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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-04-09 Daily Xml
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Wine Industry

Mr WHETSTONE (Chaffey) (15:54): I would like to make a contribution today and talk about the wine industry here in South Australia. Sadly, currently the wine industry's economic woes continue. We have just finished a vintage and the writing on the wall has not been good. To put it into perspective, all of the 18 wine regions in South Australia are currently facing headwinds but no more so than the Riverland. The Riverland is the engine room of the wine industry. It produces an E and D-grade product. That is, it makes up the majority of exports out of Australia to our global partners.

The majority of the regions are growing fruit, making wine for a domestic product, and it has become very clear that those domesticated products have had in some way, shape or form a little bit of protection. They have not seen, as I said, the headwinds of the export markets. But the exporters—those regions that are export focused—have been hit very hard, particularly the red wine grape growers.

Over the short term, we have seen a lot of uncertainty and, when it comes to putting the product onto international shelves, we are now facing significant headwinds with other countries that have entered a lot of our major export markets, no more so than China. China has been very well documented and, since 2 March 2021, we saw a 218 per cent tariff imposed on container wine products. At that point in time, South Australia was exporting about $1.2 billion of wine just to China. As of March 2024, sadly we are down to $2.8 million and that is having a significant impact not only on South Australia's wine economy but is having a significant impact on the hardship of those wine grape growing families.

We must remember that back in 2015, the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement was one of the great boons for the wine industry, and where we saw the trade relations continue to grow. As the shadow trade minister, I was very sceptical about putting all of our eggs, all of our opportunities, into the China basket. The then trade minister—well, I will not talk about the former trader, but he was a trader, he was a trade minister—came out very hard and fast at me about putting our reputation with China at risk.

Now, as to the opportunity, myself as a former trader, myself as a former grapegrower, exporter, I saw that the writing was on the wall that we were becoming more and more vulnerable as every vintage went past. What I have seen since then has come very, very true. I would like to thank a number of my political colleagues not only on this side of the chamber, on this side of politics, but along the way. Back in July 2022, I met with the now federal Minister for Agriculture, Murray Watt. I took delegations to both him and Senator Don Farrell, and over that time I have met with Minister Champion and Minister Scriven.

I will touch on Minister Scriven quickly. It is funny that she continues to visit my region, and secretly. Not once have I been notified, not once have I received an invitation and not once have I been included in any of the public consultation. Not once. So, over that time I have met with many shadows—David Littleproud and Kevin Hogan—and I have met with all of the larger wine producing companies to get a better perspective on how we are going to tackle this.

We have just recently seen the current state government put a $1.85 million bucket of money into the equation to deal with technical, testing, labelling and customs issues, but what I want to just put on the record here is short-term relief for our grapegrowers: rate relief and ESL remission. We have to look at how the primary producer diesel fuel rebate can work as does an electricity rebate.

In the longer term, we have to have more inbound and outbound trade missions and we have to look at structural adjustment. That structural adjustment is about looking at opportunities outside of being a grapegrower. It is looking at keeping our world-class farmers on their farms but growing not just winegrapes but a more diverse crop. My final call to industry is they need to come together as one. Currently, we have 11 representative bodies all pushing in different directions. I am calling on the wine industry representative bodies to come together, because we know the China market will never be what it was—never again will it be what we have seen.

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