OZPLONK WINEBIZ, DESERT PEOPLE: CACTUS

Urgent Need For Oz Overview Wine, Drugs, Water, People Desert Mess Needs Sharper Brains

by PHILIP WHITE ... bits of this have appeared in the independent weekly

Bacchus and Pan are on a bender. They’re delighted that the ridiculous number of self-serving inquiries and committees investigating the dread realities of this country’s biggest river system show no sign of achieving needed change. They’re giggling drunkenly at a bar somewhere, delighted that of all the billions of dollars involved in the irrigation corrections proposed, and the millions of people affected, there is still no call for a full-scale public inquiry into what went wrong, and precisely which plonk the water goes into.

Those mischievous deities, and the ethanol dealers who worship them, are getting away with their deadly scam. While the international wine lake shows little sign of abating, the farmers of Australia’s arid centre are determined to keep adding to it.

Nobody seems willing to face the blatant reality: if you tip vast amounts of scarce, impossibly cheap water onto the desert to make wine which is three times the strength of your average beer but is sold for the price of bottled water, you have a business which is not in any way sustainable, even if a good deal of the plonk you so make is guaranteed consumption by our shredded original peoples.

If you can absorb Damming the Rivers of Grog, Russell Goldflam’s new paper on alcohol problems in the Northern Territory, without feeling wretchedly ill at the sanctimonious deceit of the wine industry, you might just as well join this nefarious racket.

Goldflam is the Principal Legal Officer of the Alice Springs office of the Northern Territory Legal Aid Commission, and Damming the Rivers of Grog is an extended and updated version of his presentation to the inaugural National Indigenous Drug and Alcohol Conference in June 2010 in Adelaide. It should be compulsory reading for all Australians.

But while most drug peddlers can be expected to traffic in lies and deceit, their financial models are breathtaking in their lucrative profitability. Not so our wine makers. The financial nous displayed in their exportation of irrigation-driven rotgut is even more dubious than their morality.

“Australia’s core business is cheap supermarket wines” my London colleague, Tim Atkin MW, wrote recently in the UK Off License News, “many of them sold on meaningless promotions.”

“But it also needs to think strategically,” Atkin (below left) continued.

“The strength of the Australian dollar and the scarcity of water in the country’s irrigated vinous heartland make a change of tack unavoidable. To put it bluntly: Australia cannot continue to make and sell wine of decent quality under £5. Or rather it can, but only if it is prepared to do so at a loss.”

Nobody in this country seems ready to think like the astute Mr. Atkin, except, perhaps, for Paul Henry, who has contentiously abandoned his post of general manager for market development at the Australian Wine & Brandy Corporation. The departure of Wine Australia’s UK director, Lisa McGovern, and of Paul Henry, within weeks of one another prompted Atkin to quote Oscar Wilde: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

Paul Henry always seemed to me to be far too pleasant and intelligent a man to be touting the Australian wine lake as an ongoing, sustainable concern. He saw the need to focus promotion on Australia’s better, more profitable wines: those reliable, respected luxury gastronomic products which have a true home and a true story.

Sustainable products.

Atkin reported the vast gap between the philosophies of Henry, and the likes of Paul Schaafsma, UK and European G-M of the beleaguered bulk exporter, Australian Vintage. “92.6% of all Australian wine is sold below £6,” he paraphrased Schaafsma, “so for Wine Australia to be allocating the majority of its budget to regional wines over and above £7 or £8 seems to be slightly flawed.”

Atkin and Henry have one supporter in the parliamentary Member for Mawson, Leon Bignell, who took withering flak for his February report suggesting “the UK market seems more than a little schizophrenic with its approach to sustainability.

“There is a lot of talk about airmiles,” Bignell wrote, “and the need to eat food and drink wine that hasn’t travelled around the globe but, when that argument doesn’t suit them, they revert to selling cheap wine that has actually cost our country millions of litres of valuable water.

LEON BIGNELL, MP, MEMBER FOR THE McLAREN VALE SEAT OF MAWSON, WORKING IN DUDLEY BROWN'S INKWELL VINEYARD

“While UK newspapers fill their features, news and opinion pages with missives about sustainability they don’t mind peddling unsustainable goods when they are profiting from our environment.”

