Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise enthusiastically, following our prime minister, to speak in strong support of the Excise Tariff Amendment (Draught Beer) Bill 2025 and the Customs Tariff Amendment (Draught Beer) Bill 2025. As the Prime Minister said, pubs pouring draught beer are made up of communities—communities of people where everyone has a seat. My local, the Buff Club in Stuart Park, is a good example, and I pay tribute to a member of our community there that we lost recently, Harry. I've spoken about Harry in this place in the past, but he passed the week before last, and we raised a glass of draught beer to him. The railway club is another one close to home and has long been a place for true believers to get together and to have a schooner of draught beer. There are many other great establishments and breweries that I'll mention in my electorate, but it is true that for Northern Territorians—and across northern Australia, I would say—this is a welcome measure and a great measure.

This measure applies to great brewers such as Darwin's One Mile Brewing Co. and their 4:21 Kolsch and RDO bright ale, as well as Beaver Brewery's Boofhead Lager, which reminds me of a humorous exchange across the dispatch boxes here in the past. I highly recommend all the One Mile beers and the Beaver beers. Visitors to Darwin can also head down to Mitchell Street, where Darwin's Six Tanks Brew Pub makes a fantastic range of beers, draught beers, and you can have a paddle of those craft beers. They'll also apply when you're enjoying multicultural events, such as the fantastic Territory Oktoberfest that was held by Beaver Brewery last year. The Purple Mango brewery at Marrakai in your electorate, Deputy Speaker Scrymgour, is fantastic, as is the Alice Springs Brewing Co., smack bang in Central Australia, where responsible drinking is the order of the day and delicious draught beers are plenty.

With my special-envoy-for-the-north hat on, it behoves me to mention the Spinifex brewery in Broome, Western Australia, and in particular their F88 premium lager, which is named after the Australian Army's service rifle. It's another veteran owned business. That label and that draught beer honours military personnel and first responders and is aligned with the sponsorship agreement with Soldiers and Sirens, which supports those personnel. In Far North Queensland, this excise freeze will also benefit you as you're having a draught beer at Hemingway's Brewery in Cairns, enjoying some of those big, bold flavours of their draught beers, such as the grapefruit, citrus and pine of the Wharf St IPA, which incidentally won a gold medal at the 2025 Melbourne Royal Australian International Beer Awards. I congratulate Hemingway's on that win.

My point is that, like all points of our great southern land, northern Australia and Territorians love a beer, and it's great to enjoy it in a pub and, as the Prime Minister said, contribute to that social cohesion and promote responsible drinking. In the Northern Territory, beer contributes about $167 million to gross Territory product and 1,273 full-time equivalent jobs. Nationwide, Australia's beer industry, from growing the barley to pouring pints in venues like those I've mentioned, generates around $16 billion a year. According to the Brewers Association of Australia, on average, every Australian made beer contributes $4.36 to Australia's economy, and it's a very decent return on investment. A 2018 study also indicated that local craft breweries play positive roles in engendering social, symbolic and financial capital in their home towns and regions.

This bill is good for the Australian economy, including the north, but also our regions, as I'm sure there is agreement across this place. This is a practical, targeted and responsible measure that supports small businesses, protects jobs and keeps the price of a pint stable for everyday Australians. According to the Independent Brewers Association report from February 2025, independent brewers, most of which are small businesses, contribute $3.53 billion to the Australian economy, 56 per cent of them are located in regional and rural Australia, and 48 per cent of the industry reports being unprofitable or just breaking even. So this bill is an assistance to this sector being sustainable and having those conditions for competition over time. The small independent brewers describe how they are forced to absorb the increases from the excise being indexed to CPI and increasing twice per year. They write that polling indicated that Australians wanted government to stop increasing the excise tax, and that is exactly what this bill does. This is what small businesses asked for, and it's very good for independent brewers.

As I used to say when I was in the Army, dehydration is a soldier's worst enemy. The Labor government is taking the fight to that fiercest, most unrelenting of foes. So, with this bill, there'll be less of Slim Dusty's pub with no beer and more pubs from Men at Work's land down under, where the beer does flow—with, hopefully, less of the rest of that song! The bill is good for small business pubs and clubs and brewers. It is good for the hip pocket of Australians who do like to have a pint, a schooie, or one of those smaller versions—I think it's called a pot. It's good for northern Australia and the regions.

For all of those reasons, I commend this bill to the House.

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