By the winter of 2024, paddocks on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula and in the Mid North that should have greened up by June were still bare, and parts of both districts went on to record their lowest calendar-year rainfall since Bureau of Meteorology records began around 1900 (Bureau of Meteorology, Annual Statement, 2024). Further north and east, across the Murray Mallee and Upper North, graziers were carting water to troughs that had run dry and paying to freight in hay from Victoria and New South Wales, doing the sums on whether it was cheaper to feed a flock through to the next break in the season or sell it early into a falling market. By the 2024–25 financial year, much of south-eastern South Australia and western Victoria had recorded their driest twelve months since 1900–01 (Bureau of Meteorology, South Australia in 2025). This was not one bad district in an otherwise ordinary season — it was a drought that ran across almost the entire cropping and grazing half of the state at once, Eyre Peninsula to the Murray Mallee, hitting a food and wine sector that still generated $13.2 billion in industry revenue in 2024–25, even in a dry year (PIRSA, Primary Industries Scorecard, 2024–25).
What the government did
The Malinauskas Government's response has arrived in instalments rather than as a single, upfront package, broadly tracking the drought's own worsening trajectory. The first assistance came in November 2024: an $18 million package covering On-Farm Drought Infrastructure Grants, subsidised freight for donated fodder, council rate and utility relief in the worst-hit areas, and mental health and counselling support delivered through rural financial counselling services (Premier of South Australia, media release, November 2024). As conditions failed to break over summer, the government returned in April 2025 with a further $55 million — including an extra $13 million for On-Farm Drought Infrastructure Grants and $17.4 million channelled through the Future Drought Fund's Preparedness and Resilience program — taking cumulative state drought spending to $73 million (Premier of South Australia, media release, 8 April 2025). By August 2025 the running total had grown again, to $97 million, with the government citing direct consultation and roundtables with farmers and industry bodies including Grain Producers SA in shaping each addition (Premier of South Australia, media release, August 2025; PIRSA, Drought support package). The Department of the Premier and Cabinet took over coordination of the rollout, with a public commitment to process applications within 30 days. Then, in February 2026, at the South Australian Grain Industry Awards, the Premier announced a further and structurally different measure: a $200 million SA Drought Loan Scheme, offering drought-affected grain and livestock producers in the Murray Mallee, Riverland and Upper North loans of up to $250,000 over ten-year terms, with a two-year repayment holiday and a concessional interest rate set at 50 per cent of the Commonwealth ten-year bond rate for those first two years (PIRSA, South Australia Drought Loan Scheme; Stock Journal, 5 February 2026). The scheme opened for applications in March 2026, and the government reported its first approved loans within weeks (Premier of South Australia, "First drought support loans approved", media release, 2026).
The strongest case
A government that kept escalating, and did not wait for a formal disaster trigger
The government did not cause the rainfall deficit, and it does not control the atmospheric pressure systems that CSIRO and the Bureau blame for the drying trend (see below). Judged against what a state government can actually do, the record has real substance. Assistance did not stop at one announcement: $18 million in November 2024 grew to $73 million by April 2025 and $97 million by August 2025, each round shaped by direct roundtables with farm groups such as Grain Producers SA rather than designed in isolation in Adelaide. The government also moved on a structural gap that producers had specifically flagged — that grant money alone does not get a crop planted or a breeding flock retained — by opening a $200 million concessional loan scheme in 2026 with a genuine two-year repayment holiday, rather than leaving indebted farmers to ordinary commercial terms during the worst of the dry. And rather than waiting on a formal drought declaration — something the state government says it has no power to make under national drought funding arrangements — it kept adding assistance on its own initiative and its own budget, ahead of any Commonwealth trigger (farm press reporting, 2024–25).
The evidence
The rainfall data explains why this became a whole-of-state event rather than a local one. Parts of the Yorke Peninsula and Mid North recorded their lowest annual rainfall on record in the 2024 calendar year, and much of south-eastern South Australia, together with western Victoria, recorded its driest financial year since Bureau records began in 1900–01 across 2024–25 (Bureau of Meteorology, Annual Statement 2024; South Australia in 2025). The state then recorded its driest calendar year since 2019 in 2025, including its driest May since 2005 (Bureau of Meteorology, South Australia in 2025). Grain Producers SA wrote to the federal Agriculture Minister noting that many centres had recorded their lowest annual rainfall in over a century, and warned that a drought largely confined to South Australia and western Victoria was attracting less national attention — and, implicitly, less Commonwealth support — than disasters that hit several eastern states at once (Grain Producers SA correspondence, reported in farm press, 2024–25). Livestock producers across the Murray Mallee and Upper North faced their own version of the same squeeze: forced destocking, costly agistment on paddocks with feed, and a doubling-down on freighted-in fodder, pressures industry body Livestock SA and PIRSA both flagged as the reason freight subsidies and fodder logistics featured in every round of state support.