Always a fearless defender of his beloved McLaren Vale, Bignell suggested “growers along the river in NSW and Victoria use up to ten times the amount of water per hectare used by growers in McLaren Vale … it is simply not sustainable for a number of different reasons ... the water should be left where it is worth more to Australians and our iconic river than it is in a bottle being sold on a UK supermarket shelf for less than what the water is truly worth.

“Making ordinary wine in places grapes weren’t meant to grow does immeasurable harm to Australian regions that do produce top quality wines.”

In stark contrast to the Murray-Darling Basin and its products, McLaren Vale uses no Murray-Darling water on its vineyards. It recycles locally-caught water from the coastal suburbs for its irrigation, and returns many more jobs and dollars, per litre of water used, than the inland irrigators. It does this producing the sorts of profitable premium wines Mr. Henry preferred to promote, rather than the megaswill River blends which we ship in giant bladder packs to Britain and the USA, where they sell for the price of Evian or Perrier in the sorts of expensive “meaningless promotions” Atkin derided.

While the implications of all this are clear to my mind, they add ridiculous illogic to Bignell’s position, entrapped as he is between a winemaking electorate fighting to protect its best agricultural land from his own party’s addiction to malignant housing development, which, perversely, provides irrigation water for the McLaren Vale vineyards.

UNIRRIGATED 1946 GRENACHE BUSH VINES AT YANGARRA ESTATE, McLAREN VALE - STACEY POTHOVEN photo

Struggling new home-owners in Bignell’s suburbs are sore displeased; while they’ve already paid for expensive waste recycling plants in their own backyards, they are now getting $6000 bills for the pipes to carry their waste water along the street to the water wholesaler, and then they’re being hit for an extra grand or two to connect the tanks they’ve already paid for to the new pipe in the street.

The recent tractor rally against new housing in McLaren Vale was a polite, dignified, powerful display of the rage the local farmers feel over proposals like Seaford Heights, where priceless high-profit viticulture land is about to be cemented over with a multi-storey ghetto. The SA Police were cool, there were no bad manners, the law was observed. The point was confidently made.

ONE OF THE EARLY ARRIVALS AT THE McLAREN VALE TRACTOR ACTION DEMO AGAINST THE SA GOVT - photo LEO DAVIS

And there was the very brave Bignell in attendance, fending the flack he gets for his own party’s lack of intellectual and moral clarity over this housing vs. sustainable agriculture argument.

Dudley Brown, chairman of the McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism Association, summarized the situation thus: “Leon can work has arse off for this district”, he said. “We love him. But his party has to realise that if they keep this up they’ll lose the seat of Mawson for a decade, destroy the career of one of their brightest performers, and lose a brilliant potential leader in the meantime. I mean what other talent have they got?”

THE GREAT STRING OF TRACTORS TOOK THIRTY MINUTES TO GET FROM THE MAIN STREET TO THE EDGE OF THE PROPOSED SEAFORD HEIGHTS DEVELOPMENT - photo LEO DAVIS

They certainly have none of the analytical talent displayed by my London winewriting colleague Atkin, the disappearing Paul Henry, or indeed the tireless Bignell.

But it is the wine business as a whole that lacks the intellectual exactitude required to retain great operators like Henry.

A good measure of the depth of this glamourpuss industry’s capacity to address these tricky issues appeared in the September/October issue of The Australian And New Zealand Wine Industry Journal, a perfect-bound collection of the opinions of winebiz insiders, often masquerading as science. This magazine lives off the advertising of the designers of critter wine labels, transnational chemical companies, sawdust salesmen and other mongers of shonky oak products like corks, and features a regular page by somebody using the pseudonym PP [sic] Bradshaw.

“My childhood was spent in the Riverland”, PP anguished, “and I have maintained close ties with the region ever since. I tend to take it personally. My hackles rose, therefore, when I read Philip White’s comment at the South Australia Wine Press Club held earlier this year that ‘… the Riverland produces poor quality wine and should be shut down.’ This is wine snobbery at its worst and is typical of the twaddle that emanates from some wine scribes. I suppose that when you have rarely purchased a bottle of wine for the past 30 years, it is easy to be snobbish. We don’t all have access to free Greenock Creek and the like."

