Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. Australia has a problem with waste. People are doing the right thing and are trying to do the right thing. People are separating their recycling and trying to buy less, and people are trying to do things that ensure that there is less waste. But the government isn't stepping up to the plate. Although people are being asked to do more, and most people are, the government isn't matching that with its own behaviour. The government is not buying enough material made out of recycled goods when the government spends billions and billions of dollars each year. If the government decided that a proportion of the goods that it bought or which it got other people to procure had to be recycled, it would go a long way to minimising the waste we have in this country.

One of the other big problems that we have with waste is that we don't have enough domestic capacity to recycle products and to turn products into something else. As China closed its doors and said, 'We're not taking any more of Australia's waste,' what we haven't done is build recycling plants here in Australia. The latest crazy idea is that we'll just burn the waste and will convert waste to energy, as if that's somehow a solution. But that is not a circular economy. What we need to do is make sure that Australia has its own domestic recycling capacity, and an increased one, to deal with the fact that people want to do the right thing and that people want to separate their waste and see what can be recycled actually being recycled.

Government must be a model citizen here. Government must lead by example and lead by acting, and that's what this bill does. I commend the member for Clark for introducing it and I commend my fellow Greens colleague, Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, for his work on the waste inquiry that has led to a number of these proposals and that has led to the government starting to take waste seriously. If government wants to be taken seriously and it wants to ask people to reduce their waste then it should start by doing it itself, and this bill is a good start.

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