URGENT NEED FOR FULL-SCALE ENQUIRY

Australian Wine Biz: Shattered
Chaos Demands Forensic Probe
Time For Some Due Diligence
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this was published on InDaily

Given the chaos and destruction rife across the Australian wine industry this vintage, there must be somebody, somewhere, willing to address the entire wreckage with an astute judicial review.

The mighty Australian wine boom depended on three presumptions, breath-taking in their hubris: an illogically-biased tax system, an endless supply of impossibly cheap water, and an unnaturally weak dollar.

Two of these three have rightly gone; the third, the ridiculous tax advantage, will also inevitably, eventually evaporate.
We have Tony Windsor, the Federal Independent Member for New England, running his investigatory committee suggesting there may be no need to cut irrigation allocations in the Murray-Darling Basin if everybody suddenly gets efficient; on the other hand a mess of commissions and policy wonks and Craig Knowles and the Murray Darling Basin Authority going all soft and gooey rather than hardening sternly on the management of the river system we have almost destroyed.

We have huge refineries and industrial grapeyards using up to 1200 litres of water to make one litre of wine which sells for less than the cost of good bottled water but is three times the alcoholic strength of your average beer. And twice as sweet.

In a country which usually has no water.

We have entire Murray-Darling communities going broke, a river system which is on the nose and worsening the further down you go, and professional long-term grape-growing families finding it impossible to compete with faceless tax-dodging conglomerates who plant enormous industrial grapeyards and don’t seem to care much whether they make a profit or not.

We have the ridiculous obsessions of our biggest grape ethanol manufacturers with the discount bins of Britain and Australia whilst they simultaneously go to war with the killer Australian duopoly, Coles and Woolworths, for control of the part of business where there’s barely any profit.

We have the unseemly hissy between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition as they taunt each other to do something about the horrendous alcohol abuse which is wrecking Alice Springs and all those misplaced desert mobs.

We spend well over $16 billion a year addressing alcohol-related harm, yet never connect that a great deal of this destruction comes from the bladder pack plonks which make up half of our national wine consumption and come from the wreck of the river.

We have treasury boss Ken Henry departing, leaving unaddressed his suggestion that part of the way to fix all this is the replacing of the current tax system – which is jigged to assist the bladder refineries – with a simple excise tax, which would treat all alcohol equally whilst decreasing the price of good wine, and increasing dramatically the price of goonbag plonk.

That suggestion’s still sitting there on the Federal leather, as obvious and popular as a steaming turd.

We have Jacob’s Creek, which is French, the cadaver of Constellation, which was American, and Fosters, which is from somewhere else entirely, running most of the show while they also run for it.

We have total disarray in the enormous and diverse wine industry councils and representative bodies, proven useless to the extent that the old family companies who set them all up have now formed their own marketing and shared-interest body, Family First Wineries, as a direct rival.

And this week we had Professor Larry Lockshin, of the University of Adelaide, releasing a report which found – surprise, surprise – that people mainly buy wine on price.

Anyone who has an honest grasp of the droll homogeneous nature of most of Australia’s wine would suggest there is no other sane method of making the selection. Who do they think we are? Do they really think we believe their tacky little bling stickers indicate any sparkles in the Stalinist monoculture of most of the wine in Australia?

There must surely be somebody out there who realizes that all this is connected: it is indeed the one big problem. Its monetary, environmental and social cost increases annually, and there’s not a soul in public life with the wit and balls to stand up and demand a complete, forensic, public examination of wine’s role in Australian life, and how it can be steered to offer a brighter, more positive reflection of our civilization and its propensity to conserve what is good.

Which is what conservative once meant.

Not to mention our gastronomic creativity, which is NOT reflected in ninety per cent of our wine.

And now, in a vintage where it seems very little of anything good can be conserved, where many of the wrong people will go unfairly to the wall, the whole damn wreck is screaming like never before for some astute intellectual attention.

Where might this come from?

The shattered and soused grape cockies of the Murray-Darling won’t be asking for it. Tony Windsor won’t be asking for it. The Federal leaders won’t be asking for it. Coles, Woolies, Jacob’s Creek, whatever’s left of Constellation and Fosters won’t be asking for it. The Family First wineries won’t be asking for it – half of them depend on Murray-Darling fruit. The independent retailers won’t be asking for it.

Which leaves us with the tattered broke specialist growers who have no respected representative body.

No money or poke there.

It leaves us with over 2,400 boutique winemakers, most of whom produce little product of any gastronomic exception, having got into the business for all the wrong reasons.

Total disarray there.

It leaves us with the medical lobby; the health professionals who would dearly love to see their tragic end of this addressed: but dangers of this being seen as neo-prohibitionism dilute its legitimacy from the start.

It leaves us with the fanatical proho dries, who all seem too busy getting rich in the name of Jesus to worry much.

It leaves us with the Police, who would love it, but can’t get sufficiently political to really scream for it.

It leaves us with the representatives of the wrecked aboriginal communities in the bed of the Todd River, who have been begging for it, to no avail.

Indeed there’s the perfect metaphor for the idiocy of all this: in the name of the finer things of life we are tipping one dying river system into an even drier one, the Todd, butchering the communities at both ends.

So who’s the saviour? The Greens? Nick Xenophon? Ken Henry?

Would anybody listen?