THE AUTHOR AND GEOLOGIST JEFF OLLIVER WORKING ON THE SA GOVERNMENT'S McLAREN VALE GEOLOGY MAP - photo KATE ELMES

"If Mr. White got his head out of the rocks of the Fleurieu and bothered to do some real research, he would soon discover that Riverland fruit ends up in many good quality wines that are successful in the international market ... for example, I recently tried a Vermentino and a Nero d’Avola from Sunraysia-grown fruit. These are very nice wines, with better quality than many other wines from the Barossa – or wherever it is that Mr. White gets his free samples.”

While PP quotes another anonymous genius who purports to have been sufficiently present to paraphrase my impassioned and lengthy speech, whoever they are fail conspicuously to mention that I shared the lecturn with Bill Moularadelis, whose Kingston Estate was the plonk de jour, and whom I had busted in a front page newspaper story years earlier for doctoring his wines with illegal chemicals. That May 2000 piece in the only South Australian daily, The Advertiser, brought about the suspension of Moularadelis’s export license for using illegal silver nitrate to clean up his murkier plonks, resulting in an unseemly scramble to clear other Riverland wineries of illegal winemaking additives.

Unchallenged on any of this, Moularadelis preached at the Wine Press Club that no vineyards should be removed in the current glut because his company needed every grape it could get.

Nobody questioned the fact that the chairman of the SA Wine Press Club was Moularadelis’s newly-appointed distributor, with both gentlemen relishing the opportunity to display their wine to the many key industry folks, bankers, and media representatives that had come to the National Wine Centre to hear my address.

THE NATIONAL WINE CENTRE IN THE ADELAIDE BOTANIC GARDENS HAS COST THE TAXPAYER WELL OVER $50 MILLION - photo KATE ELMES

While they’re busy in their smoke-free rooms, sweating over their dying River, and their lack of profit, planning and vision, the wine industry’s plethora of councils, lobbies, and publications exude only a dumb silence while the opposing health lobby grinds determinedly on, demanding a rewrite of the taxes imposed on wine. Herein lies a problem even bigger than the tricky removal of water from those farmers addicted to the irrigation of arid land.

There was a certain degree of miffedness last week when the alcohol statisticians finally realised that one critical factor had slipped through their forensics: their supposition that Australia’s thirst for alcohol had stabilized in recent years failed to include the fact that Australian wines have been steadily growing in alcoholic content. So in spite of an apparent slight decrease in total alcohol consumed, triggered by the higher alco-pop tax, once the burgeoning strength of our wine is included in the figures, it appears we actually drank more.

I reminded the Wine Press Club that regardless of their stature in the gastroporn world, winemakers sell a dangerous depressive drug called ethanol. It makes people drunk. Drunks tend to bash each other and get killed on the roads. Over the last fifteen years, these ethanol dealers have steadily increased the strength of their product.

The cheapest way to get drunk in Australia is to drink bladder pack wine, which makes up about half of our total wine consumption, and comes from the irrigated riverlands.

Because wine is not taxed on the amount of ethanol it contains, like other alcohol, bladder pack plonk is a much, much cheaper route to the sort of oblivion sought by many.

How many percentage points are we talking?

“How much?” is the more pertinent question, and I don’t mean volume of alcohol. I mean the damage bill the taxpayer meets. One good measure, repeatedly cited by the health lobby, is the National Drug Strategy report of 2008, which found that the 2004-05 bill for “alcohol-related harm”, amounted to $15.3 billion.

When alcohol prices increase, consumption falls. But politicians can’t handle the next fact: people who feel the need to self-medicate into oblivion will choose another intoxicant, which will probably be illicit, and therefore not taxable.

But when deserved public attention is paid Treasury boss Ken Henry’s logical proposal to tax wine like all other alcohol, on its gross amount of ethanol, there will be an instant decrease in the amount of irrigation water required by the bladder plonkmongers and their growers.

