Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm glad to make a contribution to the debate on the recycling and waste reduction bills 2020, and I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"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".

In essence, this package of legislation formalises a state of affairs triggered by the China sword policy and subsequent developments that have meant countries in our region—Malaysia and Vietnam, as well as China—will not receive Australian waste for recycling in the future. But Australia needs to go much further than that if we are to take full responsibility for our waste, reduce its serious and unsustainable impact on our environment, make use of it as a valuable resource and show leadership in our region. These bills establish a framework for the phased ban on the export of certain waste materials, and they also absorb the regulatory framework previously contained in the Product Stewardship Act 2011 while making some minor substantive changes to product stewardship.

There's little doubt that one of the reasons for the export bans we are required to put in place is that the waste material we've been exporting was of relatively low quality and involved relatively high rates of contamination. What's worse, while we assumed the material was going offshore to be recycled, the reality is that in some cases the rubbish was being burned, buried or thrown into rivers. It would rightly appal people in our communities to think that the plastic they were putting in the yellow-topped bins for recycling was being baled and transported to another country where, in fact, the rubbish contributed to local environmental damage and perhaps even became marine plastic that found its way to our part of the world.

As we put in place new export ban arrangements, I think it's fair to observe that it's the decisions taken by other countries that have forced us here in Australia to recognise that what we call our waste recycling resource management system has to a considerable degree been a collection and transport system. Our achievements when it comes to the key measures of a more-sustainable approach—namely, to avoid creating disposable products, to reduce waste material, to reuse as much as we can and to recycle what can't be directly reused—have been fairly slight.

To take plastic as an example, because it represents a particularly harmful fugitive and long-lasting material, on a per capita basis we generate more than 100 kilograms of waste plastic a year, and yet we recycle barely 12 per cent. Globally we know that 10 million tonnes of plastic go into the ocean each year and that's expected to triple by 2040, not least because global production of plastic is galloping ahead. Global production of plastic has increased 20-fold since the 1960s. It's going to triple again by 2040. Microplastic is already accumulating in fish and birds, and there's evidence that in some parts of the world it's accumulating in humans. That is very, very far from the expectations of the Australian public. As a nation, when it comes to waste we are still a long, long way from the expectations of our community, especially young people. And we're a long way from supporting the ambitions and the efforts of innovative companies, switched-on community enterprises and forward-looking local governments around Australia. We also have no strong basis currently for hoping and expecting that other countries, including developing countries in our region, will make dramatic progress to reduce plastic pollution when a developed country like our own is performing relatively badly.

Let me be clear in saying that Labor supports the passage of these bills because of the commonsense and the necessity of the export bans, but we wish that this legislative package had taken the opportunity to do substantially more than that. I do take the opportunity to thank the assistant minister for his active and constructive engagement on the legislation. While I have a strong view that more needs to be done, it needs to be done differently in a number of respects, I recognise that the member for Brisbane has a long-standing and a genuine interest in this area of policy and he wants to see change. I'm grateful that we're able to achieve agreement to a number of amendments, which will be proposed and considered in due course. Of course, I wish we had been successful in getting a few more changes over the line.

It's right that this legislative framework should be subject to a five-year statutory review period, rather than the 10 years initially proposed. Let's not forget that the statutory review period of the Product Stewardship Act, which is being subsumed in this package, fell due in 2016 and that wasn't delivered until this year. As we remember that, a number of the key waste targets we have before us fall due in in 2025.

I'm glad amendments will be proposed that make the process of granting exemptions to the export licence requirements more transparent. I'm particularly glad that the consultation requirements with respect to the minister's priority list will be strengthened and expanded in their scope. While Labor believes there should be an independent statutory body charged with this responsibility, as the product stewardship advisory committee was previously, it's important that the government's new Product Stewardship Centre of Excellence be a mandatory point of reference. It will be for the government to ensure that the centre is structured and resourced in a way that allows it to provide uncompromising advice based on independent, environmental and industrial expertise. As I say, there are other changes we believe should be considered by way of amendment, especially with respect to the issue of harmful and unnecessary plastic and packaging, and we'll get to that.

I also repeat the broad point that Labor believes a more comprehensive reform of product stewardship regulation is required and, unfortunately, that can't be achieved, in our view, by spot-fixing these bills. Having said that, I want to acknowledge the work of the National Waste and Recycling Industry Council, the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association and ACOR for their engagement with the opposition—and I'm sure with the government—on these bills, and for their leadership more generally in the cause of achieving a paradigm shift in Australia's waste and resource management industry. This is a sector that employs 50,000 Australians and it contributes over $15 billion annually to our economy. It's already a significant industry and a large employer and it will be better for all of us if it grows considerably in the future.

I thank the Boomerang Alliance, Sea Shepherd, the WWF and the Plastic Free Foundation for the enormous effort they've made, and continue to make, in building community support for the change we desperately need in order to live sustainably and to live without poisoning our environment. It's a good thing that we're finally looking to take greater responsibility for our own waste. Judged on its own terms the export ban framework is broadly sensible and workable. Of course, it gives effect to an approach agreed by the Commonwealth with the states and territories. But what we need to hold on to as we make this reform is how much more there is to be done and how little has really occurred since Labor stepped into the national leadership space by creating the national waste strategy and accompanying Product Stewardship Act a decade ago.

On that basis, I have to say it was a little bit odd to hear the Minister for the Environment make the claim when introducing these bills:

… I'm incredibly proud to introduce this package of legislation—representing the first time ever a Commonwealth government has shown true commitment to taking on this important environment, and economic, policy reform.

That is frankly hard to reconcile with the fact that, from 2013 to now, in the seven years of this government, precious little has been done on waste and recycling. Really we as a community are only lucky that, as with climate change and renewable energy, the states, territories and even local governments have responded to the inaction of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government by stepping up their effort. Labor went to the election last year with a commitment to introduce a national container deposit scheme. Fortunately, it is now the case that container deposit schemes are being implemented by states and jurisdictions around the country. But how much better would it be if this was being done on a coordinated and harmonised national basis?

When we talk about a sustainable approach to waste, it is not long before we find ourselves talking about the concept of a circular economy. That is not what we have now in Australia. What we have now is a linear economy that results in an unsustainable drain on resources, with a corresponding impact on our environment. What we have now is an economy that sees limited materials sunk into ultradisposable products, many of which are used for only a few minutes before being chucked away. It is senseless and unsustainable. It is quite literally a waste.

By contrast, in a circular economy, materials are seen as a resource to use minimally and to reuse and recycle to the maximum degree so that in many cases the products we make and use are part of a closed circle. In addition to being environmentally responsible, moving to this approach holds out the prospects of creating new resource-recovery and manufacturing opportunities and related jobs.

But at this stage we have to be realistic and acknowledge that we are not very far along the circumference of that circle. Our economy is still one in which resources and materials are used and wasted in greater and greater quantities and, in some cases, are being used and wasted at a faster rate. So, in terms of our ambition to create a circular economy, taking the step of banning the export of certain materials is a relatively small one and we should hold on to that.

Beyond that step it does get harder. Firstly, we have to ensure the material doesn't simply get stockpiled or put into landfill, and both have occurred over the last couple of years as our ability to export waste has disappeared and various industry players have found themselves in trouble, either financially or in some cases through fires that affected our already limited infrastructure. Beyond that we need to make pretty substantial strides in a number of areas, and I'm going to outline a few of those.

Firstly, we need a large jump in scale when it comes to our recycling and reprocessing infrastructure, and that requires appropriate strategic investment. That is No.1. Secondly, we need to support demand for recycled materials and related products, and that requires procurement policy. Thirdly, we need to fix the market failure so that producers take responsibility for the life-cycle costs of their products. In some cases they may be required to meet certain design and material specifications. This can only occur through effective product stewardship regulation. Fourthly, we need to improve consumer awareness and the means by which Australians can know and judge the recyclability and the recycled content of various products. That will enable higher recovery rates and mean people will know what to do when they are throwing things into their yellow bins. It will enable the proper disposal and sorting of rubbish in the first place, which will make the lives of our recycling operators and their operations easier. But it also means consumers will be better able to support products and producers that do the right thing. The producers themselves and the manufacturers that do the right thing can justifiably market their genuine achievements. For all that to occur—consumer awareness, proper marketing and proper disposal instructions—we require a better approach to product labelling.

On infrastructure, according to the report commissioned by this government, Australia currently has less plastic recycling capacity than it did in 2005. The same analysis suggested that in order to respond to the export bans that we are now contemplating we would need an increase in recycling infrastructure across the board of up to 400 per cent. But, even though the government knows the magnitude of the problem, it has been achingly slow to address the shortfall.

We should remember that, after last year's election in August, when the Prime Minister was overseas talking about Australia's leadership on waste and ocean plastic, it turned out that the so-called $100 million recycling investment package wasn't a lot more than a sticky label affixed to existing Clean Energy Finance funds. When we asked about that in December last year, we discovered that the ministerial direction needed to create the guidelines for the fund hadn't occurred. When we followed up in May this year, it turned out that not a single dollar had been loaned to support recycling infrastructure through the CEFC. This week it's been confirmed in Senate estimates that the CEFC funding remains untouched. It's also been confirmed that the $20 million National Product Stewardship Investment Fund has not yet made a single grant. So, of the $120 million of the Prime Minister's $167 recycling and investment package announced in May 2019, not a single cent has been advanced. That's 72 per cent of that package which was first announced in May 2019, nearly 18 months ago.

Since then, in the middle of this year the government made another announcement in the form of the Recycling Modernisation Fund. The programs do sound similar, but at some point we have to hope they function differently, because, if you keep announcing funds and no money flows to support infrastructure and address the waste crisis, we're not going to see the change that we need.

In any case, as we now seek to increase infrastructure capacity, we must do so strategically. Australia is a large country, and we're not likely to be able to sustain infrastructure at a viable scale in every state and territory jurisdiction. That means governments and industry must consider planning for transport logistics and costs as part of their long-term strategy on a coordinated basis.

I also say that, while it's very welcome that some large companies, including companies in the beveraging and packaging business, have made commitments to increase reprocessing capacity. We do need government to be clear eyed about how the system as a whole develops. The lesson to be drawn from the current failed and broken market is that government must be prepared to shape and maintain a system that delivers on clear principles. It must be sustainable. It must protect the environment. It must protect Australian consumers. It must be fair between the various jurisdictions in Australia and between people in urban and regional Australia. It must not lurch from being one kind of dysfunctional market to another.

On procurement: we start by recognising that, while we can look to increase the quality and the quantity of recycled material, if there's no market for it, there's going to be a big problem. Government procurement is one way of building demand. The other way is through recycled content requirements. At the moment, we are seeing neither. In March the Prime Minister held the National Plastics Summit, with the only announcement of any substance being a promise to improve Commonwealth procurement guidelines, and we are still waiting for that to occur. It's in the government's National Waste Policy Action Plan that procurement guidelines with targets will be delivered by the end of 2020. It's nearly the end of October, and we are waiting to see those guidelines and those targets—targets that should be by volume, by value or by both.

On product stewardship: we have to get a serious move on when it comes to ensuring that producers take responsibility for the life cycle of their products, especially when they are particularly wasteful or environmentally harmful. That's the essence of the broken market as it stands: those costs and that harm that comes from poorly designed products that end up in our environment, our waterways and our oceans are not being borne by the people who make them and profit from them; they're being borne by the environment and all us. It is the definition of a market failure.

In the decades since Labor created the platform for product stewardship regulation, not a lot has occurred—certainly nothing since 2013. It's currently the case that the minister updates a list of targeted products annually, yet on very few occasions have any of the several environment ministers within this government taken the opportunity to talk about product stewardship in this place. The five-year review of the Product Stewardship Act, which fell due in 2016, was supposed to be provided in the beginning of 2018 but actually arrived in July this year and didn't contain much that we didn't already know.

It's rightly acknowledged that the one co-regulatory scheme in existence, Labor's National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme, has worked pretty well. It's also recognised that voluntary schemes have been underwhelming, underperforming and beset by free-rider problems. Yet not one new product has been listed for a co-regulatory or mandatory scheme since the government was elected, and even the accredited voluntary product stewardship schemes have fallen from two down to one—I know that's about to change. It's also worth noting that, even with the computer and television scheme, there's been a consistent issue with compliance, and that's an important part of these kinds of regulatory arrangements. The government, unfortunately, responded by cutting the staff employed in the relevant section from seven, back in 2013, to three recently.

Despite the need to improve product stewardship and despite the long delay involved in getting us to this reform opportunity, this package of bills does not substantially change the existing product stewardship framework. Now, instead of simply updating the list, the Minister for the Environment will have the ability to make recommendations and outline a time frame in which she expects those recommendations to be acted upon. It's an improvement, but it's a small improvement. It's essentially, on the face of it, a waggle-the-finger and tap-the-watch kind of mechanism. How well that works remains to be seen. It doesn't inspire a lot of confidence, based on what we've seen to date.

Finally, the current situation with respect to disposal and recycling labels is a real mess; nobody could argue with that. Results of a recent independent audit showed that 50 per cent of products had no disposal labelling whatsoever; only 40 per cent had a recycling claim, though in some cases the recycling claim was unclear or wrong; and only 28 per cent of Australian products used the Australasian Recycling Label, an initiative launched and partly funded by the Morrison government. We need to do a lot better in the labelling space. I know the assistant minister is focused on that.

In conclusion, this bill puts forward a reasonable approach for formalising the fact that other countries will no longer take our waste for recycling. We have to face up to the fact that we have drifted along for a long time with a severely underdeveloped resource management system. The legislation is, however, a missed opportunity to do what needs to be done on a more comprehensive basis.

The government, since the last election, has made a song and dance of its intention to do something serious about waste and recycling. I think that's because they're more inclined to do something in this space than in other areas of environmental importance. We know they're not particularly interested in climate change. There hasn't been a lot that's encouraging with respect to the review of the EPBC Act to date. The two key recommendations of the EPBC reviewer, Graeme Samuel, were national standards and a properly resourced independent agency with teeth. That second, key part of the recommendations was dispensed with before the interim report hit the desk. So the government wants to make a virtue of waste and recycling. But we're still waiting to see that change. We're going to see these export bans, but we're waiting to see all those other things happen—infrastructure, procurement, product stewardship.

In the meantime, all the targets in the glossy strategy documents that we all read grow closer to their target dates without getting closer to achievement. We're supposed to see 70 per cent of plastic packaging recycled by 2025—50 per cent recycled content. But, on the 70 per cent of plastic recycling by 2025, we're currently at 16 per cent, and it's going to be 2021 in a couple of months time. We're supposed to see the elimination—the elimination altogether—of problematic and unnecessary plastics by 2025. It's very hard to see how that's going to happen, the way we're going, and at some point in the not-too-distant future we're going to have to be upfront with the Australian community about that.

