Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Mackellar for that terrific question. If we don't do something much better on ocean plastics by 2050, plastics in our oceans will weigh more than fish in our oceans. This is absolutely something that the government is determined to act on, in a number of different ways. In the first instance, it's by stronger systems, reducing the use of plastic, increasing recycling opportunities and of course by getting existing plastics out of our oceans through terrific programs—for example, using Indigenous rangers to pull ghost nets out of the ocean.

We know that ghost nets are effectively industrial-sized killing machines, capturing dugongs, sharks, turtles and other machine creatures and drowning them.

Just on the reforms to plastic waste, the use of plastic in Australia has nearly doubled between 2010 and 2021. We went from 2.6 million tonnes of plastic—almost doubling the plastic that we're using. That's at a time when those opposite had set very ambitious targets on reducing plastic use but never achieved any of them. By reforming packaging regulation, we'll be able to reduce the use of plastic in the first place, and we'll also be able to make sure that, when we do use plastic, we choose the sorts of plastics that can be recycled more effectively—

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