The price of a $12, four litre bladder will head quite logically and rightfully toward $30, and the most expensive wines will be cheaper. While this will diminish the ravaging of desert communities by alcohol, it will wreak more havoc on the grape growers of the irrigated inland than the most savage water restrictions.

Put simply, the river will flow again. And the poor deluded farmers will flow out of their beloved bush, into the cities and Centrelink and the arms of the shrinks and the pharmaceutical transnationals who dictate drug policy. Regardless of what it costs the taxpayer, these ripped-off folks may even move to the seaside suburbs near McLaren Vale, and contribute their waste water to the local recycling plant for profitable viticulture.

Add to this confusion the latest discoveries about the amount of public harm caused by alcohol relative to illicit drugs, and the logical mind would suggest that those growing grapes would be better off growing marijuana on their arid, salty, sandy land. It would require less ground, much, much less water, would slow increasing soil salinity and incur a much lower health cost per user than the strong plonk currently produced. To be blithe, you can even make rope and fabric and insulation from hemp, and one recent report suggested that the dreaded opiates incur a much lower total public health cost than alcohol, measured per user.

So while all these inquirers and lobbyists and angry farmers foment and wave their pitchforks for the telly, while more skrillions are spent on more self-interested pow-wows, there is still no respected investigator combining these obvious issues. It’s not just the amount of water we abuse. It’s not just the rural farming community hurt and the destruction brought on by the over-allocation of irrigation water. It’s not just the river running into the ocean like it should, the red gum forests surviving, the fish, or even the votes in the electorates.

This whole mess is about our community’s yearning for oblivion, and its incredible capacity for self-deceit. This delusion expands exponentially once you enter the parliamentary bars or the sanctimonious halls of the wine business, where there is too much to lose.

It is essential that government should set up a well-funded inquirer to passionately yet forensically investigate all of this. If the wool board, the wheat board, or the mining industry made such a humungous stuff-up, there would be a dead serious inquiry, and those responsible would be denied their chance to repeat such destruction. Heads would roll. Changes would be made. Things would improve.

As for the illicit drugs industry … well, while Bacchus and Pan appear to be winning that one too, at least somebody actually declared war. I'd like to see the rules of engagement.

Moularadelis’s Kingston Estate, meanwhile, has failed spectacularly to buy all the grapes he promised he needed. He seemed sincere at the time.

WINE TAX ISSUE NOT DEAD YET: LISTEN UP!

KNOW THIS FEELING? BEEN THIS CLOSE AND SURVIVED? IF WINE HAS GOT YOU INTO THIS SORT OF TROUBLE, THE ODDS ARE YOU WERE FULL OF HIGHLY IRRIGATED BLADDER PACK PLONK. THIS HALF OF THE AUSTRALIAN WINE INDUSTRY DOES MORE THAN DESTROY THE WATERS AND ENVIRONMENT OF OUR ONLY MAJOR RIVER SYSTEM; IT MAKES PEOPLE KILL EACH OTHER

A Sobering Hour Of Radio ...
Plonk Lobby In The Spotlight ...
Brave ABC Pops Big Questions:

Australian Broadcasting Commission presenter, Kieran Weir, hosted a brave, pertinent and wide-ranging discussion on air this week. The hour-long conversation covered many aspects of public alcoholism, dry zones, health problems, the bladder pack business, alcohol tax, civic drinking laws, spirits, wine, gastroporn and politics.

With producer Petria Ladgrove, Weir assembled a panel of confronting but constructive contributors that included

* David Crosbie from the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Centre
* A very brave Alcoholics Anonymous member from Port Pirie
* Karyn Read from the Port Augusta Alcohol Management Group
* The Distilled Spirits Industry Council
* The Federal Member for Grey Rowan Ramsey

and Philip White, the author of DRINKSTER and DRANKSTER, who once again called for an immediate independent inquiry into this whole bloody mess.

No matter whose side you take, this is compelling and challenging listening for anybody in the alcohol business, and all recipients and dealers of its wares, whether casual, or terminally addicted.

ABC PRESENTER AND FILM-MAkER, KIERAN WEIR

And of course it is essential listening for everybody involved in the beleagured wreck of the Australian wine business.