It isn't hard to find examples of positive action in relation to waste collection and local clean-ups. It's not hard to find examples of local businesses that are seeking to model responsible and sustainable conduct. It's not even hard to find inventive new processes, and innovative businesses that are seeking to be directly involved in the task of waste reduction and the recycling and reuse of existing resources. I'm certain that, in the debate that follows, almost every single coalition speaker is going to name-check various businesses or organisations in their electorate that are part of this effort—and they should, because those organisations and those businesses deserve recognition—but we cannot get away from the big picture, and the big picture isn't pretty.

We know what's easy: it's easy to pretend that waste is not a massive environmental problem and market failure and to pretend that, in any case, we'll deal with it by a few nifty innovations, by asking business nicely or, in some cases, by treating business to a few stern words of encouragement. We also know what's hard. What is hard is to plan and deliver serious and meaningful progress through reform on a national scale, because that requires leadership and action at the national level and it means substantial change to the way we do things now. We're dealing with a fundamentally broken market and a very poor set of waste outcomes, and all the beatific statements about innovation and enterprise are not magically going to fix that. If the government can't admit that to itself—if we all can't admit it to ourselves—and take the requisite steps to get Australia on a better path then we'll continue to pollute our environment, we'll fail to show regional and global leadership, and we'll miss out on the jobs that should be part of a circular economy.

Llew O'Brien (Wide Bay, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the amendment seconded?

Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the amendment and reserve my right to speak.

Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'll start off by thanking the member for Brisbane and the member for Fremantle. Their contributions in this space have been extraordinary and show the people of Australia that both sides can work together on this. The member for Fremantle's speech was, as usual, eloquent and spoke to many of the fundamental problems and challenges we face in this space. There are, however, three points I would like to dispute with him. The first is his point that things are getting worse. There are any number of reports showing that, while things are not as we would wish them to be, our society, this nation, has made immense progress in this area and many other areas. Indeed, a book called Factfulness by Hans Rosling points to all the contributions and advances of humanity, both here and around the world, in making this planet a better place. It points out that our lives today are fundamentally better than they were even 20 years ago. So, while there is much to be done, much has been achieved. I think this should give anyone listening to this debate great hope that we can continue to do a lot more.

The second point I disagree with is that this government does not take climate change seriously. I know it is a line that is in the talking points of those opposite and gets trotted out quite often. It is, simply put, completely and utterly untrue. All of us on this side of the House have children, and some of us have grandchildren. We want this planet to be just as good after we leave it as the way we found it, if not better. We want to make sure that those who come after us have greater opportunity, not less opportunity. We understand fundamentally that one of the key drivers of the challenges we'll face in the years and decades ahead is climate change. How this nation, indeed how this planet, responds to that challenge will be key to what sort of planet we leave behind to those who come after us. It is both fundamentally error ridden and incorrect for anyone in this House to stand up and suggest that there is anyone here who does not take it seriously. I think it demeans the nature of the debate and makes this issue political rather than scientific. That's the thing that we should focus on, and I know the member for Fremantle fundamentally agrees with me on that.

The other thing about which we do have a fundamental disagreement is the national container deposit schemes. The member for Fremantle has a preference for a national scheme; I actually think having the state schemes and allowing the states to experiment with different schemes is the way to move forward, because it is through that policy experimentation that we may actually uncover a far better scheme than could be developed by those of us in this chamber. I know that only the best and the brightest are allowed to enter this chamber, but it is possible that there are others in other parts of the country—

Hon. Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Indeed, as improbable as it seems, there may even be some people in state parliaments in other parts of the country who also, from time to time, have good ideas. Who knows? It might be an accident. Nonetheless, our federation was designed to be competitive, to allow policy experimentation, and I think it's a good thing that each of the states is undertaking its own schemes and experimenting from those. If the time comes when we should have a national scheme, that will be the time for us to borrow the best ideas that we have seen implemented by the states and in other parts of the world.

Those opposite would have us believe that we need to choose between economic growth and the environment. It is a false paradigm that has been created by communities in an attempt for vested interests to get votes. We as a government are choosing both the environment and economic growth in this landmark legislation which is forecast to generate an additional $1.5 billion in economic activity over the next 20 years, whilst the Australian economy will be turning over an additional $3.6 billion. We are supporting communities hit hard by COVID-19, aiding economic growth and helping the environment. This is the kind of smart policy in government investment that this nation requires to get back on its feet. We believe that this country is strongest when communities are brought together, which is why we do not use the politics of division when it comes to the environment and economic growth. This is especially the case when our nation is contending with a global pandemic that has affected the lives of countless Australians and caused untold grief. Economics, not ideology, drives policies like this, which creates jobs, powers the economy and helps keep our beaches clean.

This government has never been afraid of commitment, which is why this bill is tackling some of the toughest environmental issues this nation is facing. From 2018 to 2019, more than 645,000 tonnes of waste was exported overseas. That is the equivalent of 40,000 shipping containers; if laid from end to end, they would span from Sydney to Canberra. We can use this material productively or we can allow it to destroy valuable land. Inaction is not an option when it comes to recycling, protecting our environment or encouraging our economic recovery.

Building a resilient Australia does not stop with JobKeeper but requires a holistic approach to rebuild our way of life and environment after the bushfires. We cannot allow pollution and waste-control measures to become lax and for government to turn a blind eye during COVID-19; future generations of Australians will only end up paying for this later on. Creating a dynamic economy for the 21st century which puts working Australians at its centre has been my goal since I first entered parliament. We need an innovation driven economy to fuel the kind of growth which will deliver higher standards of living for future Australians whilst supporting out retirees. As part of this, having a diverse economy with many innovative sectors will be critical in creating a shock resistant economy and society. We are taking pre-emptive action with this bill in driving outcomes for Australians and helping to create a freer, fairer society.

For those Australians not in isolation, keeping active is important not only for general fitness but for supporting good mental health. Recycling is a cornerstone of keeping our communities clean so that everyone can enjoy them. It is part of supporting the healthy lifestyle for which Australians are renowned the world over. Whatever this government can do to support Australians during times of hardship, we have done and will continue to do. Our national obsession with fitness continues unabated and is more important now given the challenge of COVID-19. We're taking a holistic approach to supporting Australians and protecting their safety. Keeping our walkways free of waste and protecting our nature reserves requires a national framework to manage waste and recycling across Australia.

At a time when our economic recovery is in the spotlight, it is critical that we do not forget the importance of our wildlife, our beaches and the environment. With the bushfires at the beginning of this year having caused mass devastation to rural Australia, on top of droughts, this government is taking a strong stand to support the environment which our rural communities rely on. The tourism industry relies on our natural ecosystem as part of their bushfire models, and it helps attract tourists from all around the world. Before COVID-19, Australia was one of the top travel destinations in the world. We cannot allow such an important sector, which so many Australian families rely on, to degrade. As a government, we are acutely aware that many people are doing it tough. In preparation for the post-COVID world, we are continuing to support our natural ecosystems to aid a speedy recovery and help Australians get back on track and back to business. This bill institutes an export ban on waste plastic, paper, glass, and tyres.

This Commonwealth government brought together the states and territories as part of an extensive consultation process to ensure that the goals of this bill were met and agreed on by all involved. Yet again this goes to our view that Australia is at its best when we're working together to resolve real issues that affect our communities. There are many that do not see it this way and instead stoke the flames of division and conflict to help themselves at the expense of others. A collective approach to national issues is why this government has outperformed the rest of the world when it comes to our COVID response and as we put in place measures to hasten our recovery.

An integral part of this bill is encouraging companies to take greater responsibility for waste that they generate. By incorporating the Product Stewardship Act 2011, companies are encouraged to design and create products more efficient in terms of waste. This legislation builds on this by increasing the number of opportunities for businesses to join in voluntarily with the product stewardship scheme to reduce waste and pollution. In cases where the scheme is not effective or where they are not targeted effectively in priority areas, the government will have new tools to intervene. This is not about introducing new regulation or increasing the burden on businesses to comply. It's about driving outcomes by creating jobs and using limited resources more efficiently. Green manufacturing is an area that will become increasingly important not only as we drive economic outcomes but also as we seek to protect our environment and use it more effectively, whether it be for tourism or otherwise.

The promise of our federation to all Australians is the opportunity to pursue their conception of a good life and to support their aspirations, provided they are willing to work hard. It is about institutionalising the quality of outcome, giving all Australians a fair go. During COVID-19 there are great challenges, and it's been deeply moving to see neighbours helping each other and coming together in this time of crisis. As a government, we cannot replace loved ones helping each other, but we can support healthy and vibrant communities.

Engaging productively with waste and recycling in a way that supports the economy rather than imposing a bureaucratic solution is a win-win. All too often solutions to problems result in more regulation for businesses, much of which is pointless and simply costs time, money and eventually jobs. Australia has some of the most stringent regulations and highest compliance costs in the world, and yet, compared to the rest of the OECD in this area, we lag behind. This is not because Australians are not innovative, hardworking or entrepreneurial. It is because the burden to be compliant with successive waves of regulation has stymied generations of small business owners and mums and dads who run simple businesses from getting ahead. Dumb regulations are the very antithesis of the promise and values of the Australian fair go, because only the big corporates actually have the finances to deal with increasingly complex legislation.

Where large multinational firms have departments dedicated to compliance in Australia, small businesses and young university graduates looking to do a start-up are undermined. They are betrayed by the Canberra bureaucrats who are searching for a reason to exist and to increase their departmental budgets and their personal salaries. In effect, they are taking money out of the pockets of some Australians to find meaningless regulation and self-promotion. At a time when many are struggling to make ends meet, when businesses have been liquidated due to hardship through no fault of their own, there are still vested interests wanting to regulate further. There is no benefit to regulation which destroys opportunities for Australians. A smarter regulation agenda such as this needs to create jobs, not lose them, and support innovation and investment, not discourage it. This bill is able to pursue the dual goal of helping the environment whilst building a stronger economy. Rather than dividing communities, we are bringing them together. Instead of pursuing a healthier environment at the cost of jobs and innovations, we are supporting a new industry. This is the agenda that partners with aspirational Australians and recognises that they are the drivers of economic growth and are responsible for Australia's prosperity and success. As a government and as a party we are helping to build a fairer Australia for everyone. COVID-19 has meant that this is more challenging now than any time since the Great Depression. That is why bills which support growth, fairness and recycling are so important. For these reasons, I highly commend the bill to the House.

Libby Coker (Corangamite, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to say to the member for Mackellar: thank you for your speech. I would also like to note that, on this side, we do not wish to seek division on this issue. We wish to work with the government and to come up with solutions that ensure that we become a global leader in recycling and waste, while making more jobs and growth possible.

I rise to address the waste and recycling bills before the House. Labor will support these bills, but it must be said that they do not do a great deal to advance our nation as a waste and recycling leader. Nor do they provide a foundation for thousands of new jobs in a sustainable industry, an industry that is champing at the bit to convert waste into valuable resources and commodities. With the right vision and the right incentives, rebates and procurement regulations, we could see massive industry investment, councils contributing their waste and a renaissance in regional manufacturing, in areas like my electorate of Corangamite. Instead, these bills are a missed opportunity, and, true to Morrison-McCormack form, this legislation is more about the spin and less about the substance.

I am incredibly fortunate to represent one of the most beautiful parts of Australia. From the Golden Plains to parts of Geelong, the Otways, Bellarine Peninsula, the Surf Coast and towns along the Great Ocean Road, Corangamite is nothing short of incredible. People in my community are proud of our environment. They're proud of our magnificent coastline, its waterways and our iconic surf beaches. They want to look after our environment and, like me, they are passionate about recycling. They also know there is too much plastic in our oceans, impacting on marine life and, in turn, on our own consumption. There is frustration at the current recycling and waste crisis, frustration with the federal government that has been dragged kicking and screaming to act, and frustration with the many missed opportunities we've had over the past seven years of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government to turn waste and recycling into jobs and opportunities for our regions. The recycling of waste into useful resources makes absolute sense. It's good for jobs, it's good for our economy and it's good for our environment.

Since China stopped taking our plastic and other waste in 2018-19, the failures in our system have been laid bare for all to see. Many people I speak to in my community have lost faith in our recycling and waste system, because they now know that so much of our recycling goes into landfill. We know that Australia lacks the ability to sustain a domestic recycling market that will protect our environment and meet the expectations of the community. Right now, we only recycle 12 per cent of plastics and 58 per cent of waste in total. Most of the remaining materials end up in landfill.

As the co-convenor of the Parliamentary Friends of Waste and Recycling, I find it unacceptable that there is now less capacity to recycle plastic in Australia than there was in 2005. Some experts have argued that Australia will need to increase its local plastic reprocessing capacity by 400 per cent in order to effectively repurpose our own waste into valuable resources. It says everything about the Morrison-McCormack government that it took a ban on imports from China and several other key nations for them to finally act. But their actions are short-sighted at best and show little comprehension of what is truly required to deliver a world's best practice national waste and recycling program. The Morrison-McCormack government doesn't seem to understand the urgency. We should not be exporting gas, plastics, tyres and paper for recycling. We should be cleaning up our own mess right here in Australia.

In this challenging setting, I would like to acknowledge the excellent work being undertaken by Barwon Water, servicing my electorate of Corangamite with all of the G21 councils towards transforming the region's organic waste into renewable energy and other recycled materials. This is a fantastic, exciting project that shows vision and commitment. But such local initiatives, while commendable, are not the answer to our national recycling crisis.

The bills before us would introduce a ban on the export of certain waste materials and establish a new licensing and declaration scheme. They would also replace and slightly update existing product stewardship laws. These are welcome changes, but, as I've already said, they are woefully underdone. If we are to become a leader in this field, the government must stop focusing on voluntary schemes. It must introduce meaningful recycling targets. And we must work with industry to produce less plastic packaging and fewer products that cannot be recycled. These bills provide no constructive plan for the future.

In contrast, Labor has a proud track record on recycling and waste. Labor in government created a national waste policy, establishing a national waste reporting process and introducing the Product Stewardship Act 2011. This was a major step forward in developing a regulatory framework to encourage responsible waste management in partnership with industry. But these measures were taken nine years ago and were meant to be only the beginning of reform, which has stalled dismally under those opposite.

Labor believes that recycling is an enormous opportunity for Australia. Recycled goods can be turned into products that generate employment, can reduce landfill and support regions like mine. I truly believe that better recycling could be a game changer for my region and our nation.

For every 10,000 tonnes of waste recycled, 10 jobs are created. We are in the midst of the Morrison recession. A horrifying number of Australians have lost their jobs. The queues outside Centrelink that we've seen this year are a national tragedy. As we come out of the COVID pandemic, the government must exploit every opportunity available to create more jobs locally, including those from recycling. In this federal budget, the government has set aside just $10 million for growing Australia's waste and recycling capacity. This will do little to see plastics turned into fence palings for council work, or to see recycled rubber in council footpaths and roads, or to see green organics composting on our local farms. There is so much opportunity for recycling and waste to support jobs and new industries here. But the federal government needs to lay the foundation to make this happen. Real outcomes require real investment. We need real leadership to provide confidence for industry investment. We need real leadership that enables local government to embrace waste and recycling on a massive scale, right across Australia, and we need real leadership on recycling incentives, rebates and rules around procurement at all levels of government.

