A follow-up to “The Escalator We Built and Won’t Use”, offered in the same spirit: not as criticism, but as an invitation to think differently about what comes next.
The response to the first piece told me something worth acting on: this industry wants to have this conversation.
So here are a few questions worth putting on the table. Not answers, and certainly not a finished plan. Just some starting points for where the conversation might go next.
Over more than forty years around this industry, it’s hard not to notice the genuine flourishing of organisations built to serve it — federal, national, state and regional bodies, alongside research and compliance organisations, each established with good intent and staffed by people who give an enormous amount of their time and expertise.
It’s worth being clear from the outset: none of this is a criticism of those people.
The question is about the structure they’re working within.
Much of that structure was built in better times.
Most of it is funded through some mix of industry levies, subscriptions and government funding, and all three of those funding lines are under pressure.
Levy and subscription income shrinks as growers and wineries leave the industry, with fewer businesses coming through behind them. Government funding is doing more of the heavy lifting than it used to, not necessarily because the industry chose that path, but because oversupply and shrinking sales have made it increasingly necessary.
Lee McLean’s advocacy earlier this year for federal structural adjustment support was a direct response to exactly that gap.
Is it sustainable to keep asking a shrinking base to fully fund a structure that was sized for a larger one?
That seems like a fair question to at least ask out loud.
The question isn’t whether our organisations are working hard. Clearly they are.
It’s whether the shape of the sector — the number of separate bodies, each with its own board, leadership, administration and overheads, often working on adjacent or overlapping ground — is still fit for purpose.
Silos aren’t just an inefficiency. They’re also where duplicated effort tends to hide, and duplicated effort is exactly what a shrinking funding base can least afford.
There’s a link here to the succession question raised last time, and it’s worth spelling out rather than assuming.
This industry currently supports a large number of senior positions across federal, national, state, regional, research and compliance bodies — CEOs, managing directors, executive chairs and others.
Every one of those roles needs a successor eventually.
Spread the same relatively small pool of experienced people across that many positions, and is it any wonder each vacancy can feel like starting from scratch?
Concentrate that same talent into fewer, properly resourced positions and the “who’s ready to step up?” question may become a lot easier to answer.
That’s not necessarily a smaller ambition for the industry. It may simply be a more achievable one.
There’s another constraint sitting underneath all of this too.
Many industry organisations operate under constitutions or articles of association that were drawn up for a narrower purpose than the one the industry now needs solved.
Those documents often exist for good reason. They keep an organisation focused on what it does well.
But they can also quietly rule out avenues an organisation might otherwise be able to explore.
In a climate where grape growers and wine companies need every legitimate avenue for diversification kept open, is it worth asking whether some organisations’ own governing documents have become one of the things standing in the way?
Not through anyone’s design. Simply because they were never written with today’s economics in mind.
If part of the answer to supporting producers into the future is more diversified economics, perhaps our governing documents need enough flexibility to support that too.
None of this is entirely hypothetical.
Australian Grape & Wine — the same organisation whose CEO search opened the first piece in this series — exists today because two separate national bodies, the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia and Australian Vignerons, took exactly this kind of look at themselves in 2018 and voted to amalgamate into one.
That happened because the industry itself pushed for it, not because anyone was forced into it.
If that was possible at national level once, is it really so far-fetched to ask the same question again?
Could similar thinking apply at state or regional level?
Could it apply between some research, administration or compliance functions?
There’s a useful external comparison too.
In 2002, the Wine Institute of New Zealand and the New Zealand Grape Growers Council merged into a single body, New Zealand Winegrowers, after identifying significant overlaps in mandate and operations.
More than two decades on, New Zealand Winegrowers describes itself as the only national wine industry body in the world representing both growers and winemakers.
Australia delivers broadly similar functions across a considerably larger number of organisations.
Again, that’s not a criticism of anyone currently doing the work.
It’s a genuine question about whether our scale still matches our structure.
None of what follows is a finished plan.
It’s genuinely scratching the surface, and I’d rather be wrong about some of the specifics and right about the need for the conversation than the reverse.
A few starting ideas:
Could a national body commission or “farm out” specific projects to the state or regional organisations best placed to deliver them, rather than every body building the same capability in parallel?
Regional organisations often have the on-ground relationships. National bodies often have the scale and access to government.
Right now, the tendency can be to build both everywhere rather than pairing the two.
Governance guidance for not-for-profits already expects boards to keep succession on the agenda and maintain a visible leadership pipeline.
Could that same discipline extend to structure?
Not just, “Can we afford this body next year?”
But, “Does this function still need to sit where it currently sits, on its own, with its own executive team?”
Could organisations review their own constitutions and articles of association through a diversification lens?
Not to abandon their core purpose, but to test whether boundaries drawn decades ago still make sense for producers who now need support through more diversified businesses and income streams.
Compliance, research administration, secretariat functions — some of this is genuinely specialised to a state or region, and some of it isn’t.
Where it isn’t, is sharing it really a loss of independence?
Or is it simply freeing up funding and people for the work that actually is specific to that patch?
Every organisation has good reasons, in isolation, to remain its own entity.
Those reasons shouldn’t be dismissed.
The question is whether, added up across a dozen bodies, they still serve growers and winemakers as well as a smaller number of well-resourced and well-led organisations might.
This is a significant mindset shift to even raise, and it isn’t raised lightly.
This industry isn’t short of capable people. The first piece argued exactly that, and nothing here changes that view.
What might be worth testing is whether the way the sector has organised itself still matches the industry it actually has today, rather than the one this structure was originally built for.
The future of this industry may lie less in what we already do, and more in what we’re willing to imagine doing differently — and then actually do.
This is deliberately an open door, not a closed argument.
I’m genuinely keen to hear where growers, winemakers and the people running these organisations agree, disagree, or would take any of this further.
That disagreement is the point.
If you missed “The escalator we built and won’t use”, visit our website to get up to speed.
— Ben Pridham
Pridham Viticulture
McLaren Vale, South Australia