DRINKSTER remains enraged that there was NO public discussion of Treasury boss Ken Henry's proposal to tax all alcohol by excise, and that faceless wine industry operatives got to an intellectually decrepit and punch drunk government to ensure the whole proposal should be quietly shelved.

This discussion must be conducted openly and nationally, and not left to a brave and enlightened regional radio station.

It can no longer be left to faceless lobbyists who squander millions influencing politicians in Canberra.

To hear the program in its entirety, click on either photograph.

AUSSIE PLONKMONGERS LOSE THE PLOT

Ethanol Floggers Flog On ... Oz Pollies Taken For Suckers Again ... Forensic Enquiry May Shake These Dangerous Tendenciesby PHILIP WHITE - a shorter version of this appeared in The Independent Weekly


There is no better metaphor for the Australian wine industry than its National Wine Centre, which has finally become a busy pavilion for weddings. It lies there, ribs poking skyward, its drying gizzards wriggling with brides.

I have no statistical evidence to suggest the success of these marriages is any different to the national average: one in three generally ends in divorce.

It's all tiresomely suburban.

The Wine Centre’s biggest publicity – ever - followed the incident when Rick Phillips went in there and whacked our Premier, Mike Rann, about the face with a rolled-up Winestate magazine.

Phillips pled guilty, while his ex-wife, Michelle Chantelois, who’d been a barmaid in Parliament House, repeatedly claimed she’d maintained a sexual affair with Rann who repeatedly denies this, while publicly apologising for any distress it has caused her or her family.

And now, as if to complete its transformation from National Wine Centre to wedding and celebrity divorce factory this troubled facility is even flogging its wine collection.

Smart observers knew, when $50+ million of taxpayers’ money snuck that corpse into our sacred Botanic Garden a decade back, that this industry, its august councils, and the politicians it seduced, all deserved forensic scrutiny.

Who are these people? The hairdos have gone from Brylcreem combovers to spiky and shooshed, but the mentality is as constant as the suits.

They cannot halt the wine industry holocaust. For their shareholders, they encouraged it to fester, at the expense of our water, our environment and civic amenity, the salinity of our soils and aquifers, our public health, and our economies: national, town-sized, familial and individual.

The glittering refineries they inflicted on our rural vistas frankly reflect the chrome pillows blowing like leaves about aboriginal lands.

They built an industry that - by vast chemo-mono grapeyards - mines the arid Mallee for sugar, which is used to make ethanol, a highly-dangerous depressant and recreational drug. Over half the Australian business depends on this formula, and in bladder packs or cleanskins sells sweetened ethanol - which is three times the strength of your average beer - at about the price of bottled water. Or less.


They built an industry in the Australian desert which depends upon endless supplies of virtually free water, an international clientele with a constantly-intensifying addiction, and a pathetic Aussie dollar.

It also lacks basic gastronomic intelligence, expects the same of its clients, and presumes the absence of any smart competition from other countries.

Like, say the countries adjacent to the Andes, which happen to be full of snow which melts to make irrigation water. These grape regions are populated by peasants who work for almost nothing, and whose laws lack the scant environmental restrictions which somehow survive in Australia.

A telling gauge of how this industry’s authorities are respected is the advent of the Family First Winemakers. As this new coalition of the great wine families – Peter Barry, Hill Smith, Taylors, Tyrrells, Brown Brothers, d’Arenberg, McWilliams et cetera – barges forth to promote the “heart and soul” of the Australian business internationally, they attempt a task which the bodies they were implicit in creating have obviously failed to perform.

Who else gets a gong? Oh yes. On February 7th, Dr. Brian Croser AO (left) made a hissy speech blaming the big companies for mucking everything up. This was reported widely.

The Australian Winemakers Federation Croser established helped shove the Wine Center upon us, only to see it slide two years later, virtually bankrupt, into University of Adelaide hands for $1 a year.