State and local governments in my areas are waiting for the government to step up. The G21 regional alliance is a group in my community which represents five local councils, including the Colac Otway Shire, Golden Plains Shire, City of Greater Geelong, Borough of Queenscliffe and Surf Coast Shire. These councils have formed a united front and are working with the Victorian government on reforming kerbside recycling to better sort waste, recycling and organics. But the absence of a federal government with a proper plan for waste and recycling, including financial and legislative support, means it is going to be just so much harder for councils, industry and groups like G21 to manage this crisis and embrace constructive solutions.

I've previously spoken out in the House and in my electorate about the potential for my region to become a national waste and recycling hub. We have potential sites, investors and numerous existing manufacturing technologies who have come to me and asked me to help them to do more to enable the creation of a recycling hub quickly. If only this government would get behind this as a national priority, this solution would result in hundreds of new jobs for my region, giving opportunities to a region suffering from a lack of tourism visitation, a struggling university sector and a lack of confidence in our economy due to COVID-19 and mounting debt.

People in my community want to build with recycled materials, they want to work with recycled materials and they want to buy recycled materials. They do not want to see massive amounts of hard waste end up in landfill. Importantly, they want our oceans and waterways to be free of plastics.

Australia has a real opportunity to become a leader in waste and recycling, but the Morrison government is failing to drive reform. It is failing to drive a robust framework that creates stakeholder confidence, and it is failing to invest in the job-creating opportunities that come with the recycling of waste. Ultimately, this government is failing our environment. The people of my electorate want to protect our beautiful environment, our precious coastline, our marine life, our waterways and our oceans. I urge those opposite to go beyond the media release masquerading as legislation and do more—much, much more—to address this crucially important issue. My region has the skills, the workers, the assets and the will to step into the future. The missing piece is a federal government with the vision to make it happen.

Julian Simmonds (Ryan, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm very proud to speak in support of the Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020. This is a subject which I and many of my constituents in the Ryan electorate are very passionate about. This legislation will go a long way to improving waste practices and changing the way in which we look at waste reduction and recycling in Australia. I want to acknowledge at the outset that the bill is the result of not just the incredibly hard work of the minister sitting at the table today, Minister Ley, but also the hard work of my good friend and neighbouring MP Trevor Evans. Minister Evans's appointment as the Assistant Minister for Waste Reduction and Environmental Management is telling of the Morrison government's commitment to waste management practices in this country, ensuring that we continue to live in a clean, green and sustainable Australia.

We recently welcomed Minister Evans in a visit to the Ryan electorate. We were very pleased to have him on the banks of the beautiful Brisbane River, down there at Indooroopilly. The local creek catchment groups, in association with cleaner waterways associations, had discovered a very large rubbish patch on the banks of the Brisbane River. Minister Evans rolled up his sleeves and collected a fair bit of rubbish, as did I, and the crew was out there on the boat picking up rubbish as well. It's a great reminder to everybody in the electorate of Ryan and in the other electorates that front onto the Brisbane River catchment of the importance of keeping waste out of the waterways and the importance of continuous vigilance.

The Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 identifies the necessity for us, as a nation, to look after the waste that we produce and to deal with it here in Australia. In doing so, we will not only be taking responsibility for managing the waste that we produce, but we will be doing so in a way that is environmentally conscious and can further stimulate the economy and jobs, no doubt making Australia a global leader in this space. The bill will ensure that Australia's waste management reduction will be a truly transformative shift in our nation's approach to waste. It has the support of federal, state and territory governments as well as local governments. However, what will ensure the longevity of this bill in creating an ongoing shift in waste management practices is the years of extensive consultation with industry and business, which will see the positive benefits of this bill continue long into the future.

This bill isn't just great for the environment; it is great for creating jobs—a priority of the Morrison government that is more important now, as we work our way through the COVID recession, than ever before. This legislation will go a long way to stimulating the economy and stimulating employment in the area of processing our waste. It is projected that the waste export ban will generate an extra $1.5 billion in our economy over the next 20 years and create hundreds of jobs. Let me say that again: the waste export ban will generate $1.5 billion in our economy and create hundreds of jobs. That's what you get from this side of the chamber; that's what you get from the Morrison government—a commitment not only to reducing our waste and to being environmentally sustainable but to do it in a way that creates jobs, supports industry and supports our economy. This is certainly no small sum. It just goes to show that, when there is a government and a side of politics that works with industry, as this side does, rather than trying to dictate to it, we can achieve outcomes that are mutually beneficial for business, consumers and, importantly, our environment.

As I know Minister Evans knows, this government's pragmatic approach to policy has meant that we are going to have resoundingly better outcomes for business and the environment in a way in which the Labor Party were never able to emulate during its time in government, in a way in which the Labor Party can simply never achieve. They like to talk big when it comes to the environment. They like to talk it up. They like to have all the show and pomp and ceremony and all the rest of it, but when it comes to actually delivering practical outcomes, it's the coalition governments of this nation that have delivered some of the most substantial, practical outcomes on the ground, while the Labor Party are too busy talking themselves up on this particular issue. That's why it's this government, a coalition government, that has delivered the first waste reduction bill, which we are debating today—another milestone in environmental management for our nation, delivered by a coalition government, not the Labor Party opposite, who like to stand up at every election and say they're the only ones in the world who can save the environment or who care about the environment and that the rest of us are philistines and all the rest of it. They couldn't deliver. They had plenty of chances. They were in government in the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years. They could have delivered Australia's first waste reduction bill. Did they? No. It is this government, the coalition government, the Morrison government, with the help of Assistant Minister Evans, who have taken the steps to deliver it. It's been achieved because we're working in a consultative manner with the industry and their reps. We're allowing for reasonable time frames to transition to our phase-out goal of 2024. Rather than dictating to industry with heavy handed taxes and unnecessary regulation, which is the Labor way—if they see a problem, they've got to regulate their way out of it or tax their way out of it—we've ensured that we've enshrined in this bill that there is a way to have a more efficient and long-term change than has ever been achieved when it comes to environmental management by the Labor Party.

The Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 accepts that our country's management of waste and recycling is not perfect, and we take responsibility for the fact that we need to manage the waste that is created within our borders and we need to do it better. As a responsible actor in the international community, the government has acknowledged the impact that we as a nation have had in generating waste which negatively impacts our regional environment. The Morrison government has accepted that this is a vital challenge that we must tackle. We know that this is an opportunity in time to step up to the plate as a developed nation, to lead the way in forging a strategy, via this bill, that can be emulated by our regional partners. By banning the export of waste in this manner, we're being both environmentally conscious and recognising the impact of our waste but doing so in a sustainable manner that will bring industry with us, that won't destroy jobs and that will allow businesses a reasonable time to adjust their business model and their employment opportunities.

We recognise that businesses, in particular small businesses, are the backbone of our economy and face enormous pressures in keeping millions of Australians in work, particularly during this time of the COVID recession. But we do ask that business take responsibility for their own waste. This will be achieved through incentivising businesses to recognise the impacts of their product and where they end up throughout the entirety of the product's life cycle. So many businesses have done so much in recent years, proactively, to this effect. They have much to be proud of in terms of what they have done already, and we are proud of what they have achieved. This bill goes further and incentivises businesses to audit their own products and recognise the impacts they may have later in the product's life cycle. Through working in lock step with affected businesses and industry, we will then be able to achieve better outcomes by taking collective responsibility.

This is a plan that will ultimately divert 10 million tonnes of waste from landfill to be reutilised in a more sustainable fashion. Diverting 10 million tonnes of waste—that's the merit of this bill. It's extraordinary and it's going to make a remarkable impact on the face of Australia in waste management. The Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill looks at waste recycling differently and acknowledges the potential opportunity rather than the burden waste presents. We previously looked at waste as a problem rather than an opportunity for further utilisation.

Brisbane City Council, which I had the pleasure to be part of for almost 10 years, has been doing incredible work for some time from a local government perspective when it comes to environmental management and waste reduction. They are an important partner with the federal government. Under the leadership of Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner they have developed a strategy to incorporate over 20,000 tonnes of salvaged glass from landfill into road base and, in the process, they have saved their ratepayers $3.6 million. This is the kind of innovative stuff that can be done when you view waste as an opportunity—an opportunity to save money and to create jobs—and you take that approach rather than viewing it as a burden.

Brisbane City Council, with the assistance of federal government funding, has also developed a trial to incorporate discarded car tyres into bitumen, to make use of a discarded tyres and in doing so create a formula which will make bitumen more durable and longer lasting. These are innovative and forward-thinking approaches from a local government. We have seen the same sort of innovative and forward-thinking approaches replicated by local governments around Australia. They are saving tonnes of waste from going into landfill and saving ratepayers' dollars as well.

I would also like to acknowledge Brisbane City Council's leading efforts in Australia as Australia's first carbon-neutral council. The first carbon-neutral council in Australia is not a Labor council. It's an LNP council. An LNP council that has had LNP leadership since 2004 has been the first council to take the step to be entirely carbon-neutral. That's the difference between Labor, who are all talk on this issue, and the coalition and LNP parties, who are about practical steps and implementation.

But it's not just local government and federal government who are doing their bit. Many major supermarkets have incorporated soft-plastic bins into their shopping centres to make it easier for consumers to dispose of plastics which are not recyclable, electronic stores are taking in unused mobile phones and even Rotary clubs across the country are collecting bottle tops to be reused for prosthetic limbs. So there are some fantastic stories out there to be told, and we need those individual efforts to continue. The bill won't replace them. The bill will simply work in conjunction with them by bringing together industry, business and government so that we can collectively work to create better outcomes for the environment, create jobs and save taxpayer dollars in the long term.

I know that Assistant Minister Evans has worked hard to ensure that the industry has a realistic time frame in which to meet the requirements set. The ban on unprocessed mixed plastics will be in force under this bill by 1 July 2021, on whole used tyres by December 2021, on single resin or polymer plastics by July 2022 and on mixed paper and cardboard by July 2024. It's an ambitious but reasonable time frame that will allow businesses to judiciously adjust to those new bans. As the party of small business, we know that it is only when businesses are brought into the conversation we can successfully achieve our goals. The ban placed on waste products is restricted to unprocessed materials, and businesses will still be able to apply for licences to export processed waste that is in line with industry standards if they are willing to do the work to process the waste in a way that is environmentally sustainable.

Collectively, with this bill we will divert over 10 million tonnes of waste, create over 10,000 jobs, pump an extra $1.5 billion into the economy and, most importantly, help safeguard our environment for future generations. The residents of my electorate of Ryan aren't single issue focused. They care about all these things. Of course they care about supporting their environment, but they also care about creating jobs. They also care about a strong economy. The fact this government is able to achieve all of those goals together by working with industry and by enshrining it in this bill is an incredibly clear testament. It's a clear testament that it's only under the stewardship of an LNP government that we can create such a universally accepted approach to waste management. The Morrison government will continue to work tirelessly to create pragmatic policy that is good for the environment, good for the economy and good for jobs, and on that note I commend this bill to the House.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is the words proposed to be omitted stand as part of the question. I give the call to the member for Macnamara.

Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] Thank you very much, Acting Speaker. It's nice to see you. I hope to be up there in Canberra with you all in the not too distant future. Listening to the member for Ryan give his contribution was a little perplexing to be honest, because the member for Ryan spoke about his time and his friends in the Brisbane City Council, about how he was rummaging around and busy supporting a carbon neutral Brisbane City Council. My advice to the member for Ryan is: if you're so enthusiastic about carbon neutrality maybe get your government to commit to net zero emissions like the rest of the world, maybe join the rest of the states, maybe join the Business Council, maybe join the Farmers Federation in actually committing on a pathway towards carbon neutrality, but of course they're not going to.

I listened carefully also to the member for Mackellar who spoke about how the Labor Party likes to make political hay about climate change, that's because the government's not doing anything about it. It's not hard to see why when the Prime Minister, instead of actually taking action on climate change, tries to use recycling as the excuse for his inaction on climate change. But we all know that the member for Mackellar, the member for Wentworth and the member for Goldstein are part of a very small group of MPs on their side of the House who have to sit in the corner of the party room, whose views are not really allowed to be expressed openly, because the views of others in the party are far more prominent. Like the views of Senator Rennick, who accused the Bureau of Meteorology of having a conspiracy and fudging the weather data—that's a view that reflects the views of the government—or Senator Molan who said that he doesn't take into consideration evidence when forming his views on climate change, or even the member for Hughes who just flat out denies that climate change is a thing altogether. They're actually the views that represent the views of the federal government.

On that the Labor Party takes a very, very different view. The Labor Party takes a view where we need to move forward and we need to take action on climate change, on emissions and, of course, on protecting our environment. This bill and these bills before the House are bills that we would support. The huge changes in the recycling sector have meant that Australia needs to take more responsibility of our waste reduction and of our waste products. Unlike the government, we don't believe that everything should be done by the states. We believe that the federal government should have an active role in steering, in funding and in moving Australia towards a more circular economy and towards better management of our recycling.

I'm not up in Canberra at the moment. I'm home in my electorate of Macnamara. Last night I was watching an episode of Utopia, a great show, where the characters were talking about the future infrastructure fund. It was a $100 billion fund where they were going to take money now, put it in a fund, but not spend a cent. It was going to be about future infrastructure. Of course, there were infrastructure needs at that moment. That episode highlighted how the future infrastructure fund is all about the future. That can be a pretty good analogy when art imitates the life of this government. I remember the Prime Minister set-up a $100 million recycling fund—$100 million! He put it on a brochure. Of course, we now know that 72 per cent of that announcement hasn't been spent. The government's answer to dealing with recycling is to copy the world of Utopia by setting up future funds. 'Let's put it in a glossy brochure; let's put it in a media release,' but not actually do anything about it.

This government isn't good at recycling products, but one thing this government is good at recycling is announcements. They love recycling announcements. There's not an announcement they won't use again. They'll use the same one time and time again to resell an initiative but not actually do anything about it. The $100 million recycling fund that the Prime Minister announced on the world stage was actually a re-dressed announcement of money that already existed in the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. The government are not actually interested in doing things and moving the dial forward. What they are interested in doing is recycling announcements and making sure that everyone knows how glossy their marketing products are.

The government have set themselves targets around recycling which, just like the emissions reduction targets, they are nowhere near on track to meet. It's 'say lots, do little'; that's their approach to recycling. They've got lots and lots of plans and lots and lots of announcements, but they haven't actually set up a pathway to be able to achieve their 70 per cent reduction by 2025, and we're currently at 16 per cent reduction. This government really, really needs to do better. And that comes, unsurprisingly, amid broader failures on environmental reform and emissions reductions, which all go hand in hand. We cannot separate plastics, recycling and emissions reduction from habitat destruction, biodiversity destruction and the really serious state of our environment right across this country and, obviously, across the world.

