Outrage as Govt eyes extra wine take

The Government already gets $200 million a year from the industry, say unhappy winegrowers. Photo / File

Winegrowers have hit out at a proposal from the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) to recover an additional $2.9 million per year from their industry.

New Zealand Winegrowers chairman Steve Green said it was "manifestly unjustifiable" for the wine industry to pay $2.9 millon to cover the costs of the ministry's wine regulatory programme.

The country's wineries already paid more than $200 million to the Government each year.

"Payments have increased by $70 million, or more than 60 per cent, in the past decade. We would have thought MPI, as part of the Business Growth Agenda, would have been looking at how it supports the wine industry's growth, rather than imposing more costs on the sector," Mr Green said.

The proposal was part of a wider review of the fees the ministry charges to primary industries as part of biosecurity and food safety systems.

Hawke's Bay Winegrowers Association executive officer James Medina said as far as his association was aware, the wine industry was the country's only export sector which "gets punished by the Government with an annual indexed tax on its products".

"It seems both counterproductive and counterintuitive to introduce new taxes on the industry which is growing strongly at a time when other key exports are struggling."

He said in 2014 the average Bay grower received $1.55 per bottle of wine gross income before the costs of growing the grapes, while the Government received "a whopping $2.11 per bottle of wine in excise tax, plus GST on top of that".

"So the Government makes around 40 per cent more than Hawke's Bay growers off every bottle of wine sold in New Zealand."

Mr Green said the wine industry had been a "stand-out performer" in the economy over the past decade.

Exports had grown at a compound rate of over 13 per cent per annum, lifting from $435 million in 2005 to $1.33 billion in 2014 and they were expected to reach $2 billion by 2020.