When he was determinedly pushing the Wine Centre into the Garden, I questioned Ian Sutton, then Chief Executive of the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia, Wine Australia Pty. Ltd., Australian Wine Foundation and the Australian Wine and Brandy Producers' Association. I asked about the strangely optimistic business plan, and just how much consulting had been done to get the true feeling of the industry, much of which seemed a tad embarrassed about the whole thing.

"My job's not to consult the wine industry”, Sutton snarled. “My job is to represent the wine industry".

Croser was the University’s deputy chancellor at the time, determinedly pushing his agenda to have what was the fusty old winemaking school at Roseworthy fully absorbed by the glittering Adelaide campus. "Technologising", I heard one boffin describe it at the time.

Big companies? To the tune of hundreds of millions, it was Croser’s Petaluma group that slid through Lion Nathan into the hands of the mighty Japanese Kirin Brewery under the caress of his Petaluma accountant Andrew Cheeseman (right), who now heads the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation.

Just days after his spray at the Big Guys, Croser made another speech: he’d suddenly discovered that Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay was much better than he’d previously considered.

His initial blast at the big companies would have infuriated people like Phil Laffer of Pernod-Ricard, the French families who own Jacob’s Creek, whose company secretary, Kate Thompson, sits on the board of the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation. Along with Dr. Tony Jordan, antipodean lieutenant of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey.

Croser made the Adelaide Hills wine region. He planted the Piccadilly Valley with Jordan, and set forth preaching his gospel for decades, adding great value to his Petaluma. Over endless lunches at his Bridgewater Mill, he encouraged Dr. Ed Tweddell of Fauldings to invest massively in the hills, by setting up the Nepenthe viticulture company that planted vast swathes of vineyard whose fruit ends up now in Jacobs Creek or the carcass of McGuigan’s Australian Vintage. If Kirin doesn’t want it.

The latest top yarn concerning this lot is the Rabobank report of senior analyst Marc Soccio (left). It says the industry’s crook, although he thinks it’s not so much the buggered Riverlands, but cool places like the Adelaide Hills which are far too slow to uproot.

Like the river grapeyards, too much of this upland planting was committed by the wrong people in the wrong places for all the wrong reasons, like tax advantage, or fashion. Many of these doctors, lawyers, and wealthy retirees who dared, with the persuasion of people like Croser, to compete directly with seasoned generational growers in McLaren Vale and the Barossa, should never have entered the industry.

Tragically, we can't ask my good friend Dr. Ed Tweddell about this, as he committed suicide in 1995 (CORRECTION : 2005; not 1995). His son James, who ran the vineyard development company, now runs a nightclub in Queensland.

Rabobank seems confused about gradings of wine quality. Like the freshly-re-enlightened Croser, it obviously regards Jacobs Creek as premium. You can’t blame them: as Croser and his Petaluma chairman, Len Evans, ran the Australian wine show system for decades, megabulk brands like Jacobs Creek won bounteous bling.

Croser would never enter Petaluma in the wine shows. There are still people who remember his rage when he discovered his marketing manager, Bob McLean, had quietly entered Petaluma red in the Melbourne show. While the Petal was notably failing to win the Jimmy Watson Trophy inside, where Croser vented his feelings, ace Wolf Blass red man, John Glaetzer, was crawling around the bushes out the front, yelling “Where’s the dummy? Where’s the dummy?”

Glaetzer could afford to joke: he’d already won a record three Jimmies, and went on to win a fourth.

Individuals aside, this crazy amalgam of savagely competitive ethanol dealers needs a new sheriff. Those responsible for the current carnage should be forced to withdraw, never to play with such power again.

But the blithe refusal of the Rudd government to accept treasury official Ken Henry’s perfectly logical and fair excise regime for all alcohol taxation is crisp evidence that the ancien regime still rules: its lobbyists have been very hard at work reinforcing the constipating inertia extant. Henry’s proposal would have finally and sensibly rendered most of the unsustainable arid land grapeyards unprofitable, but bolstered the chances of small, premium producers.

The frisson of delight at the dribble now oozing down the big rivers proves there is no change, and no change likely. The same old suits sniff a new wave of dirt cheap Riverland premium. Maybe the piddly prices the National Wine Centre gets for its wine collection will best reflect just how premium all this premium really is.