I want to talk a little bit about local action to contrast action taken locally with the action—or the lack of action—by the federal government. In Macnamara, we are so lucky to have such a wonderful coastline around our electorate. We're right on the bay. My electorate goes from Port Melbourne all the way down to Elwood along the coastline and then cuts inland a little bit. We take great pride in our local beaches and we take great pride in our walkways and our waterways. At the last election, we actually had a policy for cleaning up some of the waterway that travels through my electorate and out into the bay. It was a great initiative that locals were really excited by, and I can assure you that it hasn't been taken off the agenda. It's something that whoever is in charge should be looking towards, because the quality of the water in the bay in Melbourne and through Melbourne is important, and it affects the biodiversity of our bay and the biodiversity of our waterways.

Some of the other great work happening locally that I wanted to mention is, first of all, to do with the Port Phillip EcoCentre—and, on Sunday, I was very pleased to attend their AGM. The eco-centre is one of the jewels in the crown of our local environmental organisations. They do brilliant work around monitoring biodiversity, and on plastics—the use of plastics, where plastics end up, the effect that plastics have. They also help and contribute to some of our really special wildlife hotspots, from Elsternwick Park to the St Kilda pier and its penguins. They are a brilliant organisation, and I would like to take this opportunity to recognise them and also to put on the record again my personal support for their potential redevelopment. They are looking to create a local hub for education and environmental management in St Kilda, at their current premises. They're looking to create a centre of community use and environmental management. I was pleased to support it at the last election and am fully supportive of the project right now.

I'd like also to acknowledge BeachPatrol, who spend their weekends basically protecting our bay and protecting our beaches. These are locals who give up their time to make sure that the plastic that we use and ends up on our beach fronts is collected and doesn't potentially affect the wildlife and the marine life in the bay. BeachPatrol, including my friend Ross and his team, do a wonderful job, and I'd like to give them a shout-out for all their efforts in working towards reducing the plastic and recycling imprints on our local area.

It is absolutely crucial when speaking about recycling that we mention the government's really appalling efforts in relation to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. The EPBC Act should be the linchpin of environmental protection and habitat protection. Among the key recommendations of the Samuel review, as mentioned by the member for Fremantle—I acknowledge his contribution and leadership in this policy area—are to have a federal regulator and to have strong national standards. It is not enough just to deal with the recycling issues that these bills confront. It is also crucial that we make sure that we are protecting habitats and protecting biodiversity locally and also protecting the animal life that exists. The government had a brilliant opportunity to strengthen our environmental protections and do something profound, something that this country would remember as a great part of their legacy in environmental protections, but they couldn't bring themselves to do anything like that. Instead, they rushed through a bill that they gagged in the House of Representatives for no good reason. They just knew that they didn't want to talk about it for any longer, because it was such a disaster for environmental protection in this country. What a stain on their legacy that is. The environment and natural habitats will be around a lot longer than the Morrison government, and instead of doing their bit to protect our natural environment, the Morrison government's legacy will forever be that they rammed through a bill that weakened environmental protections in this country.

These bills are a step forward, but they are nowhere near enough. The government needs to stop recycling announcements. The government needs to stop doing glossy brochures and glossy media releases around recycling funds and future recycling funds and all the things that the Prime Minister likes to focus on. Instead, it should be looking at the proper reforms to reduce the amount of plastic production, to increase circular economies and to increase business accountability on the products that businesses create. It should also be supporting businesses to ensure that they have a shorter lasting imprint on our environment. We are custodians of this land. We are custodians of the waterways. We came to this country with a responsibility to look after it. The way in which this government constantly trashes the environment, trashes any legitimate climate policy and trashes its responsibility to protect our natural habitats and wonders will forever be a stain on the legacy of each and every member of this government. I acknowledge that there are a few members of the government who seek to sound different and have a unique voice in an overwhelming tidal wave of irresponsibility when it comes to environment, recycling and climate change, but the public know and the experts know that this government has failed on all of those accounts.

We, on the Labor Party, remain committed to properly protecting our environment. We remain committed to doing our bit. We remain committed to supporting the wonderful local organisations that we have, like the eco centre and BeachPatrol and many others. We wish the government would take a leaf out of their book, instead of the inaction that has riddled this government each and every step of the way.

Katie Allen (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 and associated bills with an immense sense of pride. This bill is pragmatic, practical and what the Australian people want and expect.

Australia generates about 67 million tonnes of waste each year and only 37 million tonnes are recycled—that's about half of our waste that's recycled each year. We can and we should do better. Only 12 per cent of the 103 kilograms of plastic waste generated per person in Australia each year is recycled and this is mostly overseas. This waste problem isn't unique to Australia, but this waste problem is a problem that the world needs to face together for the safety of this planet. A European Union report estimates the production of virgin plastic will account for 20 per cent of global oil consumption and 15 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This is a looming problem that needs to be dealt with now.

Australians rightly assume their council rates, which includes a rubbish collection levy, pays for their waste to be appropriately dealt with by the council and the company who collects their bins every week or fortnight. But in my home state of Victoria, the looming problem of waste and what to do to manage it came to the fore about 18 months ago—that seems like a life time ago now. In a very sudden announcement, almost overnight, residents in 33 local councils across Victoria were told that they would no longer have their allocated recycling collected. This was because of the collapse of a particular recycling company. That, coupled with a series of warehouse fires that were storing rubbish, in particular car tyres, blew the lid on the practices of recycling companies—literally.

Most average Australians dutifully separate their recyclables from their rubbish and compost every week, placing the appropriate waste in the right coloured bins. But what most Australians didn't know—and perhaps they do now—is that there's been a long history of most of our curb side collection being shipped overseas to China for processing. When China made the decision to stop importing waste from the rest of the world, the rubbish collection industry went into freefall. Factories were forced to stockpile, resulting in rubbish of all varieties—recyclable and non-recyclable—ending up in landfill. This was incredibly disappointing, considering the leaps and bounds Australians made in understanding, educating and actioning recycling principles, and consciously making more sustainable choices in their daily lives.

I'm sure I have the support of all members in this House who've visited local schools in their electorates and seen the incredible work that our students do on recycling. It was hard to look these kids in their eyes when this disaster happened. We know these kids care about their planet. We know they're enthusiastic recyclers. We know they care about their future, and so do we. And so began a blame game in Victoria between the industry, the Victorian Labor government, who failed to see the writing on the wall, and councils, who were responsible for handling our local waste.

Well, enough is enough. The Morrison government has decided to step in and take charge. And I want to thank the minister for Brisbane for his passionate leadership in this area as Assistant Minister for Waste Reduction and Environmental Management. I call him our waste warrior.

As a nation we have a duty and a responsibility for our own waste. We can't just pass the buck to other countries to deal with. That is why I support the bill with a great deal of pride today. This landmark bill seeks to ensure Australia takes responsibility for its waste and establishes a national industry framework for recycling. The Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 will work to end the 640,000 tonnes of rubbish—including plastic, paper, glass and tyres—that Australia ships overseas, mainly to China. As Australians, we should all welcome the $190 million dollar commitment for the new Recycling Modernisation Fund announced in the budget recently, plus the $60 million for the National Waste Policy Action Plan that will improve our waste data collection and halve our food waste by 2030. It will also provide the basis for those who design, manufacture and distribute products to take greater responsibility for the impacts of these products on the environment.

As the Prime Minister has said, 'It's our waste; it's our responsibility.' The Australian public expect this and the Australian public deserve this. We are putting this incredibly important issue firmly on the federal government agenda, not leaving it the to states and territories to go it alone. We will work as one across the three levels of government to solve this problem for Australia. The new 2020 national waste policy will work with Australian environment ministers from all states and territories and with the Australian Local Government Association to set a unified direction for fixing our waste crisis now and into the future. This legislation will not only reduce the amount of products that go to landfill but tackle plastic pollution in our waterways and oceans and give Australians confidence that, when they put their recycling bin out, their waste will be collected and recycled properly and responsibly, not simply dumped into landfill.

The Standing Committee on Industry, Innovation, Science and Resources, on which I sit proudly, is currently undertaking an inquiry into the Australian waste management and recycling sector, to understand how we can build the sector to meet our country's demands. The Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia, in their submission to the inquiry, highlighted numerous benefits of re-examining our recycling habits and, ultimately, restructuring the framework for dealing with our waste and recyclables. They sum up quite succinctly the benefits of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to remodel waste management across the board.

Firstly, they suggest transforming and modernising Australia's economy to enable it to be more sustainable. We must think of our material management as cyclical, not linear—a holistic approach to managing our natural resources, with strong leadership encouraging rethinking and redesigning that enables greater use. For those of you who are technically orientated—geekish, perhaps—I encourage you to go to the inquiry's website and view some of the amazing submissions about how Australians are now thinking about a cyclical rather than a linear approach to recycling. There are some amazing technologies that have been presented to the inquiry.

Secondly, they suggest the preservation of resources and accelerating the decoupling of economic growth from the use of fossil fuels. This is important, because we need to have a complete shift in our mindset on waste—in fact, not seeing 'waste' as waste at all, but more as a resource that can be used again and again and again. Plastics is a great example. Once processed, it can live lots of different lives in lots of different forms. We've heard about this in the recent submissions to the inquiry into waste and recycling.

Thirdly, there's a focus on the creation of local jobs and the growth of local economies. We are hearing this more and more, particularly from rural and regional electorates, where local communities embrace the opportunity to be waste warriors and to benefit economically from this. It's important to remember that good waste management is not just an environmental problem; it's an economic opportunity to create and rejuvenate the sector. For every 10,000 tonnes of waste recycled, more than nine jobs are created. Our actions under the National Wast Policy Action Plan will create 10,000 new jobs over the next 10 years. That's a 32 per cent increase in jobs in the Australian waste and recycling sector.

Fourthly, the plan stresses the importance of investment in the sector in both infrastructure and operations. With no guarantee that products made from recycled materials will be purchased, invested in or innovated, the industry dries up. I welcome our national government's procurement plan, ensuring that procurement through government sources can invest in this industry. This will ensure that they've got an economic plan ahead. The submission notes we must place greater emphasis on creating end-markets, or demand, for recycled materials, to generate investment in infrastructure and innovation. Investment, innovation and growth in this industry ultimately supports job creation, and this is critical as we cast our minds to our COVID pandemic economic recovery. Fifthly, they state, 'Waste management in the recycling industry ultimately supports the achievement of climate goals.'

Earlier this year the Morrison government released the low-emissions Technology Investment Roadmap, which is a very welcome development as part of our goal to develop a long-term climate strategy that appropriately balances environmental and economic concerns.

It's technology, not taxes, that are key to meeting and beating our international climate change goals. We know how important recycling and waste are to emissions and our emission reduction goals. Innovating in our waste management and recycling industries supports this goal. It's something that the public wants. It's something that the public enthusiastically supports.

Energy from waste is the treatment of residual waste to harness energy from material that would otherwise be landfill. I was pleased to visit recently the ecolawn centre as part of the inquiry into recycling and waste to see some of the wonderful technologies that are being brought online. The energies are created by either thermally processing waste at high temperatures and using heat to make steam or digesting the organic material to produce gas which can be used for fuel, electricity generation or heat. Currently, small- and large-scale anaerobic digestion technology is being developed across Australia and makes a meaningful contribution to resource recovery and renewable energy generation. This is a 'watch this space' area globally, and Australia needs to be in line with the technology development in this area. It's exciting and promising work which should, hopefully, grow to form an important part of the energy mix in Australia.

In conclusion, waste and recycling may not be the sexiest topic under consideration in this place, but its importance both now and into the future cannot be understated.

Peter Khalil (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] I also rise to speak on the Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 and the plans for this bill to introduce a much-needed ban on certain waste materials, including glass, plastic ties and paper. Labor will support these bills because there is actually no time to delay when it comes to responsible waste management and protecting our environment.

Introduced by the Gillard government in 2011, the Product Stewardship Act was a major step forward in developing a regulatory framework to encourage responsible waste management in partnership with industry. It was the foundation for the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme, which is still the only co-regulatory arrangement and has been largely successful. Since then, virtually nothing has been done by the coalition to build on this progress. That is seven years wasted—excuse the pun. It took a ban on imports from China and several other nations for the coalition government to make a move on this and to act on waste and recycling. How can you take this government seriously on waste and the environment when their signature election commitment, the $100 million Recycling Investment Fund, is simply a repackaging of the existing Clean Energy Finance Corporation? More than a year after it was first committed, the fund remains untouched.

In the meantime it has been clear that there is a serious deficiency in Australia's recycling capacity. We have lower capacity to recycle plastic than we had in 2005. Product stewardship is a critical element of sustainable waste management. It's fair to expect that the designers and manufacturers of products will take responsibility for mitigating environmental impacts by seeking to reduce waste in the first place and also by enabling re-use or recycling and incorporating these costs into their business models. The government's own review found that growing numbers of industry free riders are the primary factor that leads to a failed voluntary scheme, yet their apparently limited response is to facilitate a form of naming and shaming that may influence businesses to take responsibility. If that doesn't work, they have promised to consider a stronger approach at a later time. This is too much talk and not enough leadership or action. We don't really have time to wait and see. There is a set of targets to be achieved under the national waste policy from 2018, and we can't afford to wait and see.

There's no doubt that the much-needed progress on waste and recycling requires some semblance of national leadership, which is lacking at the moment. I will say that we as an opposition, federal Labor, are up for the challenge. We created the first national waste policy in 2009, establishing a national waste reporting process, and introduced the Product Stewardship Act, under the Gillard government, in 2011. We were glad to note that the long-delayed statutory review of that act confirmed the fundamental value of Labor's policy, particularly in relation to the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme, which I mentioned earlier. Further improvements to compliance that now come under that scheme are both necessary and welcome. Labor has consistently argued for strong national action on plastics and recycling.

By contrast, the Morrison government continues with its failed business-as-usual approach to the issue of waste management. It continues to create media events, like the so-called Plastics Summit in March, whilst taking little or no action or large-scale reform at all. That means worse environmental outcomes but it also means we miss the opportunity to develop new and innovative manufacturing processes and jobs. We need to move towards eliminating single-use plastics and maximising plastics recycling through better design, producer responsibility, improved infrastructure and effective policies on procurement and recycled content requirements. All these measures should be delivered through a nationally coordinated and strategic approach.

The fact is that Australia lacks the ability to sustain a domestic recycling market that will protect our environment and meet the expectations of the community. Up to eight million tonnes of plastic makes its way into the world's oceans every year. The global consumption of plastic could triple by 2040. In Australia, we only recycle 12 per cent of our plastics and 58 per cent of our waste in total. Some analysis indicates that Australia will need to increase its local plastics recycling capacity by some 400 per cent to recycle and reprocess our own waste into useful and valuable resources. We have a very poor record on plastics in particular, yet Australia stands to be heavily affected by plastics pollution in our oceans, which are so important to us as an ocean continent. As with the issue of climate change more broadly, we are not doing our best to build regional cooperation in reducing plastics across the Indo-Pacific. I think we can do much better by leading by example and demonstrating that we can be leaders in this space.

