The grant is dead! Long live the WET?

The way of taxing wine in Australia is imperfect. With the termination, recently, of the Wine Tourism and Cellar Door grants, wine historian Edward Cavanagh provides an overview of recent policy developments in order to call into question the current system of bundling together a wholesale tax and a goods and services tax with rebates. In the recent federal budget of May 2026, it was announced by the Labor government that the Wine Tourism and Cellar Door grant was winding up. The decision has taken many within the industry by surprise. A sense of surprise is fairly enough felt. After all, just a few weeks earlier, the very same initiative wa…