While they’re saying twenty per cent of the national vineyard must go, it’s time somebody admitted the figure should be more like thirty or forty per cent. In lieu of any smarter method of devising the number, they could follow the success rate of the weddings in their National Wine Centre, loaded with an index locked to the tumbling prices of that premium wine collection.

But with all dread seriousness, the vine pull formula should be based on the number of jobs and dollars each litre of irrigation water creates. In places like Barossa and McLaren Vale, this ratio is normally exponentially ahead of any part of the Murray-Darling Basin, which now seems to extend to include the Limestone Coast. Not to mention the Adelaide Hills.

The glut these industrialists created sees professional growers, some four to six generations strong, suddenly being paid $300 a tonne instead of $3000. You don’t need so much premium fruit at $3000 now that you’ve decided the desert produces premium at $300.

Anybody taking water from the Murray-Darling should be forced to pay real prices for it. A litre of water should have a price. Period. Irrigators should pay a price a helluva lot closer to the amount that an Adelaide resident is expected to pay for what manages to ooze from the mains.

If you’re growing truly premium grapes in a unique place like McLaren Vale, where much of the irrigation water is recycled waste from coastal housing estates, you should be encouraged to remain in the business.

But the percentage of vineyard currently for sale in the Vale simply serves to prove that in the eyes of these industrialists, true quality, continuity and professionalism, let alone the environment, simply do not matter. The casual investor, the shareholder, is king.

The politicians are simply inept in addressing this. The only one to poke his head up with a sensible suggestion was Leon Bignell, the Labor member for Mawson, which includes McLaren Vale. The great Rudd/Wong/Rann triumvirate has failed to convince anybody. Tellingly, against all the pundits’ great wisdoms, after his statement, Bignell actually increased his margin in the recent South Australian election. Much greater egos saw their margins shrivel, and seats disappear.

When the wool business, the miners, or the wheat board makes a mess like this, there’s a very prompt independent enquiry. Heads roll. People are stood up and expected to explain their actions. Heros emerge.

Before Croser comes back to save the wine industry, there should be an independent judicial enquiry.

EXCISE IDEA COULD DESTROY BLADDER BIZ

AN EXCISE WOULD SEE THE PRICE OF EXPENSIVE WINES LIKE THESE TUMBLE WHILE BLADDER PACKS WOULD DOUBLE. photo LEO DAVIS

Rudd Money Man Wants Excise WET Rebate May Dry Up Lobbied Pollies In Abject Panic

by PHILIP WHITE - a shorter version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly

Treasury wallah Ken Henry has thrown a very tricky handful of marbles under the feet of the wine industry with his recommendation that the current scramble of alcohol taxes be replaced with a simple excise. For seasoning, he’s thrown another handful under the political dries who want to tax kiddylikker - and spirits - to oblivion. With state and federal elections brewing, we’re in for a spat of extreme panic in Pollyville, as the mighty grog lobbies get to their nefarious work.

Henry is a favoured apparatchik of Labour Prime Minster Kevin Rudd, who faces an election soon, in the midst of insurmountable difficulties in attempting to manage the dimishing waters of the Murray Darling Basin. Two Australian states also face elections, six quick weeks from now. One of these, Tasmania, which is sinking in good water, has a premium wine industry but no discount bin plonk production; South Australia produces the most of both types of wine, with much of the business dependent on Murray River water, of which there is none.

Although general political commentators have so far failed to realise the full implications of Henry's proposal, State Labour leaders like South Australia's Mick Rann will soon be forced to announce the attitude they'll take when lobbying their federal counterpart.

WHILE THE TAX WOULD BE A NATIONAL IMPOST, SOUTH AUSTRALIAN PREMIER MICK RAM HAS ONLY DAYS TO MAKE A STAND ON THE EXCISE WHICH HIS FEDERAL COUNTERPARTS ARE CONSIDERING.

Wine is currently taxed on the value of the unit sold, be it bottle or bladder. Under an excise, which is a tax on the total alcohol each unit contains, the cost of a $14 bladder pack would double, to $31.07, while a $30 bottle would fall to $27.53. These KPMG figures would see your favourite boutiques boom, and the Murray-Darling Basin wine industry collapse.