We've seen, however, a lack of leadership in the government's own budget recently. The Prime Minister made energy announcements and left out renewable energy entirely. He focused only on the threat of funding new gas projects. Labor's policy is for Australia to become a renewable energy superpower. If elected to government, we will implement policies that will achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Renewable energy will power our future and tackle the climate crisis. As the Leader of the Opposition said recently, the market tells us that the cheapest forms of new energy are renewables. In his recent budget-in-reply speech, he detailed Labor's commitment to making Australia a renewable energy superpower and highlighted one area in our energy system that desperately needs government attention, the electricity grid. Our Rewiring the Nation plan will invest $20 billion to rebuild and modernise the grid for the renewables age. Australia's complex tangle of electricity grid connection and congestion and system strength issues is quickly becoming a major barrier to the next big wave of renewable energy investment. The reality is that the grid was not designed for renewables and small-scale generators. So federal Labor is committed to making Australia a renewable energy superpower; rebuilding our electricity grid for the future; driving the transition we need to tackle climate change and create thousands of new jobs; maximum plastics recycling through better design, producer responsibility and improved infrastructure; and effective policies on procurement and recycled content requirements.

Labor knows that we can come out of this recession stronger if we have the vision, if we have the leadership. Only we can deliver the massive reform that we need to both safeguard our climate and create the thousands of new jobs necessary to power that economic recovery. That's what leadership is about—having a plan for the future, which we've articulated.

We are in opposition and we will continue to be critical of the government's lack of action on waste, which so far has failed to deliver certainty for industry—for jobs—and for Australia's environment. While the reforms we're debating are not unwelcome, and nor is any other legislation or policy on this implemented by this government, we don't think it will be effective in building a significantly improved waste and recycling sector. It falls short again, in short. We need to see action from government when it comes to producer responsibility for waste, to procurement and to the strategic allocation of waste infrastructure if we are to see a major take-up of recycling here in Australia.

Dave Sharma (Wentworth, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's a pleasure to talk on this landmark package of legislation today, the Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 and associated bills. I want to congratulate the Minister for the Environment, the member for Farrer, and the Assistant Minister for Waste Reduction and Environmental Management, the member for Brisbane, on the work they've done over many months, in fact years, in putting this legislation together. This legislation is about Australia stepping up and taking responsibility for the waste that we produce, rather than shipping it offshore and outsourcing our responsibility. It's about Australia developing new waste-processing industries, creating new businesses and jobs and new products, and it's about the transformation of Australia's waste and recycling sector and the development of a circular economy.

Waste is an environmental problem to solve, and solve it we must, but it's also an economic opportunity to seize, and seize it we must. These bills will do just that. The bills have three main objectives. The first is to enact a prohibition on waste exports. Once that is enacted, the export of waste material will be prohibited unless certain conditions are met: that it is being processed into a value-added material or that it will be reused or used as a manufacturing input overseas. This will help phase out some 645,000 tonnes of unprocessed plastic, paper, glass and tyres that Australia currently ships overseas each year. The export of mixed plastics will be banned from 1 July 2021, whole used tyres from 1 December 2021, single-resin or polymer plastics from 1 July 2022, and mixed and unsorted paper and cardboard from 1 July 2024.

Secondly, this package of legislation addresses the issue of product stewardship. These bills will replace and improve the existing Product Stewardship Act 2011 and provide for three kinds of product stewardship scheme: voluntary, co-regulatory and mandatory. The bill will encourage the development of a circular economy in Australia by enhancing voluntary product stewardship and supporting businesses to consider the full life cycle of products. It will encourage and, if it is needed, impose obligations upon manufacturers, distributors and importers of certain products to help manage the full life cycle of these products, from design and production through to reuse and disposal, and ensure that these producers take greater responsibility for the impact of these products on the environment. Overall, this will help improve the design, durability, reparability and reusability of products and help lower the overall environmental footprint of them—things such as batteries, printer cartridges, photovoltaics and others. The bills will also facilitate voluntary product stewardship arrangements and accreditation with a product stewardship logo that will let consumers know that they are making a responsible choice.

Thirdly, these bills will help realise the economic and community benefits of processing waste in Australia. They will help create new industries, products and jobs, and they will be complemented by our $191 million Recycling Modernisation Fund, recently announced in the budget. This fund will help leverage around $600 million of recycling infrastructure investment. It will help create around 10,000 new jobs. It will help divert more than 10 million tonnes of waste from landfill. All up, this waste export ban is expected to generate potentially $1½ billion in new economic activity over the next 20 years.

The House Standing Committee on Industry, Innovation, Science and Resources, of which I'm a member, has been conducting an inquiry into Australia's waste management and recycling industries, as my colleague the member for Higgins just mentioned. Through this inquiry we have learnt already how much of a contribution recycling is making in Australia. We've heard about the growing use of recycled crushed glass in road construction as an alternative material to sand. We've heard from the charitable op-shop sector, in many respects the pioneers of Australia's circular economy—the first op shop in Australia was opened in 1880 by the Salvos—about how their business model has actually thrived during the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, through the roughly 3,000 charitable op shops around the country, some 285 million products a year are given a second life through reuse, diverting some 622,000 tonnes of waste from landfill every year and, in doing so, generating some $550 million in annual revenue for social welfare programs supporting disadvantaged communities and people. So the circular economy is already here in Australia. It's been here since 1880. These bills are about accelerating and growing the circular economy.

Through this inquiry, we've also heard from the National Association of Charitable Recycling Organisations about how a large amount of textile waste in Australia is still sent to landfill each year, some 679,000 tonnes. That's a resource recovery rate of only 12 per cent. If these textiles could be diverted to the op-shop network, which has recovery rates of almost 90 per cent, a vast amount of waste could be diverted from landfill. The fashion and clothing industry in Australia needs to do a better job of taking responsibility for this, and it's an important message to all Australians: do not just throw out your old clothing; take it to the op shop. As NACRO told us, 'Clothing textiles donated to charities are a resource, not a waste.' So let's give them more resources.

We've also heard in this inquiry from the National Waste and Recycling Industry Council about how government can make an impact by addressing product stewardship regulations for batteries, packaging, all electronics, photovoltaics and tyres and establishing producer or manufacturer collecting and recycling services for these products. We also heard from them about how diverting more food and organic waste from domestic and commercial recycling bins would have a massive impact, given it accounts for some 50 per cent of the volume going to landfill. That's right: food and organic waste is currently 50 per cent of the volume that goes to landfill, and the decomposition of this food and organic waste without oxygen, which is frequently what happens in landfill sites, leads to the production of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

I want to reflect here and congratulate one of the local government areas in my electorate of Wentworth, the Randwick City Council, which has recently introduced a food and organic waste collection service. Unfortunately, far too few councils in the Sydney metropolitan area offer such a service. I urge other councils in Sydney to look at the Randwick City Council model and look to do the same.

Through this inquiry, we've also heard from IKEA about its ambition to transform itself into a completely circular business by 2030 and its use of furniture buyback, which is now available for 10,000 articles, going back some ten years, and which is now live in all 10 Australian IKEA stores. So far under this scheme, some 5,044 pieces of furniture have been returned, and this will only grow over time. It's a remarkable initiative, a leading initiative, from a company that is often known for being at the forefront of such innovations.

Extensive consultation on this bill over the past few years has been conducted, with discussion papers, industry roundtables, extensive engagement with states and territories and comprehensive stakeholder engagement. Again, I want to applaud the work of the assistant minister and the minister for the comprehensive task they have done in this regard. The feedback from these consultations has been incorporated into these bills.

In conclusion, in Australia we generate more waste per capita than in many other countries. We need to do better—better at finding ways to reuse goods, better at diverting products away from landfill, better at turning waste products into valuable inputs, better at finding ways to unlock and repurpose the value in much of what we currently dispose of and better at taking full responsibility for all we use and consume, throughout its lifecycle. These bills are an important first step, and I commend them to the House.

Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Lucy Wicks (Robertson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020. This bill will allow Australia to take responsibility for its waste and to establish a national industry framework that bans the export of waste glass, plastic, tyres and paper. The bill will also improve the framework of the Product Stewardship Act 2011 to encourage and regulate best practice in this area.

I'm really proud to be part of a government that's so committed to driving Australia's waste recycling industry forward. The bill will phase out the export of 645,000 tonnes of unprocessed plastic, paper, glass and tyres that are being shipped overseas every year. The legislation will implement a waste and export ban through a licensing and declaration scheme in which waste material can be prohibited from export unless specific conditions are met. These include holding an export licence or making a declaration prior to export.

The legislation also sees key improvements to product stewardship that encourage businesses to take responsibility for the waste that they generate. This will be achieved through better product design and increased recovery, as well as through the reuse of waste materials. This approach ensures that exported waste is safe for human health as well as for the environment. In turn, this creates jobs in the waste management and recycling sector, boosting the local and the national economies. Overall, I'm advised that our waste and recycling strategy will create 10,000 jobs over the next 10 years. The job-creating ability of recycling is immense. For every 10,000 tonnes of waste being sent to landfill around three direct jobs are created, but if we recycle that same waste we can create nine direct jobs.

One of the reasons I rise to speak in support of this legislation is that there are a number of businesses within my local community that are already helping our environment, and creating local jobs in the process. They are a fantastic demonstration of the commitment that our community has to waste-reduction and recycling, and a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate the work being done in my local community from a business perspective, as well. I've been out to see a number of these local businesses. Licella and its pilot plant in Somersby have developed a catalytic hydrothermal reactor technology that can chemically recycle post-consumer products into the oil and chemicals they originally came from. This oil is a direct substitute for fossil oil and can be used to make new plastics, chemicals, fuels, waxes and bitumen products. This will reduce the amount of fossil crude that needs to be extracted. iQRenew, a partner of Licella, is a large material-recovery facility where mixed recycling comes to be sorted into various recyclable streams: plastic, paper, glass, aluminium and steel. This Somersby facility alone saves 105,000 cubic metres of landfill, which equates to 20,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases being reduced every year, the equivalent of removing over 4,500 cars from the road a year. Licella's co-founder and CEO, Dr Len Humphreys, believes that this legislation will 'provide the catalyst for us to deploy this world-leading technology in Australia, and it is a great example of Australian innovation tackling one of the world's major issues'. Dr Humphreys also said that plastic pollution is a major global issue. Research shows that almost all plastic produced still exists, most of it in landfill and our natural environment.

The Cat-HTR technology has been developed by Licella in conjunction with the University of Sydney. Licella believes that this legislation could lead to the potential to build 30 to 40 Cat-HTR plants around Australia, creating over a thousand new direct jobs. In my view, this offers great potential and some real hope for the future of our recycling and waste sectors. It really was fantastic to go out and see firsthand this business operating. It is extraordinary. The opportunities are immense, and it's fantastic to see the commitment to waste-reduction and recycling being demonstrated by local businesses such as these in my electorate on the Central Coast.

As Minister Ley has said, through this bill the Morrison government is tackling a national environmental issue that has been buried in landfill or shipped offshore for far too long. These reforms are a once-in-a-generation opportunity to remodel waste management and reduce pressure on our environment.

I know that many young people in my electorate of Robertson will be really pleased that this bill encourages environmental stewardship for future generations. Many students on the Central Coast have contacted me to express their passion for this issue, including 10-year-old Sofia who said, 'We need to consider the impact that plastic has on sea life and animals.' Tilly from North Avoca said that she always picks up rubbish after finishing nippers with her brother Angus because they care about keeping their beach clean. My own daughter Molly-Joy is also making sure that she has no waste in her lunch box every day before she heads off to school and recently started a petition among her friends on the importance of recycling as an important initiative to reduce the harm on our environment.

I know that when I go out and I visit local community organisations so many of them demonstrate, in many local ways in their local community, with their membership, different and important ways that they are committed to waste reduction and recycling. It definitely is something that is broadly supported across my community. Of course, everyone in our community can do their bit to assist in moving towards a greener future. The Morrison government is ensuring that we take greater responsibility for our waste whilst also helping our environment and creating jobs. I commend this bill to the House.

Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020. South Australians are this country's trail blazers in recycling and we are rightfully proud of our legacy. South Australia was the first state to introduce container deposit legislation way back in 1977—first to 5c and then to a 10c return on cans, bottles and then flavoured milk. Recycling for cash has long been part of South Australian households. Many a South Australian child has topped up their pocket money with a trip to the recycling depo. Soon, perhaps, wine bottles may be added to the list, as a result of the South Australian Environmental Protection Authority's 2019 public consultation. I know that my community would be very supportive of such a move.

Other states and territories have been much slower to adopt South Australia's container recycling innovations, with Tasmanians and Victorians still waiting for their own schemes to be introduced. South Australia is also proud to be the first state to phase out lightweight plastic bags. We did that more than a decade ago back in 2009. Last month legislation that prohibits the sale, supply and distribution of certain single-use plastic products passed the South Australian parliament. Fortunately, other states and territories have been quick to follow our lead—with the singular exception of New South Wales, whose government remains steadfast in its reluctance to pursue meaningful action on plastic pollution. Recycling has a long and strong history of bipartisan support in my state. I'd encourage those New South Wales members to put pressure on their state government to catch-up with the rest of the country with respect to lightweight plastic bags.

Earlier this year the state government announced a 2021 ban on some single-use plastic straws, stirrers and cutlery. But South Australians aren't waiting for the ban. Many communities are already leading the way, including communities in my electorate of Mayo. Last year, the district council of Yankalilla voted to ban single-use plastics in its region. The Yankalilla district became an identified plastic-free SA precinct. I'm delighted to say that the beautiful hills town of Uraidla has been declared South Australia's first plastic free township. The boycott of single-use plastics was led by local residents and local businesses. The Uraidla Hotel, the Uraidla Republic Cafe and the nearby Greenhill winery all came together to be officially awarded plastic-free status.

I have recently spoken in the parliament about the exciting recycling hub proposed and put forward by the City of Onkaparinga, the City of Marion and City of Holdfast Bay. This is a groundbreaking project, a materials recovery facility, that is at a scale to manage the collection of recyclables from three major metropolitan councils. And it has great scope for further expansion. That is in my electorate in McLaren Vale. As one of the first facilities to be developed from scratch since the major changes in international waste commodity markets, it has been designed to produce recycled materials that meet the quality needs of Australia's and international markets. It's much more than a recycling depot. It's an engine for an exciting new circular economy in our future.

