By the start of the 2024 vintage, grape growers walking their blocks between Renmark and Waikerie in South Australia's Riverland were doing a sum that had gone backwards for three years running. Shiraz that had fetched around $700 a tonne in 2019 (approx.; industry reporting) was being offered at close to $200 a tonne, and indicative prices for some parcels in the early 2025 vintage fell again, to as little as $80 to $120 a tonne (approx.; The Drinks Business, February 2024; Drinks Trade, January 2025) — against a cost of production industry sources put at more than $350 a tonne. Water leases for the coming irrigation season had jumped by around half in a year, to roughly $300 a megalitre (approx.; industry reporting, 2024–25). In February 2024, growers parked idle tractors outside Parliament House in Adelaide in protest; a year later, Riverland industry figures wrote an open letter warning the Premier that, without government action, the situation would become "even more catastrophic." For a district that in a big year crushes close to 60 per cent of South Australia's own wine grapes, and that sits inside a wider inland belt of Australian regions supplying around 70 per cent of the national crush (approx.; Vinehealth Australia/PIRSA, SA Winegrape Crush Survey, 2021 and 2025; Wine Australia, National Vintage Report), the choice facing many growers was no longer how to cut costs, but whether to keep growing grapes at all.
What the government did
The Malinauskas Government, elected in March 2022, took office nine months before the River Murray's biggest flood since 1956 forced a State of Emergency along the river corridor from Renmark to Murray Bridge in December 2022, and it has since governed through a wine-grape price collapse and what farm groups describe as the district's third consecutive dry-conditions year by 2025. On the flood, the state and Commonwealth governments jointly funded a River Murray Flood Recovery package that reached at least $178 million by January 2023 — reportedly the largest disaster relief package in South Australian history at that point — rising to more than $194 million in combined state and federal spending as the clean-up continued, with grants of up to $75,000 for flood-affected primary producers and up to $50,000 for small businesses (approx.; SA Government, Recovery.sa.gov.au; InDaily, January–February 2023). On drought, the government rolled out an initial $18 million assistance package in November 2024, followed by a further $55 million on 8 April 2025, taking total state drought support to $73 million — covering on-farm infrastructure grants, subsidised fodder transport, council rate and utility relief, and mental health funding for farmers across the Mid North, Riverland and Murraylands (Premier of South Australia, media releases, November 2024 and April 2025). On the wine crisis specifically, the state government's response has largely been to back the Commonwealth's 2023–24 review of the industry, chaired by Dr Craig Emerson, and to support existing structural adjustment programs rather than legislate new state relief, leaving direct income support for grape growers largely absent from the state's own measures. Underneath all three responses sits a broader regional investment claim: the government's 2024-25 State Budget included around $1.8 billion in new measures for regional South Australia across infrastructure, primary production, police and health, and in September 2024 it published a Regional Blueprint putting the state's public-and-private regional investment pipeline at $62.56 billion, up from $44.6 billion two years earlier (approx.; SA State Budget 2024-25; Premier of South Australia, September 2024).
The strongest case
Three shocks in one term, and a government that kept turning up with money
The government inherited a flood emergency nine months into office, did not create the global wine oversupply or the now-lifted Chinese tariffs that hammered Riverland reds, and cannot make rain fall in a river system it does not control. Judged against what it could control, the record is genuinely solid. The flood package was scaled quickly and became one of the largest disaster recovery spends in state history, reaching river towns within weeks rather than years. The drought package, rather than sitting on an inadequate initial $18 million once a third dry year became undeniable, was more than tripled within six months. And a state government that supplies only part of a $62.56 billion regional pipeline — most of it private investment intentions rather than appropriated public money — still chose to publish the figure annually and be measured against it, region by region, rather than let regional SA's fortunes go undocumented. None of the three underlying problems is entirely within Adelaide's gift: the wine glut is a national and export-market problem, the drought is a rainfall problem, and the 2022–23 flood was an upstream catchment problem. A government that met all three with real money, not just sympathy, has a legitimate claim to have shown up for the regions.
The evidence
The scale of what is at stake is measurable in tonnes as much as dollars. The Riverland crushed 558,252 tonnes of wine grapes in 2021, 59 per cent of the state total that year and, at the time, the first crush over half a million tonnes the district had ever recorded (Vinehealth Australia/PIRSA, SA Winegrape Crush Survey, 2021). By 2025, South Australia's total crush stood at 747,688 tonnes, 48 per cent of the national crush, with the Riverland still the largest single contributor (Vinehealth Australia/PIRSA, SA Winegrape Crush Survey, 2025). Citrus is smaller but still substantial: the Riverland is Australia's third-largest citrus growing region, with 5,518 hectares of plantings — about 20 per cent of the national citrus footprint — and its official fruit-fly-free area status has kept export markets such as Japan open in a way other Australian citrus regions cannot match; the state's citrus industry had a farm-gate value of $136 million in 2018–19 (Citrus Australia; PIRSA, citrus industry data). Almonds are the newest and most water-intensive addition to the district: the Riverland holds around 18 per cent of Australia's almond plantings, behind Victoria's Sunraysia (56 per cent) and the NSW Riverina (24 per cent) — the three regions together account for 98 per cent of a national crop that reached roughly 165,000 tonnes in 2024, on national plantings that have grown more than seventeen-fold since 2000 to around 64,000 hectares (approx.; USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, GAIN Report, Tree Nut – Almond Annual, Australia; Almond Board of Australia).