HARD LIQUOR PRICES WILL TUMBLE UNDER THE EXCISE PROPOSAL

Never before has the gap between the polarised wings of the wine business looked wider. But industry bodies, like the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation, which is partly funded by the taxpayer, are obliged to represent everybody in the business, so will have to protect the bladder boyos, who produce half the wine consumed, if not made, in Australia.

These two ends of the business have always been at war. It was Brian Croser who went to Canberra at the onset of the GST and current messy regime and organised the Wine Equalisation Tax, which offered newly disadvantaged small producers an annual rebate.

This writer argued contentiously at that time that an excise was the only clean, logical manner of taxing alcohol. It was a classic Aries vs. Virgo reposte. Croser came home touting his deal as a great victory for the entire industry. I argued that it was terribly messy, and would only postpone the inevitable collapse of the discount bin business.

WINE AND BRANDY CORPORATION BOSS ANDREW CHEESEMAN WAS BRIAN CROSER'S ACCOUNTANT AT PETALUMA

Croser’s band-aid would simply keep the huge irrigating industrialists on side with the tax-dodging doctors and lawyers with ill-conceived hobby vineyards. No doubt he had discussed this at great length over many Bridgewater Mill lunches with the likes of Alexander Downer, the former Liberal government's Minister of Foreign Affairs. Not to mention folks like Amanda Vanstone (Immigration Minister under the same conservative regime) and Robert Hill (Defence Minister who became Ambassador to the United Nations), who co-owned the relatively tiny Amicus brand with Walter Clappis. These guys had a very heavy pull on John Howard’s wine taxation philosophy.

An open, far-sighted mind might see Henry’s proposal as the perfect opportunity to cleanse the big rivers of the scourge of an industry which is in such gross, nay, grotesque, oversupply to the extent that it’s collapsing anyway. This would release water to the Murray Mouth, and remove the source of much of the grog consumed as an alternative to sniffed petrol in aboriginal communities.

HENRY'S EXCISE WOULD SEE A BLADDER PACK SOAR FROM $14 TO $31, AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE IRRIGATING DISCOUNT WINE BUSINESS, LEAVING A LOT MORE WATER TO RUN DOWN THE MURRAY. GOOLWA IMAGE BELOW BY KATE ELMES.

It would also, according to the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia, result in the loss of 12,000 jobs.

Whilst the cynic might argue that these jobs are going anyway, the idea of the new tax will fill many country electorates with even more fear and depression. The milder sceptic could suggest that the discount wine industry is in permanently deep merde as long as the international wine glut continues, and that any movement which might lead to its dimunition is something healthy which much be addressed.

Apparently Henry has stepped his excise numbers: the brackets would be 3.5 per cent alcohol and below, then up to 5 per cent, 7 per cent, 10 per cent, 15 per cent, and above 22 per cent.

This would also favour the premium wine lover who has spectacularly, internationally, turned away from the sorts of dead-head alcohol bombs we’ve been rotely making in the twelve years since one American critic, Robert Parker Junior, began to tout them. While the wine blog explosion has seen Parker lose some power, the notion of an increased tax on wines above 15 per cent would surely be a strong incentive to Australian winemakers to return to healthier alcohols. Sales of more modestly balanced alcoholic wines should increase internationally.

In the meantime, a relaxing of the stifling tax laws and regulations on distillation could see a great deal of the wine glut converted to industrial alcohol, the income from which could perhaps be devoted to funding the next vine-pull scheme, which seems increasingly imminent, and would be likely to see a permanent cessation of irrigating to produce wines which sell for less than the price of bottled water.

As for the price of alcopops falling from $3.30 per unit to $2.42, well. At the risk of adding complexity to Mr. Henry’s pristine simplicity, perhaps the excise should be extended in the case of premixed drinks to include an extra charge on sugar and other sweeteners when mixed with alcohol. If caffeine was also included in this kiddylikker, another hike could be imposed. Banning such cocktails is futile: anybody can whup down three or four stiff short blacks between sessions in the boozer.