The member for Brisbane, the Assistant Minister for Waste Reduction and Environmental Management, has been kind enough to visit the project. I know that he and the South Australian members of parliament have been quick to realise the value of the project as well as the value of the local employment that it will provide. The recycling hub is projected to create over 80 full-time construction jobs and approximately 20 ongoing full-time jobs. The project is a prime candidate for the federal government's Recycling Modernisation Fund, which partners its funding with equal contribution from industry and state government. The South Australian government is no doubt seriously considering the proposal, and I encourage the South Australian minister for the environment to fully evaluate the project and follow through by seizing the opportunity that is offered to southern Adelaide, to the Fleurieu Peninsula and beyond. This is a really exciting collection of bills. I commend these bills to the House.

Celia Hammond (Curtin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to rise today to speak in favour of this government's Recycling And Waste Reduction Bill 2020 and associated bills. I do so knowing the people in my electorate of Curtin care deeply about recycling. They want to be confident that, when they put things in a recycling bin or deliver them to a collection centre, they will be repurposed effectively.

We're all aware there have been shameful cases where—when we thought we were doing the right thing, putting our rubbish into different waste bins or taking them to certain drop-off points—we've found out later that they've been dumped in landfill or sent overseas for somebody else to manage. This has to stop. Likewise we need to stop throwing away millions of tonnes of waste. We need to take our own steps to make sure we are aware of what we are using and what we are wasting, and we need to support the schemes and initiatives that reduce our usage of products which can't be effectively repurposed or recycled.

These bills are going to establish a legislative framework to reduce the environmental and human health impacts of products and reduce waste from products and waste material through two key measures. The first of these implements the decision in March 2020—the decision of the Commonwealth, state and territory governments to ban the export of waste glass, plastic, paper and tyres. The second replaces and improves the existing Product Stewardship Act to ensure that those who design, manufacture and distribute products take greater responsibility for the impacts of those products on the environment.

The first element, the banning of the export of waste, is rolling the ban out over a period of time. Mixed plastics are going to be banned from 1 July 2021. Whole used tyres will be banned from 1 December 2021. Single resin or polymer plastics will be banned from 2022, and mixed and unsorted paper and cardboard will be banned from 1 July 2024. The bill is going to implement the waste export ban through a licensing and declaration scheme, which will ensure that waste material is value added and safe for human health and the environment in the receiving countries. It maximises the ability of our waste management and recycling sector to recover and re-manufacture waste materials, creating jobs here in Australia. There's going to be criminal offences and civil liability penalties for people who contravene the act.

The second part of these bills is focused on product stewardship, which is aimed at assisting all of us to reduce our waste by getting our manufacturers and our industry to embrace the circular economy principles and to lead the charge on proper product stewardship. Product stewardship, in simple terms, requires manufacturers and industry to consider the entire life cycle of a product and not just thinking about it ending at the point of sale about what happens to it after it is sold. The principles of a circular economy is one where we can trust that the products we use today can, at the end of their life, value-add to the products we will buy tomorrow, so that when we buy these products in the future we won't be creating additional drain on our natural resources and we won't be adding to the mountains of waste in landfills, oceans and native environments. This part of the bills takes on board many of the recommendations that were contained in the review of the Product Stewardship Act.

The bills provide a framework for three kinds of product stewardship scheme: voluntary, co-regulatory and mandatory. A voluntary product stewardship scheme drives action to reduce the negative impact on the environment of waste from products and materials—so it's a voluntary one that people within a sector can sign up to. Co-regulatory product stewardship schemes are a combination of industry action and government regulation. Government sets the minimum standards, or the minimum outcomes and operational requirements, while industry has some discretion about how those requirements and outcomes are to be achieved. The final layer—the most onerous, if you like—is the mandatory product stewardship scheme, which can require a person, such as a manufacturer, importer or distributor of a product, to take specific actions in relation to a product. Mandatory requirements may be imposed where there's a high level of environmental or human health risk.

The bills are going to strengthen the minister's priority list, adding clear time frames and recommended actions to increase transparency around listed products. Again, there are going to be new offences and civil penalty provisions related to product stewardship, which will strengthen efforts to manage the impacts of different products and materials on the environment.

This legislation is only one part of a whole lot of new measures that this government is taking to transform our recycling industry and help transition Australia to a truly circular economy. The government has made targeted investments to build a stronger Australian recycling industry and create more jobs. There are the Recycling Modernisation Fund and the National Product Stewardship Investment Fund. There's money that has been invested to implement the Commonwealth's commitments under our National Waste Policy Action Plan. Money is being invested to improve national waste data collection. Money is being invested for a special round of co-op research centre projects to focus on recycling. The government is also strengthening Commonwealth procurement guidelines so that any Commonwealth agency undertaking procurement considers environmental sustainability and the use of recycled content when determining value for money. By using our own purchasing power, we can generate demand and encourage innovation. We're also, properly, working with the states and territories to develop national standards and specifications for the use of recycled content in a broad range of capital works projects.

As I said at the outset, the people of Curtin are deeply passionate about recycling. There are numerous volunteer organisations working at a grassroots level on initiatives focused on ensuring our natural environment is preserved, enhanced and, where necessary, restored for the benefit of us and for the benefit of future generations. I refer to the many 'friends of' groups, such as Friends of Shenton Bushland and Friends of Lake Claremont, and the coast care groups: Cottesloe Coastcare Association, Cambridge Coastcare. These are all run by volunteers. Not only do they run the organisation; they do volunteer weeding and volunteer management of lots of beautiful environmental areas in my electorate. This work is absolutely critical. What they often report is that the amount of plastics they find in this beautiful, pristine environment is absolutely huge—monumental. They take steps to bring the community along with them to help get rid of this rubbish, this waste.

I would also say that most, if not all, of the schools in my electorate have their own dedicated recycling and waste management programs. Some of the schools—at last count it was over 62 but I imagine the number's much higher now—work with Greenbatch, which is a local organisation that looks at waste as a valuable resource. It's building WA's first plastics reprocessing plant to reduce the amount of plastic that is being sent to landfill. Greenbatch partners with schools around WA to collect plastics for the future plant. Currently, they are turning plastics into 3D printing filament, which they then give back to the schools for their use. So that really is the circular economy.

Other schools have developed their own initiatives. One is the Moerlina School in Claremont, which was recently successful in being awarded a $15,000 communities environment grant to create a child driven community partnership to utilise rubbish as a resource, focusing on the collection and repurposing of plastic waste.

I heard the member for Perth talking before about local councils. I think he mentioned one in my electorate, but he may not be aware—and I have to give a big sing-out to the local councils in my electorate because of this—that five of them have come together, worked together with regard to waste and set up the Western Metropolitan Regional Council. This actually looks after the waste of five local councils, and another one is now joining. The west metro regional council doesn't just offer a service to collect and dispose of recyclable material for people, though they do that and do it brilliantly; they collect absolutely everything: fridges, tyres, cartridges—absolutely everything. They also undertake a significant community education role. So they work with schools, but they also work with the public at large, holding sessions where they teach people about working out what plastic is what, because there are different types of plastics. They want to do more, so they're actually excited about the opportunity to get additional funding to invest more in the recycling space.

When it comes to recycling, we even have a local organisation that recycles stationery. I've spoken in this House before about this organisation. It's called Give Write and it was set up by Anita Bell; her husband, Jeff; and her son, Ben. Ben, you're about to start your exams in WA, so best of luck. They've had a pretty troubling time this year with Anita being ill. They set up this organisation about 18 months ago now. They collect an extraordinary amount of leftover stationery. At the end of the school year, as any parent would know, your kids come home and a lot of stuff you bought for them at the beginning of the year hasn't actually been touched. Maybe it's just my kids! Give Write collects all this. It gets all the schools. I now have a Give Write bin in my office for people to drop off their unused stationery. It gets collected, and then Give Write uses volunteers to repackage all of this and send it to kids in schools who don't actually have the resources to buy all the stationery they need. So it's recycling pencils, pens, notebooks, notebooks—anything you can imagine. They clean it, they make sure it works and then they put it in packages. Again, that is an example of recycling that is being embraced within my community.

By way of concluding, I would say that these bills help us. We've got a commitment to recycling. We have a commitment to managing our waste. These bills will help us all take that step further and a long way down the path, because these bills regulate. They expand the capacity of industry. It's also about investing in new technology and expanding the markets for recycling and for recycled products. These reforms are really important for our country both here and now and for future generations, and I'm very happy to commend these bills to the House.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am actually quite pleased to have a chance to stand in this House and talk about waste and recycling, because I actually have a great passion for this, as many people in my community know. For me, the thing that we are wasting at the moment is the opportunity that is in waste. The whole world at the moment is trying to transition from a society that uses more stuff than it needs, that uses once and throws away, that makes plastic that lasts forever and then uses it once. We're all trying to transition, and the technology that's being developed around the world is happening quite rapidly, but in Australia we've had the pause button pushed on this for seven years now. So I just want to talk a little bit about where we are at the moment—the basic details of where we are when it comes to waste.

On average, there are a bit more than 2½ tonnes of waste produced for every one of us every year. That includes about 100 kilograms of plastic, and we recycle or reprocess barely 10 per cent of that. We drill for oil, we make plastic and then we bury it in the dirt. Eighty per cent goes into landfill, where it, of course, lasts forever. We use it once and we bury it forever, because it's not biodegradable.

According to the 2017-18 Australian plastics recycling survey, we only managed to recycle 9.4 per cent of the 3.4 million tonnes of plastic consumed in Australia. That's worse than in any other year since 2014-15. So we're going backwards, not forwards. The report, which was commissioned over the summer, on the recycling market found that our plastics recycling capability is lower now than it was in 2005. There is three million tonnes of plastic that we don't recycle, and the best we can hope for is that it goes into landfill rather than into our oceans.

This is an appalling situation for a developed economy that has the capacity to solve these problems right now—and we have had that capacity for quite some time. Australia was late to the party anyway. Everybody in the community has known for a long time that we need to do better with what we are doing. Labor started the process back in 2009 by creating a national waste policy, establishing a national waste reporting process and introducing the Product Stewardship Act 2011—an incredibly important act at the time, which dealt with the requirement that companies manage the entire life -cycle of the products they make. The National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme was started, but that was the only one.

That was in 2011. Nearly 10 years later, we have had seven years of a conservative Liberal government and we haven't had one more item added to that. Nothing has happened since that stewardship plan was started. In fact, there were two voluntary programs and one of them has disappeared. So we've actually gone backwards since 2011. This is in absolute contrast to the attitudes of the community. My community are years ahead of this government in their desire to recycle and their willingness to do something about it. There are 35,000 people in the Facebook 'buy, swap and sell' group in Parramatta and another 13,000 just over the highway in Granville. There are thousands and thousands of people who know they have to do better and are trying to do so.

Most of us are still concentrating on plastics and the stuff we put through our recycling bins. But if we had been doing what we should have been doing for the last 20 years, let alone the last seven, we would now be talking about clothing, over 95 per cent of which ends up in landfill. It takes hundreds of litres of water to make one cotton T-shirt, and we wear it for six months and throw it into landfill. It's an extraordinary waste. Yet the technology to recycle cotton now exists. About three years ago, two companies in the US worked out how to do it. The technology exists to take that incredibly valuable and unique product and use it over and over again. It costs so much in resources to make, but what a great product it is—but not if you only use it once.

Also, we are not talking about water recycling. We have single-use water in our cities. We use drinking water once. It's absolutely bizarre. We should be talking about waste when it comes to that. We should be talking about waste when it comes to compost. My community is really keen to start serious community composting, but where is the support from the government for that? We know that 60 per cent of landfill is compostable, yet it is still in landfill.

At great risk to myself, I would also like to mention phosphorus. The world is running out of phosphorus. We actually get it from bird urine; we call it bird poo but it is actually bird urine. It is really high in phosphorus. We've been digging it up and using it for fertiliser for years, and the world is running out. In Western Sydney we have one of the largest mineable sources of phosphorus in Australia. It is actually in our urine—and we flush it down the toilet. It's incredibly easy to process; it's not dirty. Yet we mix it with stuff that is hard to process, faeces, and we shove it down the loo and flush it to heaven knows where. It is kind of funny that we do that. In other parts of the world, people are starting to look at the technology to recapture that. Phosphorus is rare and extremely valuable, and we just throw it away without thought—because we can. Most of the things I'm talking about are things we do because we can. We thought we could keep going, but we now know that we can't.

In my community, there are a number of people who are really starting to work hard on this, and some of them have been there for a long time. I particularly want to mention the Bower. The Bower's been around, in one form or another, for years and years. It's been in Parramatta for a short period of time. They launched a right-to-repair campaign recently, asking that manufacturers produce goods that are fixable—ensuring spare parts are easily available and ensuring Australians can make reasonable attempts to repair goods without risk of voiding their warranty. A right to repair would also encourage manufacturers to make high-quality, long-lasting goods in the first place, rather than products that conveniently die as soon as the warranty expires. They launched a petition calling on the government to act as we move towards a circular economy. This is incredibly important work. If you are in the community of Parramatta, or anywhere in Western Sydney, and you want to be better at repairing stuff, they run fantastic workshops as well. They are a really interesting organisation, and they are doing what they need to do to make this world a better place.

The Bower and the Generous and the Grateful, another organisation, collect furniture which can be reused and recycled. It is really amazing work. They have so many donations now, they can't find enough places to put them. So they're now trying to develop their market. Incidentally, when they first tried to apply for the environment grants program that each electorate was given, their application was rejected on the grounds that finding a market for recyclable goods wasn't eligible, and we had to fight really hard to get it included. If you're so far ahead, as an organisation that's been around for 20 years or more, and you can collect so much material you have to look at the demand side, that's where the money should go. Otherwise, they collect it and it goes back into landfill. It is an extraordinary organisation doing truly, truly amazing things.

I want to come back to the product stewardship issue. Again, this is incredibly important. There are some recyclers in Australia at the moment. On is called Soft Landing, which recycles hundreds of thousands of mattresses. They have very good relationships with the large mattress manufacturers. That is one area where product stewardship really should have been in place for quite some time, because the major manufacturers have already been working with the recyclers to move down that path. There's very low-hanging fruit that has sat there, hanging off the trees, for many, many years. We're a little concerned about the product stewardship review and that the changes to product stewardship that are made in this bill are not strong enough. They leave far too much to industries and manufacturers to work out themselves. We've seen with that 'let them sort it out themselves' approach over the last seven years that not much happen. There are free-rider problems that this bill doesn't solve as well. So we're a little concerned that this doesn't go far enough. As late as it is, we would have expected more on the table at the moment.

The government also has to lift its game when it comes to recycling labels. Th results of an independent audit recently showed that when it comes to lifting our woeful waste and recycling performance, the labelling regime is falling a long way short, not just for recyclers but for people who want to recycle that bit of plastic or cardboard or whatever it is that's in their hands. The audit was commissioned by the Australian Council of Recycling, and the report found 88 per cent of product packaging could be recycled—88 per cent is getting up there—but only 40 per cent featured a recycling label, and some of the labels were wrong or misleading. So 88 per cent might have been recyclable, but a high percentage didn't have appropriate labels. Even more concerning is that only 28 per cent of Australian products used the Australasian Recycling Label, an initiative launched and paid for in part by the Morrison government. But it is not being applied or used in the way that it should be. Again, there was a nice announcement but not very good follow-through. The report found a:

Lack of any disposal labelling, as seen on 51% of products, may also lead to consumers wrongfully placing non-recyclable items into their kerbside recycling bin …

We all know that when you do that you contaminate a whole truck-load of recycling materials.