The people growing that fruit are also ageing faster than the fruit trees. ABS regional population data shows much of non-metropolitan South Australia recording natural decrease — more deaths than births — reflecting an older age structure than Adelaide's, with population only holding up where interstate or overseas migration is large enough to offset it (ABS, Regional Population, 2023–24 financial year). Health access has not kept pace with that ageing profile: South Australia's own medical workforce commentary puts general practitioner density at around 106 GPs per 100,000 people, against roughly 116 in the eastern states, and towns including Kimba, Cowell, Peterborough and Wudinna have gone without a permanent GP altogether in recent years (approx.; AMA South Australia). The Riverland's own referral hospital, Riverland General Hospital in Berri, serves a catchment of roughly 70,000 people across the Riverland and Murraylands with around 40 inpatient beds (approx.; SA Health, Riverland Mallee Coorong Local Health Network). It has picked up incremental upgrades — a new fracture clinic, a Midwifery Group Practice model of care, and a central sterile supply hub-and-spoke arrangement rolled out in February 2024 — but like most of regional SA it remains reliant on rotating, difficult-to-recruit medical staff rather than a settled specialist workforce.
The critique
The headline totals do more work in a press release than they do on a balance sheet. The $62.56 billion regional investment pipeline the government cites is an annual compilation of public and private investment intentions across the state, not a figure the government itself is spending — most of it is private capital the government hopes will materialise, and it has published no breakdown of what share is genuinely new money versus projects that were already under way. The $1.8 billion in "new" regional Budget measures is likewise an aggregate spread across many portfolios and several years, without a public accounting of how much represents recurrent spending re-labelled for a Budget headline rather than money that would not otherwise have been spent in the regions. And the drought package's own timeline undercuts the "government that kept turning up" framing: an initial $18 million in November 2024 was judged inadequate by farm groups almost immediately, and it took a further four months of visibly worsening conditions, a tractor protest and an open letter warning of "catastrophe" before the $55 million top-up arrived in April 2025 — assistance that was scaled to public pressure as much as to the agronomic reality on the ground, which had been forecastable well before the protest.
On the wine crisis specifically, the gap between rhetoric and relief is starker still. Riverland growers asked for structured support to either keep farming through the downturn or exit it with dignity; what the state government has delivered is support for a Commonwealth review process and existing programs, with no dedicated state income-support scheme of its own for grape growers facing prices below the cost of production. Meanwhile, the almond industry — better capitalised, corporate-backed and expanding — has kept bidding for the same scarce Murray water that wine grape growers need, a dynamic that helps explain why water lease prices rose by roughly half in a single year even as grape income collapsed; the government has not published any policy response to that specific competition for water between an expanding high-value crop and a contracting one.
A $73 million drought package that took an open letter and a tractor protest to reach its final size is disaster relief, not a strategy for a food bowl now told, year after year, that dry is the new normal.
On regional health, the GP shortfall and the reliance on rotating hospital staff predate this government, but three Budgets in, the roughly ten-per-100,000 gap in GP density against the eastern states has not closed, and four regional towns still cannot keep a permanent doctor. Incremental hospital upgrades at Riverland General — a fracture clinic, a new model of midwifery care, a sterile-supply hub — are real and worth crediting, but they are modest relative to a structural workforce gap that a $1.8 billion regional Budget line has not been shown to be closing, because the government has not published region-by-region GP or specialist vacancy data alongside its spending totals.
The risk to the future
The risk to the future
A food bowl squeezed from both ends
The Riverland and regional SA face a genuine structural squeeze, not a single bad season. On the water side, industry estimates suggest the national wine grape crush may need to fall well below its recent 1.5 million tonnes toward something closer to 1.2 million tonnes for the market to rebalance, which points to more vines pulled out of Riverland soil in the coming years, not fewer — a permanent shrinking of the district's highest-value crop rather than a cyclical dip. At the same time, an expanding, better-capitalised almond sector is competing for the same finite Murray water allocations, and constrained delivery capacity through the Barmah Choke bottleneck limits how much more water can physically reach the district even if growers could afford to buy it, meaning water price pressure on the remaining grape and citrus growers is likely to persist or worsen. On the human side, an ageing, naturally declining regional population and a GP workforce already thinner than the eastern states create a feedback loop: fewer working-age residents and a shrinking rate base make it harder to fund and staff services, which in turn makes regional towns less attractive to the young families and professionals who might otherwise reverse the decline. The government's $62.56 billion regional pipeline and $1.8 billion Budget package are real numbers, but they are pipeline and Budget-line numbers, not yet evidence that the underlying arithmetic of an ageing population and a contracting irrigation economy has been turned around. The test of the next term is not whether the totals keep growing, but whether the Riverland still has a viable wine industry, a staffed hospital and a population under 65 to fill it.