Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's wonderful to be able to speak on this motion moved by the member for Higgins, because it goes to the heart of the type of country we want to be. It goes to the heart of whether we're a nation that takes responsibility for itself as part of a global community and the action that we take as citizens, community and country to make sure that we steward our environment from one generation, healthy, to the next.

Those are the values and those are the principles that motivated me to be in this chamber in the first place. They're the cornerstone of liberalism itself. This motion is a very liberal motion about the responsibility that we take and this government takes in stewarding the health of Australia's environment to future generations. What we have done as a government has been about how we build the capacity for Australians to care for the bounty of our beautiful continent. We have provided $167 million to fund an Australian recycling investment plan to increase Australia's recycling rates, to tackle plastic waste and litter, to accelerate work on new recycling schemes and to continue to implement our commitment to halve food waste by 2030.

It's a plan, yes, that is designed in Canberra, but its focus is on how we work to empower community and citizens to take greater responsibility for themselves and do the right thing by our environment. Day in, day out we see this in our wonderful Goldstein community, made up of the City of Bayside and parts of the City of Glen Eira. Both councils, working with community organisations, continue to lead in caring for our environment. In fact, both recently introduced the capacity to put food waste in bins so that it can be recycled and harvested to generate energy. This is part of a long-term plan to develop compost for our community, to stop the waste, to stop so much food waste being put aside and discarded only to go to landfill.

What's been really disappointing is that while we have councils taking such strong action, engaging residents to do the heavy lifting, and we have a federal government that has made this a big priority—and I want to particularly recognise and pay respect to Minister Trevor Evans; he has done a wonderful job in leading a discussion around the improvement of waste management across the country—there has been so little action, frankly, from our state government in Victoria, which seems to say the right things, but when it comes to an action plan for getting things done it has been left by the wayside. It has allowed us to end up in a situation where we have such a big crisis around waste in our state, and ultimately across the country.

We are not just focusing our energy on what we need to do at the higher level around strategy. Yes, it is about empowerment, but it is also about the capacity and the opportunity that waste provides to recapture as part of a circular economy and to build the industries of the future. The $167 million that we have provided includes $100 million through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to support the manufacture of lower-emissions, energy-efficient recycled-content products, such as recycled-content plastics, paper and pulp. It includes $20 million for a new Product Stewardship Investment Fund, which will accelerate work on new recycling schemes, such as batteries, electrical and electronic products, photovoltaic systems and plastic oil containers.

These important, simple but clear measures from this government stand in such stark contrast to the ineffectiveness of our state government, which is why I was so happy to see the Victorian opposition only yesterday come out with a clear plan on the waste crisis in our state—how it can be harvested and reused and repurposed for fuel energy generation. This is the sort of big-picture thinking that Australians want to see from the federal government and the state governments, where we can turn a burden into an opportunity and set the course for a safe environment that stewards it for future generations.

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