Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Recycling is how we build our future—low emissions, low environmental impact and quality jobs. There is no reason that we can't have a big, thriving, growing recycling industry here in Australia that deals with our own waste. That's what this legislation and, indeed, the amendment are about. It's about taking responsibility for our own waste here in Australia—a principle that everyone in this place should agree with. We can't just ship our problems to other jurisdictions and at the same time be shipping the potential for scientific breakthroughs, innovation and indeed jobs away with them as well.

I commend the member for Fremantle for his amendment. He is a strong voice for the Western Australian environment and a strong environmentalist who acts in the national interest in this parliament. In my home state and the member for Fremantle's home state of Western Australia, we finally—and the South Australians would say that we took maybe a little too long—have a container deposit recycling scheme. That recycling scheme has already seen in just one month of operation some 10 million cans and bottles recycled, paying out $1 million dollarydoos to Western Australians and to many sporting clubs. I commend those sporting clubs who have found this as a new and innovative way to fundraise, particularly when we know that this government has cut a range of sporting programs that they normally rely on because it can't administer them in the national interest. It was only able to administer them in its personal political interest, which was incredibly disappointing.

When you think about the scale of the waste that we are dealing with, it is 67 million tonnes of waste a year. I can't comprehend how big a volume of waste that is. When almost half of it, some 30 million tonnes, is not recycled at all, we can of course improve a great deal. When it comes to plastic, every one of us in Australia on average generates 102 kilograms a year—and only 12 per cent of that is recycled, despite the fact that more than 50 per cent of it is recyclable. We are not meeting our objectives and our obligations to future generations if we don't get serious about recycling.

The Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 is to introduce a ban on the export of certain waste materials and is also providing some much-needed updates to the existing stewardship laws and amending the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme. It gives me fond memories of the first computer in my household, the Apple Macintosh Classic, which has now, I hope, been recycled—or it might be in a museum somewhere! I never had the joy of a Commodore 64, and I think anyone who has one would definitely not be recycling it. They would be getting a very high price on eBay for such a piece of ancient but important technological history. I hope that my Apple Mac Classic and the Apple PowerPC 570 that followed it and the HP Pavilion that followed that are all somewhere happy in recycling computer heaven. It is important that we do recycle all of these things because of the large range of rare and precious minerals that go into the manufacture of those computers, and the more we can recycle them the more we can lower the costs of computing power, which is obviously essential for our future.

Banning the export of glass, mixed plastics, whole used tyres, single resin or polymer plastics and mixed and unsorted paper and cardboard all makes really practical sense. For that reason, the Labor Party will support the bill but of course is seeking to amend the legislation to improve and broaden the impact of the scheme. Labor has a proud history of taking the lead when it comes to recycling policy. In 2009 we created the National Waste Policy, trying to start to build a product stewardship program and have a national waste process. This is something where, if we do it nationally and we get it right, there will be huge economic benefits for our country. We do not need to be shipping this waste overseas. But this legislation isn't perfect. The government's own review has found that growing numbers of industry free riders are refusing to take responsibility for products that they manufacture. This is the main reason that voluntary schemes fail. When we're only recycling about half of our waste, with the other half going into landfill, we are just creating problems for future generations.

I am going to talk about some of the activities in my electorate of Perth, where we are trying to take action on this at a local level. I will start with the City of Bayswater. The City of Bayswater has Riverside Gardens, which was the dump for most of the Perth electorate and the inner suburbs in the north of the metropolitan area for many, many decades. Thankfully, Riverside Gardens has been, to some level, remediated and now has beautiful water-frontage parklands and a large, large patch of grass. The City of Bayswater's vision is to turn this old tip, which now sits very close to a large number of houses, into a new urban forest, as part of their efforts to reforest large parts of the City of Bayswater. I think that's appropriate and is something that we in this place should also look at—how we support the remediation of tips that have been really only partly restored to what they were before we started dumping our rubbish in those locations.

I did the count in the electorate of Perth: there are 23 buy-nothing, sell-nothing Facebook groups. That's not metropolitan Perth; that's just in the electorate of Perth. That is a sign that people are serious about doing what they can to avoid things ever going to a recycling plant, ever even going into landfill. The City of Vincent and the town of Bassendean are going to have FOGO—food organics and garden organics bins. These have been incredibly popular where they have been rolled out in other council jurisdictions. It's just another way that people could actually start the recycling journey at home by avoiding things going into landfill at all.

I want to give a shout-out to the workers at the City of Stirling's resource recovery centre. The City of Stirling's resource recovery centre will take almost anything that doesn't smell and recycle it—you can drop off your polystyrene, your cardboard, your television, your fridge. There are a bunch of really dedicated council workers who keep that facility running. I commend the City of Stirling for making that a free facility for the people of Stirling. As a resident of the City of Vincent, I am still allowed to cross the council border—one of the borders we can cross—and take my recyclables there. It's a great community resource. It's a great hub of activity for bin chickens in the metropolitan area and it ensures that people can access recycling in a convenient way to them.

Finally in relation to councils, before I talk to other matters on the bill, I want to say that it's time that the CBD of Perth had a proper recycling plan. We have huge numbers of businesses who should be doing more and could be recycling more. With the new mayor of Perth—and I congratulate Basil Zempilas on his election; it's a very exciting time for our city—I hope they can start some serious action on recycling action so that our CBD has a proper recycling plan that takes us well into the future.

People of all ages in my electorate have campaigned about the need to do more on waste. I've spoken in this place before about the work that the kindergarten students do at Perth College. They have run their own recycling campaigns. They wanted to see less plastic being used by local cafes. So, rather than wait on all of us to get around to this, they decided they were going to start lobbying—these are kindergarten kids—local cafes with their poster to say, 'Let's do something to prevent plastic going into our environment.' They are possibly some of the more successful lobbying efforts I've seen in recent times. They've been incredibly successful with local cafes, and once again I commend them. They wanted to do something about plastics because they had learnt what we do know in this place, which is that plastics can affect our wildlife when left out in the open and not properly managed.

Conservative estimates are that plastic affects some 267 species globally. Eighty-six per cent of sea turtles have some impact from plastics in the ocean. Forty-three per cent of marine mammals are at risk of being harmed by plastics in our oceans. And 130,000 tonnes of Australian plastic, which we all use, ends up in our waterways and oceans each year. As an electorate on the Swan River, I know that, whenever we see plastic there, there are only two places it ends up—on our shores or in the ocean, and when it ends up in the ocean it harms sea life. The more the we can do, the better when it comes to protecting our amazing coast and the animals that live there.

I mentioned earlier the WA Containers for Change program. Finally Western Australia has a container deposit recycling scheme. A huge shout-out to Stephen Dawson, the state minister, who led this change. It is well overdue and there has been an incredibly smooth start to this program. These programs don't always start smoothly, and that's often because there hasn't been a lot of hard work behind the scenes. On this occasion, there was lots of hard work behind the scenes, and I commend some of those who were intimately involved in it—particularly someone who is well-known in this place, my friend Hannah Beazley, who has worked very hard on that program. Hannah, you and your team have done an amazing job in communicating with communities about how they can have an impact. Equally, Reece Wheadon, who is a brewer in West Leederville—the lesser of the Leedervilles, given that it is just outside my electorate and I've only got Leederville itself!—who has also made sure that that industry is represented, and I congratulate Reece for his work on the board in terms of giving the WA Containers for Change program such a successful start.

There are things that we can learn from this in terms of how we go forward. There are still 1.3 billion beverage containers consumed in Western Australia every year. Not all of them are recycled. We will see in the next year whether or not this program does indeed generate an increase in recycling. What we do know, since the modelling has already been done on this, is that it will generate 600 jobs—600 new local jobs—in an environmentally sustainable way. That has to be a good thing. It's expected—and I hope this is an underestimate—that an additional 6.6 billion containers over the next 20 years will be recycled, and 40 per cent of those jobs that I mentioned are projected to go to long-term unemployed people, Indigenous people and people with a disability. Again, that's something I think everyone in this place can get behind.

Finally, when it comes to management of waste and creative recycling, I just want to talk about REmida, a WA reuse centre based in West Perth. It started as an initiative of the Bold Park primary school—the Bold Park school, I should say; they also have a senior campus. In 2004, the teachers and parents of Bold Park Community School collected 1,000 containers of waste materials. They became the feature of an artistic installation which was set up in Forrest Place in the heart of Perth. The artwork inspired the community to rethink waste and possible ways that they could do more. REmida is now a community-run not-for-profit collecting industry waste, cut-offs and old stock that can be used in children's workshops. You only need to look at a day care centre or at pre-primary or early years education to know that the 'making table' is one of the hottest bits of property in an early learning centre, and making sure that there are things to make with is equally important. Organisations like REmida make sure that kids can make truly creative things which can then go into parents' homes for a new life, rather than going into waste.

I've already mentioned the 23 Buy Nothing/sell nothing groups on Facebook for Perth. We also have three toy libraries—again, making sure that children can access a range of toys without generating excess plastic waste. Local governments too are doing more when it comes to reducing, re-using and recycling.

I will conclude my comments by saying that, whilst this is a step in the right direction, there is so much more opportunity for what this government could be doing when it comes to greater coordination across the federation in recycling and reusables. We don't always acknowledge the power that we have when we pool our effort and do more together. This legislation is a step in the right direction. I'll conclude my remarks there.

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