David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Plastic pollution in Australia's oceans and waterways was the issue of our very extensive inquiry. The report is titled Drowning in waste for a very good reason—because at the moment we have a problem with waste in Australia. We have put a ban in place, but we have a disrupted and incomplete circular economy for plastic waste in this country, and waste is building up everywhere. But the good news is that we've made some recommendations which will, hopefully, fix a lot of those problems.

First of all, I thank every one of the hundreds of submitters for the very extensive submissions that were presented to the committee as we went around Australia. There are an enormous amount of community organisations and philanthropic organisations and some standout councils and state and local government organisations that are on the job. But there's much more to do. I also thank the secretariat of the committee, who managed huge volumes of information and submissions and put them into a coherent set of data. There was so much information, so to distil it all down was quite an amazing bit of work. I thank all the other committee members, and our chair, the member for Makin, who steered us through a very useful inquiry.

What I'd like to do is not give a holistic, blow-by-blow description of this excellent report but talk about the things that I think are the most important and will lead to the most dramatic improvement in preventing plastic waste polluting our oceans and waterways. There is the microplastic issue, which is the small amounts of plastics that are ubiquitous in metropolitan life getting into our food chain, through fish and other marine animals, and there is the macro, or large, plastic waste, which is suffocating sea animals like whales, dolphins, turtles et cetera. Some of the microplastics and larger plastics are getting into seafood.

I should acknowledge all the good things that have happened because of the National Plastics Plan. I would just like to give a shout-out and a nod to my former colleague the former member for Brisbane Trevor Evans, who led that legislation when he was the minister with that responsibility in the Morrison government. He addressed a lot of the problems with the whole life cycle of marine plastic and waterway plastic and the issue of how to reduce it. Many people pointed out that there are gaps in our current National Plastics Plan. The first is to do with putting a value on the plastic. It's only waste if you waste it. You can apply that principle to lots of things. But plastic is not waste. It has embedded energy in it, and we need to start using that. I'll expand on that a bit further. A lot of the depositions related to the fact that we have plastics that are easy to recycle and plastics that are hard to recycle. They accentuated that we need to get the plastics that are essential in our lives—PET, high-density polyethylene, low-density polyethylene and polypropylene—because clever industrial chemists can put that to the best use. The more complex polymers are harder to recycle.

By virtue of the Recycling and Waste Reduction Act—which the former member for Brisbane Trevor Evans and Scott Morrison were influential in putting in place—the Recycling Modernisation Fund and the National Product Stewardship Investment Fund have been set up and have led to major changes, some of which involve people who made depositions to this inquiry. But we still have a fragmented market. The ban is in place, so we can't export it, but there are not enough entities involved in reprocessing the built-up plastic that we are now banning from being exported. People are turning to fresh, virgin plastic in new presentations rather than utilising this market.

There were recommendations for microfibre filters on every washing machine. That was back in the original National Plastics Plan. But we haven't enacted that, so we need to do that. As I mentioned, some councils are already doing really good things with stormwater filters at that macro, local council level. But many more things can be done in that same vein, making it uniform or mandatory across the country.

There is the Ghost Nets Initiative. The big nets and bits of plastic that are left over from commercial fishing are a big problem, particularly because they suffocate whales, dolphins, turtles—all sorts of stuff. There is a ranger program to address that. A lot of the areas in the north of Australia are really quite affected by this, because a lot of these plastics don't actually come from Australia but they can end up in the northern part of Australia. One of the recommendations that would address this would be recommendation 3, which is that the government prioritise a sustainable end market for recovered plastics and increase the disposal options for plastics in remote and regional Australia, because a lot of these plastics initiatives are metropolitan based.

My particular interest out of this committee is to get recommendation 12 up. Rather than banning plastics, the best way for them not to end up as waste is to get value out of them. Many other countries have addressed this by turning waste into energy either by simple incineration or by chemical processes. The feedstock is the end-of-life plastic, and it goes through chemical processes, providing energy itself, and then, with refining, you can turn plastics that would have ended up in a waste pile, or in landfill, in a river or out at sea, back into what it started as—high-purity diesel, gas and even petroleum and kerosene. The engineering does exist for that. Many places in Europe have waste-to-energy plants in the middle of their cities, but they're in hills or dressed up with vegetation or elaborate architecture, and people don't even know that it's an energy plant using the city's waste.

So there are many things that we could do. But we really need to get going with putting a value on plastic waste for everyone in their home. We have so many clothes that are made of synthetic material. The waste can be filtered out at the place it's developed, and we can do that by setting standards for white goods manufacturers. We can encourage states at COAG meetings to institute filters on all stormwater drains, depending on the state.

I commend this report to the House. It is a very good report. It's got a huge amount of useful information. Again, I'd like to thank all the committee, all my colleagues, and all those people that are active in the industry of preventing waste from polluting our oceans. But we really need to engage with our Asian and near north neighbours to see if we can get the same rigour applied to their metropolitan and regional practices, particularly in the fishing industry, where a lot of these plastics really have a high impact on marine life. I commend Drowning in waste to the parliament.

See this speech in context