Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When Windsor Public School student Lily Spies was nine years old last year, she did a project at school on single-use plastic bags and their impact on the environment. The harmful effects that they had so moved her that, like the member who moved this motion, she saw something had to be done. She was a key speaker at Hawkesbury City Council when it considered a motion last July to ban plastic bags. The motion was successful, and there was a commitment by the council to advocate at a state and federal level for a ban. Lily—more to the point—now 10, has not stopped her campaigning to address environmental issues in her school and also at a local government level and in the wider community. She's inspired. Her work has been noticed, and it was a delight to be there to see Lily as a co-winner of the Environmental Award at the Hawkesbury City Council's Australia Day Awards—and all because Lily saw that plastic bags were not the way to go.

Like Lily, many people of the Hawkesbury and Blue Mountains area have long been committed to protecting our beautiful local environment. There's no doubt that the use of plastic bags in local businesses and supermarkets has come to the forefront, and there's already action being taken. I know many of us here have talked about remembering the pre-plastic bag days—that does date us—when you did get a paper bag for your groceries. Organisations such as the Hawkesbury Environment Network, the Ban the Bag Blue Mountains group, Boomerang Bags, in both the Hawkesbury and Blue Mountains, and local councillors in both the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury have all been vocal and committed to phasing out the use of plastic bags in our area.

Many of our retailers already offer paper and cloth bags, in spite of there being no all-over New South Wales policy on this. I must note the great effort by the Springwood Chamber of Commerce and the shopkeepers there, who, as part of their 'shop local' push, have come up with a local, cloth bag that people can use time and time again. They, and many others in my electorate of Macquarie, know that the plastic bags stocked at the checkout and stowed away under our sinks have far-reaching impacts when they hit our environment. The estimated 520 million bags that Australians use each day contribute to the 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans. I don't need to explain the devastating impact that it has on wildlife, and I think a simple photo of a sea turtle that has ingested plastic really says it all. A third of our sea turtles and half of our seabirds have ingested plastic, according to the CSIRO. Indeed, our community groups, our businesses and the government initiatives that have already occurred in some states recognise the importance of removing plastic from the natural environment. We already spend around $4 million a year, by the way, to clean up littered bags.

Most Australian states have made a move. South Australia was the first to enact the ban in 2009, so that's nearly a decade of a ban. Under their plan, the plastic bags of less than 35 microns in thickness, with handles, were prohibited. This left shoppers with a choice: to either bring their own reusable bags to the counter or pay up to 25 cents per biodegradable bag. It's a pretty simple scheme. Since then, the South Australian Environmental Protection Authority has estimated that the measures have resulted in 400 million fewer plastic bags in that state. These changes were welcomed by the people of South Australia, with nine in 10 shoppers choosing to take reusable bags to the supermarket after the ban.

The ACT has followed suit in banning non-biodegradable bags in 2010. They've found that the ban has reduced the volume of plastic bag waste in landfill by a third. And I certainly know I have to remember to take my green bags with me when I do my shop before parliament sits for a week. When reviewing the ban in 2013, the ACT government found that almost three-quarters of constituents wanted to keep the ban in place. So New South Wales remains the only state that refuses to commit to banning the bag, with both Queensland and Western Australia having recently come on board.

It doesn't need to be something that is left purely to the states. We, as a federal parliament, should be actively improving how we look after the environment and working with the states so that there's no reason we couldn't achieve a national ban by the end of the year. I'm quite aware that this isn't necessarily the most exciting piece of environmental legislation, but it is one that we know would make a difference. I think encouraging these changes is something that this parliament can do.

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