We also, of course, need to seriously look at recycling within Australia. It's been few years now since China gave the warning that it would stop accepting our less than adequate recyclable material. Because it wasn't sorted, it was contaminated; it just wasn't useable. We take material that comes separately out of households and stick it all together, and, in doing so, make it more expensive and more difficult to work with. It's been years since that was announced, and we are still nowhere near it. The Morrison government commissioned an independent analysis that showed that Australia may require a 400 per cent increase in recycling infrastructure capacity to cope with the additional waste from the export ban, and that is within just a couple of years.

There are a lot of people in my community, as I said before, who really, really want to do more on this. I am going to suggest to them and to this House that we as a community really need to start the change ourselves. This government is not going to do it at the speed in which the community wishes. We have an opportunity in the Parramatta area in the next couple of years. The major recycling contract expires in two years, which means we have an opportunity to move from a situation where we are simply freighting rubbish to a location to a situation in which we can have a number of businesses work locally to genuinely produce recyclable and reusable materials. There will be extraordinary opportunities in the next two years if we work together. I suggest to anybody in my electorate who really wants to get together, have look at what is going on, find others that care about this, identify other community composting programs, if that's what you're interested in, and have a look at what local businesses are around that can help the community do what it wishes to do to go onto my website and click on 'local solutions' and sign up. We will get together later in the year. We will start seriously talking through what we can do about this.

The opportunities in this are amazing. The opportunities in genuine recycling and a genuine circular economy are quite extraordinary. People in my community went to a circular economy forum in numbers about seven years ago. They've been ready for a long time. So let's get together and see what we can do. We can't really wait. No matter what the government does, we still need to change our behaviours and cultural approach to waste in our communities as well. So let's get together and see what we can do.

Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Deputy Speaker Wallace, it's good to see you in the chair. You're looking very fine in your stewardship over this chamber today. In fact, that's what this legislation is about. It's about stewardship. Of course, I welcome it because I'm a Liberal. One of the reasons that Liberals welcome principles of stewardship is that we understand the responsibility that one generation has to the next, to hand to future generations an economy that is as prosperous if not better than the one we inherited. It's the same with the sense of a united society. That's one of the reasons why we oppose divisive identity politics that seek to divide people and pursue an agenda where people see their differences rather than their points of commonality and common humanity. And, of course, we want to steward the environment for future generations so that they can enjoy the benefits that it provides, the natural beauty with which we are blessed and the resources that it provides for economic opportunity and also the opportunity through technological advancement and economic progress to undo some of the damages of the past. That's ultimately what this legislation is about. What can we as responsible Liberal stewards do to improve the health and welfare of our great nation?

I want to congratulate the assistant minister on this important legislation, the Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 package. When I think about the outstanding ministers of the Morrison government and those who've come in full thrust and grabbed the issues head-on and made sure they have progressed reform in a constructive way that improves the health and welfare of our country, I often think of the Assistant Minister for Waste Reduction and Environmental Management, the member for Brisbane, who is doing an outstanding job in bringing together this package of legislation and passing it through the parliament, not just because of the substance of the legislation, although that is obviously critical, but because he is building on the good work of the Morrison government and the coalition governments to date and bringing along industry so that we're all part of the solution.

One of the things that always bothers me about our political opponents is that they always seek to divide this country. They always seek to divide between haves and have-nots and young and old and, when it comes to industry, it's always about what punitive measures they can put on them, rather than working with them to be part of the solution and move our great country forward together. The legislation the assistant minister has put before us is focused on bringing everybody forward together and recognising the contribution that industry can make by being part of a sustainable solution. That's critical.

We're all concerned about recycling and waste reduction in this country. We're all mindful, on a day-to-day basis, of what we can do and how, as responsible stewards of the environment, we can reduce our environmental footprint. In fact, for many of us, it goes to the foundation of why we're Liberals. One of the reasons we believe in free markets is that they price out the cost of waste. If you ever want to see environmental degradation and wreckage and a complete disregard for the natural environment and the efficient use of the world's scarce resources, you just need to go and look at economic systems, like socialism, which have no interest in environmental stewardship, because they're rapaciously attacking the environment to try and meet the needs of people today. Liberals see opportunity from waste. They see the opportunity of how it can be harvested and returned to economic benefit and how it can then be used not just to reduce our environmental footprint but to grow the economic pie and improve the welfare of everybody. That goes to the heart of what is included in this legislation, particularly the principle of a circular economy. We can reduce our environmental footprint by reusing precious minerals, metals and products that may have a second life if we can find a way to repurpose the goods for a greater benefit. This is what our constituents and the people of Australia want to see.

One of the things that I see all the time is people asking us what we're doing for the environment. Of course, we're doing many things for the environment, unlike our political opponents, who always want to put the date out further. If you look at their attitude towards climate change, they don't want a target for today or even for a decade's time; they always want to put it further out so that they can't be held accountable, because the positions they take aren't based on practical outcomes but on rhetoric, vanity and virtual signalling. This government is not just addressing climate change by setting targets for today, targets for ten years from now and, ultimately, targets for the future so that we can measure them against benchmarks and outcomes; we're also looking at what we can practically do today to improve the lives of Australians. This has been the core of the focus, particularly for the Prime Minister, who has a particular interest in preventing environmental degradation and stopping the amount of plastics that go into our oceans. You can talk about things in the ethereal, but we're talking about and doing things in the practical, in the here and now.

This package of bills is focused precisely on that. It recognises that we have to limit the amount of waste we produce, that we have to find pathways for recycling and recycling investment in Australia today and that we need to provide the pathways for every Australian, every citizen, to be responsible. That goes back to the heart of the Liberal ideal. We don't want a country run by 600,000 Canberra bureaucrats down; we want a nation built from the foundation of the citizen up, where they have the freedom to take responsibility, where we call them to their sense of responsibility in the best interests of the nation.

When the Assistant Minister for Waste Reduction and the Environment, the member for Brisbane, came to the Goldstein electorate late last year, we went to look at the practical steps that the Goldstein community is taking, particularly in the City of Bayside and the City of Glen Eira. They're looking at not just what we can do to reduce people's environmental footprint, which is critically important, like separating out green waste and putting out recycling to make sure it can be repurposed and reused, but they're also increasingly looking towards using food waste to generate energy, as a new energy source, and pathways for collecting compost, to reduce the overall environmental footprint of food waste.

At every point we're looking at what we can practically do and what we can empower citizens and communities to do, not to push discussions off into the distant future, like our political opponents, who seem to believe in the rhetoric of the environment but not in the practice. That's the approach we'll continue to take, because it's practical, it's focused and it's outcomes driven. This allows us to build a sense of confidence amongst the Australian people but also build up the economic opportunities and the industries that can thrive in an environment where we take stewardship and responsibility seriously. I know there are lots of business, in Victoria and across Australia, who see this economic opportunity to reduce our environmental footprint and repurpose our waste. We want to encourage them to provide pathways to purpose and growth.

This is also what I hear from schools when I go and talk to young minds who are interested in the future of the planet they're living on. They do want the big discussions around the global challenges we face, but they also want to know what they can do to help—what can they do on a day-to-day basis and what they can take to their parents and other family members to improve the community they live in now.

That is the basis of the approach that our government is taking, and we welcome it, and this parliament should welcome it because it's the basis on which we can have a sustainable environmental strategy for the future. Working with industry with practical time frames and making sure there's voluntary participation, we can improve the basis of our industry—and of course, where necessary, have punitive measures for those who have done wrong. If we take that approach, we will build the economy we need for the 21st century, because we all know that the COVID-19 pandemic and the COVID-19 recession have exposed some of the weaknesses of the 21st century economy. What this government is doing under the leadership of the Prime Minister and under the leadership of the minister for energy in the work that he's doing, and of course with the Minister for the Environment and the Assistant Minister for Waste Reduction and Environmental Management, is building the economy for the 21st century: prosperity, responsibility and opportunity for every Australian.

Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Financial Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The amount of plastic that is infecting our environment is, quite simply, frightening. I had the great fortune to work with a local group of volunteers in my electorate called Protect Our 1. It's a group that was established by a young Indigenous man and asks people to volunteer to clean up the beaches along the east coast of Sydney. Protect Our 1 have been very successful in getting a lot of people to come along on a weekend and pick up rubbish and, in particular, plastics from our beaches. I've done several of those beach clean-ups now with Protect Our 1, and the amount of plastic that is collected during these clean-ups is frightening. On a number of occasions, they've used AUSMAP—the organisation that is devoted to reducing the amount of plastic in our waterways—to do collections of microplastics over a very small space of beach. Typically, it's one square metre of beach. The amount of microplastics that they get from one square metre of beach is simply unbelievable—on average, about 4,000 pieces of microplastic per square metre of beach in Sydney. When you look at the number of beaches throughout Australia, that is a very frightening statistic.

CSIRO estimate that there are 14 million tonnes of plastic on the ocean floor, and it's much greater and much worse than they ever expected. Our ocean is literally drowning in plastic. The damage that this can cause to marine life is of course significant. They can often mistake it for food, and it destroys the natural environment and their natural habitats. But it can also harm our health because, if a fish swallows microplastic, guess where it ends up when we eat it? It ends up in our system, and that can't be good for our health.

Not only members of the community but also us in particular as legislators have got an obligation to try to reduce the amount of reusable waste, particularly plastic, that we have in our community and to ensure that more of it is recycled in Australia. And we've got to find a way to coerce the corporations that are producing these recyclable materials to take responsibility for the plastic in their products and recycle a lot more of it. In Australia, not enough of that is happening at the moment.

Most Australians probably don't know what happens to plastics and other recyclables once they put them in their bins at home. We've been successful in Australia in changing the culture around domestic recycling. Most local government areas will now have a separate recycling bin. In the area that I live in, it's the yellow bins, and we've been successful in encouraging people to separate their household waste and put their paper, cardboard, plastics and other recyclables into those yellow bins. I think I'd be on fair ground in saying that, when most Australians do this, they probably feel good; they probably feel like they're doing something to reduce the amount of waste, particularly into landfill, and to ensure that we're protecting the environment. But what they wouldn't know is that, unfortunately, quite a significant amount of what goes into the separate yellow bins ends up in landfill and can end up in our oceans and our waterways.

Up until last year, what occurred with most of that recyclable material, particularly the plastics, is that it was exported to other countries. In 2018-19, Australia exported 4½ million tonnes of recyclables to other nations, up from three million tonnes in 2006-07, so you can see how significant the growth had been. There is no doubt that, unfortunately, some of that ended up in landfill. We've simply been exporting our problem to other nations, and some of those are developing nations that don't have the environmental protections that Australia has, and that material would have no doubt ended up in waterways and in landfill.

A shift occurred in 2018 when the Chinese government decided that they were no longer going to accept imported recyclables from other nations. What followed then was similar announcements by other nations that were importing recyclable materials, and they included India, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand. So, if this recyclable material is not being exported by Australia at the moment, where it is going? Most Australians are unclear on that—in fact, most of us are unclear on that—because the answer isn't simple at all. Some of it is still being exported to nations like Indonesia, which still accepts some of our recyclable materials. A small proportion of it is recycled, but unfortunately the larger proportion of it simply goes into landfill. I think it's really misleading the Australian public about all of this cultural change that they've been through in recent decades to try and change the view of how we treat waste in Australia when it simply still goes into landfill. Australians are being vigilant—they're doing the right thing—but at our level we're being lazy and we haven't put in place the practices and regulation that are required to ensure that more of this material is recycled in the future. I was horrified when I recently spoke to a local government representative in the community that I represent and asked him where the recyclable material in our yellow waste bins was going, and his response was, 'Most it's going into landfill.'

Thankfully, in March this year, COAG agreed to ban the export of waste materials—plastic, glass, tyres and paper. That export ban from Australia begins on 1 January next year, with glass, and works through to all of those materials being banned for export by 2024. So we need to develop our own domestic recycling capacity. We need to make sure that we as legislators are doing the right thing by the Australian public, who expect us to put in place the measures to produce better outcomes and ensure that more of this material is recycled.

This legislation is a step in the right direction. There is no doubt about that. That's why Labor is supporting it. But it doesn't go far enough. There's much more that we could be doing to ensure that more of this material is recycled. This legislation will establish a new licensing and declaration scheme with standard qualifying requirements, and fees and charges to cover administrative costs, conditions, reporting and auditing arrangements, and processes for seeking exemptions to the licensing requirements. The bills also replace the existing product stewardship laws, making some long overdue changes to the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme and enabling the minister to make recommendations to indicate time frames by which industry should achieve better outcomes in taking responsibility for the life cycle of their products.

On product stewardship, I don't believe that industry and government are doing enough to encourage more responsibility by corporations for, in particular, the plastics they produce with their products. Manufacturers need to bear that responsibility for the life cycle of the goods they are producing and that are consumed by Australians. This is an area where the government has failed. The product stewardship scheme was initially established by the Gillard government. It has different elements to it: there is a voluntary capacity, there is a co-regulatory capacity and there is a mandatory capacity. When you look at the outcomes, it has been a dismal failure under this government. There is only one party operating in the co-regulatory scheme. And guess how many are operating in the mandatory scheme? None. No organisations are operating under the mandatory scheme. And this government has not listed any items to include in that scheme. So there is a huge free-rider problem with this scheme. Other corporations are saying, 'If it's not mandatory, why would I? There are additional costs associated with it. Why would I participate?' And guess what? They're not. So all this plastic—in particular, water bottles—is ending up in our oceans, in our waterways, and too much of it is ending up in landfill. So I believe the government has a responsibility to put in place measures to change that and ensure that more of this material ends up being recycled. That is simply not happening at the moment.

It's a shame that it took a ban on waste imports by China and several other nations for the government to finally do something. That has resulted in this legislation. The Australian community and our waste and resource management sector are crying out for national leadership on reforms that not only reduce landfill and plastics pollution but actually build the foundation of a sustainable and circular economy in which materials are recycled and reused, and waste is reduced to a bare minimum. Up to eight million tonnes of plastic makes its way into the oceans each year and global consumption of plastic could triple by 2040. Our nation only recycles 12 per cent of plastics and 58 per cent of waste in total. Some analyses indicate that Australia will need to increase local plastics reprocessing capacity by 400 per cent in order to be effective in recycling this waste that we have now stopped exporting.

We have a very poor record on plastics in particular, yet Australia stands heavily affected by plastics pollution. In order to improve our poor rate of recycling when it comes to environmentally harmful materials like plastics, it's vital that we dramatically improve our local processing and manufacturing markets. But that will only be viable if there are end markets for this material, if there are end markets for the recycled product. In addition to supportive procurement policy, there needs to be better and greater producer responsibility when it comes to product design and the incorporation of recycled content.

