Richard van Ruth responds to Adelaide Hills winemaker’s request to Agriculture Minister to set a timeline for the appointment of a permanent chair of Wine Australia.
Brendan Carter is right that leaving a statutory authority under an acting chair with no end date is untenable, and right to ask the Minister for a date. But there is a harder problem underneath the one he has raised, and the sector should be clear-eyed about it: even a permanent chair, appointed tomorrow, could not deliver what he is asking for.
Read Wine Australia’s own Board Charter. Its stated purpose is to promote and strengthen “the management, accountability, performance, governance and strategic direction of Wine Australia” – of the organisation, not of the industry.
The first responsibility listed for the board is “providing strategic direction for the organisation”. What follows is budgets, annual operational plans, financial position, internal controls, risk, compliance, remuneration frameworks and corporate culture.
Every item is inward-facing. The board governs Wine Australia. It does not govern the Australian wine sector, and the charter does not pretend otherwise.
The charter is equally direct about the limits: the board’s powers are created under the Wine Australia Act 2013, which “lists Wine Australia’s statutory objects, functions and powers and the constitutional limits within which Wine Australia must perform its functions. Wine Australia is not permitted to conduct activities that fall outside its statutory or constitutional remit as defined by the Act.”
Note too where accountability runs. The board is the “accountable authority” under the PGPA Act. Its duties include keeping the Minister informed, providing the Minister with an annual report, and providing the Minister with five-yearly strategic plans “in accordance with the Act“.
The lines of obligation run upward to Canberra, not outward to the growers and producers whose levies and export charges fund the place.
And the chair’s role, as the charter defines it, is leadership of the board – conduct of meetings, briefing of directors, guiding deliberations, relations between directors and management. It is not a mandate to convene the industry and arbitrate its future.
So when a strategic plan is re-based, what is actually being re-based is Wine Australia’s own investment priorities: where R&D money goes, which markets get promotional effort, what the authority itself will and won’t fund. Useful, and worth doing well.
But it is not a plan for the industry, and it cannot tell a grower in the Riverland whether to pull vines, or a producer whether to renew a contract. No chair – acting, permanent or otherwise – has been given that authority, because no one ever gave it to Wine Australia to give.
That is not an argument against appointing a chair promptly. Drift at the top of a statutory authority is its own cost, and six years with an expired term and a freshly reconstituted board is a poor footing for anything.
Appoint the chair, and set the date.
But if the sector’s real complaint is that nobody is setting strategic direction for the industry through the worst contraction in a generation, the vacancy is not the cause and the appointment will not be the cure.
That work sits with the sector’s representative bodies, with state governments, and with producers making commercial decisions in an oversupplied market – not with a Commonwealth authority whose own charter confines it to running itself well.