a whole heap of issues with existing in the landscape in that environment and do so really well. That was quite interesting to see.

The last point I would like to make on this report is about our visit to Barossa Enterprises, which I am thinking was a bit of a favourite of the committee; we certainly enjoyed the tour. The Barossa has a really strong pathway for those with mental disabilities, and we have a disability unit at Tanunda Primary School that is world renowned. I have met a number of the teachers there and visited quite often. It is beautiful to see children with a mental disability able to learn and grow at their full capacity whilst still being integrated into a normal schooling environment. I think that that is quite important.

Those kids then tend to move on to Nuriootpa High School, which has two 20-person disability units, and I think they are looking at the moment to upgrade one of their disability units so that they have two stand-alone facilities that are purpose-built for what they need. Again, it is great to see kids with a mental disability integrated as much as they can be into the broader school society, whilst at the same time having their needs met, and reach their full potential.

Once those kids graduate from Nuri High, they tend to go on to Barossa Enterprises, which we visited, and there is an opportunity to give back to the community and engage in meaningful work. The products they produce there are fantastic; they are world class. Barossa Enterprises does compete with private industry when it comes to the provision of specialist boxes for high-end premium wines. The products they are encasing are expensive ultra premium products, and so these wooden boxes need to stand up and present that same quality image.

While we were there, Barossa Enterprises did talk about the challenge of dealing with the new NDIS funding arrangements, and that is something I really want to put on the record. The NDIS is something that both sides of this chamber have engaged with and are hugely supportive of, but the change from a collective block funding model to an individual model presents challenges for businesses such as Barossa Enterprises, who before were able to get, as I said, direct block funding from the government for the services they provide and now are going to have to help their staff and clients ('clients' meaning the people who work there) deal with this change to an individual model of funding.

It creates a level of uncertainty for a business that has a social objective, and that social objective needs to, I suppose, marry with its objective as a business that competes in the private environment. I think we need to be very mindful of those great institutions across our state, of which Barossa Enterprises is one of the best examples, to ensure that they are not lost in this rush towards the NDIS and that the expertise and structures they have built up over decades are not lost as we transition to this new scheme. I suppose that is a message I would like to send to the Minister for Disabilities at a state level and to the Minister for Social Services at a federal level.

Let's make sure that this community infrastructure—and in the Barossa it is not just Barossa Enterprises but also groups such as Carers Link, Lutheran Community Care and other organisations that access this block funding—this social infrastructure, which has been built up over decades and is extremely strong in a community driven society such as mine, does not get lost in this. We need to ensure their concerns are addressed and realised so that we can actually have an NDIS that is fully funded and works best for those it is seeking to support, but also so that it supports the infrastructure that supports those in need. With those few words, I commend the report and thank my fellow committee members for daring to come along to my beautiful electorate. I look forward to the next trip with gusto.

Motion carried.

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