Unfortunately, what we've got from this government are recycled policies and recycled announcements. In July, the Minister for the Environment announced the $190 million Recycling Modernisation Fund. That was then renounced in the budget. Last year's $100 million Recycling Investment Fund has not advanced one single dollar, and last year's $20 million Product Stewardship Investment Fund has not made a single grant. And that's the point: we are facing this problem of not being able to export our recyclables—which I think is a good thing; we shouldn't be forcing our problems onto other nations—but we haven't put in place the measures to deal with it domestically. The evidence of that is in the establishment of these funds by this government and not one dollar invested in the Product Stewardship Investment Fund through a single grant. That is a failure. That is a failure from this government that we are all paying the cost of and our environment in particular is paying the cost of. We need to do more.

I want to finish by congratulating some of the local government areas that exist in my community for some of the actions that they're taking. I think it's great to see, although we've had this lack of leadership from the Morrison government on this issue, that local government and state governments are taking the lead in the absence of that leadership. Randwick council recently introduced a new food and organic waste system whereby in future food and organics will be able to be placed in a separate bin at Randwick City Council and that material will then go into composting. It will ensure it has avoided going into landfill. It's estimated that 50 per cent of landfill is made up of food and organic waste material that produces methane. We can do it if we put in place the right measures. I want to congratulate Randwick council because they're showing leadership in the absence of this government showing leadership. This bill is a step in the right direction but it doesn't go far enough. We really need more responsibility around product stewardship and we need this government to take leadership on recycling.

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

I rise in support of the Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020, the associated bills and consequential and transitional provisions. Most Australians know the status quo. It's a quick and easy process. You put stuff in the bin when you're finished. If you are a conscientious citizen of Australia you separate it into the red bin, the green bin, the yellow bin. Then that's about the last thing that you think about. But we do have a massive problem in this country. We have huge amounts of waste that historically we have shipped interstate, shipped into landfill or shipped overseas. It's really good that we are now looking after our own waste—cleaning up our own mess.

These bills will put effect to that by announcing, in a sequential fashion, the cessation of unprocessed waste being exported overseas. I think it shows that our nation has grown up. Everyone's aware of the recycling of plastics and other sorts of waste that end up in our waterways, or end up in the oceans of the world, or end up in giant eddies in the Northern Hemisphere, or down the throat of sea life. Even leading to death or drowning of birds, seals, fish—you name it. The small particles of the plastic can end up in living animals. It is a game changer that we have got this sequential legislative ban on exporting unprocessed waste.

This legislation will put effect to our National Waste Policy Action Plan, of which there are seven main streams. As I mentioned unprocessed plastic waste, paper, glass and tyres will not be able to be exported anymore. We have a goal of reducing waste by 10 per cent for every Australian by 2030. Each of us produce, by all the things that are provided for us, 2.7 tonnes of waste each a year, so that means reducing our own personal waste by 300 kilos per year. If you think how much you put in your bin that is a lot of waste, but there's all this indirect waste that you don't see which is produced to deliver all the other things that we have in our modern life. Even though families and individuals have been recycling and using re-usable bags at the supermarket, this goes beyond to governments, to institutions, to states, to local councils and so on.

We are aiming, on the third action item, to recover 80 per cent of the average waste that normally goes off into other streams. We're aiming to increase the use of recycled content by government and industry, not just by individuals. And we are also aiming to phase out problematic, unnecessary plastics by 2025—only 16 per cent of our plastic waste is recycled or reused. We also want to reduce organic waste that's going into landfill. The practical things we can do are composting on site in your own home or in your own back garden, having a worm farm and having stuff go into the green-recycling bin so it can be turned into compost on an industrial scale. This legislation is aimed at the bigger fish in the pond—the macro waste, not just individual household waste. We also need to have accurate data and reporting on how we're going on reducing that.

This legislation will turbocharge the process of product stewardship, which was initiated back in 2011, when we weren't in government. The ALP was on the government benches then. Product stewardship has taken root in lots of businesses, but this legislation will turbocharge that effort. Good design, where products are designed so they can be used again, is the aim of product stewardship. Taking responsibility for what you've designed is a really good initiative. Many of us remember when we used to get our milk in bottles—the milko used to drop it off at your front door step—and that bottle was used time and time and time again. Glass is very reusable. Even if it's broken it can be resmelted and reused. Everyone's familiar with the recycling of aluminium cans initiative, at least in the state of New South Wales. It was quite disruptive when it first came out, but now that it's up and running it's a really good initiative.

Some people see this ban as being just another bit of government intervention, but, really, it's long overdue. Waste shouldn't be looked at as a problem. Waste is a resource, and if you recycle intelligently, you can turn that waste resource into a commodity, something that's valuable that you can sell. If you design it well, you can use it multiple times. In fact, things can be designed to be reused and recycled. Multi-use food containers: everyone used to have glass for jams, preserves and things like that. It's just that the quick and easy bit is just putting it into another piece of paper. That leads to another problem, our paper and cardboard waste. That is recyclable, very much recyclable, if you get it into a recycling system. It can be repurposed and come back as cardboard. If you really want to get serious you can turn it back into fresh paper. All these things are ultimately recyclable. It's just that we've got to have a system so that it can happen on a macro scale. Look at tyres. Tyres are energy rich. Not only are there the plastics and carbon residue of the actual tyre bit but there are precious metals in the wire and the reinforcing, and, through the wonders of technology, all those end-of-life plastics can be used through pyrolysis and turned into road-ready diesel and petrol. There are systems that are being developed in Australia that give incredibly high returns. Up to 85 per cent of the energy can be turned into diesel, petrol, marine diesel and even avgas, and, depending on which pyrolytic process you use, you can also turn it into liquefied petroleum gases. So they are very recyclable. It is a huge resource that we should be tapping into, because otherwise we've got to drill for more oil somewhere else. It might seem like it's difficult, but if the price of oil goes up, all these recycled fuels will become very, very cost competitive. This Australian process, which is now being developed to be put into place in Thailand, in Amsterdam, in Northampton in England and potentially in the US, will deliver fuels that meet Euro 6 standards. So it is very effective.

Then there are other resources, like batteries. Everyone talks about renewable energy, but the thing with renewable energy is it has to be renewed the whole time. Solar panels only have a 20- to 25-year life. So we are going to have to have a recycling plan for them, because there is a lot of energy embedded in a solar panel. You have to be using your solar panel for four years to make up for the carbon footprint of the manufacturing of a standard solar panel. So if you then throw it on a garbage tip or bury it you're just going to have to create another carbon footprint to make another panel. So we have to start planning now to recycle all these millions and millions of solar panels that are being produced around the world.

Everyone is turning to batteries. Batteries, as we know, are not a source of energy; they are a source of storage for energy that's produced by something else. They have a huge carbon footprint too. In fact, when the Prius first came out they estimated that you had to run that Prius for 11 years to make up for all the copper, all the wiring, the second motor and the battery itself. So if you are just going use a battery in a Prius and then chuck it on a heap you will have all these toxic battery metals and elements rotting away. You could be turning it into a recycled battery. Landfill with plastic, steel and all these potentially recyclable metals like copper and rare earth metals should be an absolute no-no. Our oceans and waterways shouldn't be filling up with plastic.

If we do our bit in Australia and set an example for other nations, it will be a really good thing for the planet. We are, compared to some other nations, quite behind on how much we recycle. Rubbish can be turned into jobs. It can be turned into money. Like I said, if we are smart about the way we manage our waste, not only will it lead to a cleaner local environment and a cleaner global environment but in Australia we will have much more employment and economic activity.

The exciting thing about these waste systems is they can be done in regional areas and they can be done in metro areas. In fact, I might just say a few words about pyrolysis. Pyrolysis among some quarters of the Australian body politic is seen as an evil process because you are burning stuff. But there is actually no oxygen. You are heating stuff and you are recycling it and turning it into liquid fuels, liquefied petroleum gases or biochar, which is great for increasing soil carbon. All sorts of things come out of it. It is a wonderful technology, yet we have been very slow on the uptake. Everyone has been used to just putting things in an incinerator. But a pyrolytic plant is not an incinerator. Sure, there's heat and melting, but people have to realise, as I said, either we have to keep drilling for oil everywhere or we get sensible about using the resources we have now. It will be a lot easier to utilise all those tyres and bits of rubber and plastics that go into cars and all sorts of things.

People talk about carbon sinks. When you are changing hydrocarbon to another shape or form, that is recycling. Some of these long-lived plastics are a store of carbon. Some plastics, depending on the type, can last for hundreds of years. That is a carbon sink in itself. So that's why I think there needs to be a step-change in the way people are thinking about burning stuff. In the old days Australian councils used to have incinerators. Hospitals used to have incinerators. You just chucked everything in the back and you didn't think about it. That was incredibly wasteful, because you had all that energy. At least you should have used it to heat your water for industrial purposes or to heat your building—but, no, we just used to chuck everything in. The pyrolytic techniques are really advanced around the world, but, now that we have this legislation coming through, these sorts of things will, by their very requirement to meet the legislation, turn the economy and turn entrepreneurs to using this sort of technology in Australia, and it will be great for the economy. Some people think that, if it's plastic, you've just got to shred it up into little bits and pieces and put it in a playground as a soft landing spot or put it into a road, but I think we can be much smarter and get much better energy outcomes out of this resource rather than just having it sit inert and rotting over 30 or 50 years or whatever.

As I mentioned, this legislation turns to unprocessed plastic, glass, tyres and paper but there are so many other things that we need to turn our minds and our economy to. I mentioned batteries and solar panels, which are top of the pops because there's a lot of energy involved in making them. If you just put them into a landfill, you've wasted that energy. We should be re-using it. Rather than starting another mine somewhere, re-use all the copper, let alone all the iron waste that's sitting around the country. There must be millions of tonnes of old iron, steel and aluminium that can be recycled. We've just got to get a big enough scale to make it pay and make it work.

These bills have a lot of other technical provisions preventing and fining people and prosecuting people if they are sending off unprocessed waste. It's a great initiative. We have got a significant allocation in the budget for recycling modernisation: $190 million. We've got $20 million for the national product stewardship scheme that I mentioned, $35 million to implement our National Waste Policy Action Plan that I started talking about and also our waste data; it's going to require a whole system, and there's an appropriation of $24.6 million for that. And this is also for co-operative research centres. (Time expired)

Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On the most recent figures I have been able to find, Australia generated some 67 million tonnes of waste. That was in 2016-17, so I suspect that perhaps, when those figures are updated, the figure might even be higher than that. But 67 million tonnes of waste were generated, of which 54 million was referred to as 'core waste'. That is waste dealt with by the waste and resource recovery industry across the country. About a third of the waste comes from construction and demolition services, a third is from commercial and industrial sectors and the rest, I suspect, is mainly household waste that's accumulated across the country.

By comparison with other developed countries, Australia generates more waste per capita but recycles less. We have about 6.7 million tonnes of inorganic waste collected every year and, sadly, about 130,000 tonnes of plastic ends up in waterways and oceans each year as well. Even more concerning, only two per cent of Australian waste is converted to energy. I know that, in other places in the world, the process has been in place for decades where some communities effectively convert most of their waste into energy. I have personally visited plants that do that and seen just how efficiently it can be done. Yet here in Australia we don't seem to be able to do that, and I have to say it is of some disappointment that governments in this country over the years have not embraced available technology for the conversion of waste to energy.

The net effect of those figures is that it leaves around 45 million tonnes of waste every year to be disposed of. Last year around 4.5 million tonnes of recyclable waste was shipped overseas to Asian countries, including India, Malaysia and Indonesia. But those countries, like China, where previously much of Australia's waste had been exported to, are also closing their doors to Australian waste. So what happens to the remaining 40-odd million tonnes of waste here in Australia? Around half of it goes to landfill. Of course, that comes at both a cost to the environment and an economic cost to society. It is a cost that is rising and that some state governments seem to profit from by applying so-called waste reduction levies.

In South Australia the state government has for some years applied a zero waste levy—that is, a state tax—which was intended to encourage recycling. There is a levy applied to every tonne of waste that ends up in landfill. In 2019, the levy was a hundred dollars per tonne. Since then, the Marshall Liberal government has pushed the levy up to $140 per tonne. In one year, the already hefty levy was increased by 40 per cent. Of course, that increased levy was passed on to communities and ratepayers through both local government rates and the waste industry itself, which had to charge more for collection services. Effectively, it became a tax on the community. The South Australian government's zero waste levy is, quite frankly, blatant backdoor taxation, with most of the funds that are raised ending up in general revenue rather than in the environmental and waste reduction initiatives the levy was intended to fund. As expected, the South Australian Marshall government justifies the very high zero waste tax as a disincentive to sending waste to landfill and an encouragement to recycle more. But, like the Morrison federal government, the South Australian Marshall government have shown no leadership whatsoever in the recycling agenda. Yes, they fiddle around the edges, but in terms of major structural changes to recycling across this country very little has been done.

The only reason this legislation and the $20 million National Product Stewardship Investment Fund were established is the waste crisis that Australia was confronted with when China and other countries closed their doors to Australian waste. This government then, after seven years in office, had to bring in measures to try to address that situation. I can recall the outcry across Australia from the local government sector when they couldn't send their waste overseas for recycling, it was building up—there were mountains of it—and they didn't know what to do with it. So, effectively, a crisis meeting is called and the government responds. It's a reactive approach to a serious issue that should have been addressed much, much sooner.

It comes as no surprise that that was the government's attitude, given their dismissive attitude to environmental responsibilities more broadly. That was made very clear again only a few weeks ago when the government rushed their EPBC legislation through this parliament. They guillotined debate on it because they didn't want members in this place and the Australian public more broadly to understand what they were doing. It highlighted what the government have been wanting to do for years now, in fact ever since coming to office, which is to hand over environmental responsibilities to the states. They want to do that without properly resourcing them or transferring any funds to them to do the oversight that is required. It's a very simplistic way for the government to wash their hands of environmental responsibility, and they finally did that with the EPBC legislation. It was brought into this parliament as a result of a review of the current laws that apply across the country, which needed to be upgraded and strengthened rather than simply handballed to the states.

When we read stories that across the world, and even in this country, wildlife numbers have plummeted by some two-thirds over the past 50 years because of human activity and the severely degraded land on which we live, it is a real concern that this government takes very little interest in trying to protect and preserve our environment. We know that something like three-quarters of all of our land and 40 per cent of our oceans have been severely degraded over the past decades. Those figures alone are of concern—but then to think that the government simply says, 'But we're not particularly interested in that; our interest is purely economic activity'! And, for the coalition government, economic activity trumps environmental protection every day of the week.

There is a failure by this government to understand that environmental degradation comes at a financial cost to the economy. It comes at a financial cost—

Trent Zimmerman (North Sydney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order. The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour.