Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Recycling and Waste Reduction 2020 and the associated bills and note the amendment moved by the member for Freemantle: 'whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House notes the government's poor handling and chronic delay in delivering meaningful regulatory reform for waste management and product stewardship in Australia'. I say upfront that, obviously, Labor will be supporting the legislation, but there is the opportunity to draw the attention of the people of Australia to what the government has actually been doing.

These bills will introduce a ban on the export of waste through the establishment of a new licensing and declaration scheme and will also make some small adjustments to existing product stewardship laws, many of which are long overdue. But, as all of the speakers on both sides of the House have noted, there is a waste crisis in Australia. We've seen press conferences from those opposite. We've seen the Prime Minister come out and say, 'We're going to ban the export of tyres' et cetera, as if the Prime Minister has decided to stop Australia from exporting waste. But all of us who follow the news know that this is actually a result of the China Sword policy and countries like Malaysia and Vietnam having decided to stop the importation of these materials, which had been going on for a very long time. Many people in the suburbs had taken the time to recycle this relatively low-quality material by putting it in their yellow bins, and through other recycling programs. Unfortunately, even with those efforts, there's still a relatively high rate of contamination. So I understand why these countries have decided to stop taking our rubbish. It would have been nice to believe that those materials that were taken overseas were being reused, recycled and then sent back to us as a different product. But the reality, more often than not, was that rubbish was being burned or buried in fields or, even worse, thrown into rivers and was coming back to Australia as pollution, as some sort of environmental damage. So we can understand why those countries have decided to stop that practice.

I am very cynical about a Prime Minister who says, 'I am going to take control.' It's like when you're a kid and you say to someone, 'You can't come to my birthday party,' and then that kid turns around and says, 'I have decided not to go to your birthday party.' This is what the Prime Minister is effectively doing by saying, 'We've got a great waste reduction policy.' In reality, he is just trying to put an advertising agency employee's spin on a global situation—the ad man trying to turn a bad situation into something positive. We do know that there is so much more to do, and it is hard policy. To get Australians to reduce waste material, to reuse it and to recycle it as much as possible does come down to individual choices. I guess it is that classic intersection of the Liberal Party saying, 'Oh, no, it's just individual choices,' against the Labor Party saying, 'It's a collective responsibility.'

There are some things underway. I am glad to be a member of the committee chaired by the member for New England, with the deputy chair being the member for Cunningham, that is looking at recycling. We know it is a big problem confronting people. We heard from the member for Dunkley that it was suggested by one of her constituents that people ingest a credit-card's worth of plastic every week. There is the horrible figure of Australians producing 100 kilograms of plastic waste per capita every year. Obviously, we do make a bit of an effort to reduce waste, and we have changed. But, sadly, when you look back over the last 30 or 40 years, we see we are in a worse position than we were even in 2005. There is less infrastructure in Australia to deal with recycling now than there was in 2005. We know that the amount of plastic being produced is likely to increase and that part of big plastic's approach to business is to keep producing plastic well into the future.

See this speech in context