Production held up better than the rainfall numbers alone would suggest, but only after a scare. The Commonwealth's own forecaster, ABARES, lifted its 2025–26 South Australian winter crop forecast by five per cent to around 7.9 million tonnes — 4.24 million tonnes of wheat, 2 million tonnes of barley, 845,000 tonnes of lentils and 373,000 tonnes of canola — after useful rain reached the Eyre and Yorke Peninsulas in mid-2025; even so, ABARES flagged that subsoil moisture in marginal Mallee cropping country remained "below average to extremely low" (ABARES, Australian Crop Report, September 2025). The wine sector told a similar story of a shallow recovery from a low base: South Australia's 2025 winegrape crush rose 11 per cent on 2024's drought-affected low, to 687,564 tonnes, but that was still 10 per cent below the ten-year average, and Riverland growers — paying temporary water prices around $300 a megalitre, up roughly 50 per cent in a year — described their district as being in "the grip of a social and economic emergency" as late as November 2025 (Vinehealth Australia/PIRSA, SA Winegrape Crush Survey 2025; InDaily, 26 November 2025).
The critique
The instalment pattern the steelman credits as responsiveness reads differently from the other side of the ledger — it is also evidence that each package undershot the need it was meant to meet. The original $18 million in November 2024 was judged inadequate by farm groups almost immediately, and it took roughly nine months and two further top-ups, to $73 million in April 2025 and then $97 million in August 2025, before the state's grant assistance reached a scale industry bodies regarded as commensurate with a drought some centres were already calling the worst in living memory in late 2024. A government genuinely ahead of the conditions would have sized its first response closer to its fourth. Instead, farmers spent much of 2024 and 2025 watching support grow in reaction to worsening rainfall data and public pressure, rather than getting ahead of a deficit the Bureau's own numbers show was already severe by the time the first package was announced.
The geography of the state's largest single measure, the $200 million Drought Loan Scheme, is also narrower than the drought itself. It targets the Murray Mallee, Riverland and Upper North — but the Yorke Peninsula and Mid North, the districts that recorded the lowest rainfall on record in 2024, sit outside that list, leaving some of the worst-affected grain growers without access to the state's biggest single financial support instrument unless they qualify through other, smaller grant lines. A loan, however concessional, is also still debt: a two-year interest-only holiday defers the reckoning rather than removing it, and a producer who borrows up to $250,000 to get a crop in the ground during a drought carries that liability into whatever season follows, dry or not. Farmers backing a petition for a formal state drought declaration have been told the government says it has no power to make one under national drought funding arrangements, leaving South Australia's producers dependent on discretionary, incrementally announced packages rather than any trigger tied automatically to the severity of conditions on the ground (farm press reporting, 2024–25). And at each announcement the government has published a new cumulative dollar total, but no equivalent public accounting of what share of drought-affected farm businesses that money has actually reached, or how $97 million in grants sits against the income genuinely lost across a food and wine sector that PIRSA's own scorecard shows still turned over $13.2 billion in a dry 2024–25 — leaving the adequacy of the response, as distinct from its headline size, unverified.
A drought package that grew from $18 million to $97 million in nine months is not proof of a government ahead of the weather — it is a record of four announcements chasing one deteriorating season.
The risk to the future
The risk to the future
A drying trend, not a drought that breaks and is forgotten
The deeper risk is that 2024–25 is treated as a discrete emergency to be relieved and then filed away, when the climate science says otherwise. The Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO's State of the Climate 2024 report found that cool-season rainfall — the autumn and winter rain South Australia's cropping districts depend on to fill the soil profile before spring — has fallen by around nine per cent since 1994 across south-eastern Australia and by up to 20 per cent since 1970 across the south-west, driven by fewer and weaker cold fronts and more frequent high-pressure systems sitting over southern Australia (CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology, State of the Climate 2024). Southern Australia has recorded below-average April-to-October rainfall in 26 of the 32 years to 2025 (Bureau of Meteorology). South Australia is already the driest state on the mainland, so a structural decline in exactly the rainfall its grain and grazing districts rely on is not a risk at the margin — it goes to the base case for the industry's future. A government whose drought response is built around sequentially topped-up grant packages and time-limited loan schemes is answering a structural, recurring risk with an emergency-relief architecture. The test for this government, and its successors, is whether preparedness spending — on-farm water security, soil moisture and groundcover retention, and genuinely long-dated finance — grows as a share of the response over time, or whether South Australia simply waits for the next run of broken rainfall records to write the next relief cheque.