Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is for the Minister for the Environment and Water. A recent review found that major supermarkets are in some cases charging more for unpackaged fruit and vegetables than they are for plastic wrapped produce. One example was loose potatoes which cost 53 per cent more than bagged ones. With Australians already struggling with the cost-of-living crisis and some really trying to do the right thing by reducing their plastic waste, how is the government going to hold supermarket chains accountable for fuelling Australia's plastic pollution?

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

Thank you very much to the member for Kooyong for that excellent question. It really is quite outrageous that the supermarkets are actually making it more expensive for families to do the right thing when they're doing their shopping. Bananas come in their own packaging. Oranges come in their own packaging. They don't need to be wrapped in plastic as well.

The supermarkets have also walked away from their responsibility for recycling soft plastics, as the member for Kooyong knows. The supermarkets have been much too slow in reinitiating the collection of soft plastics at supermarkets. We're continuing work on the supermarkets to roll out the collection of soft plastics again. We are opening soft-plastics-recycling facilities, including for those very difficult plastics like food packaging to be recycled. In fact, the member for Adelaide, in his electorate, has recently seen the opening of a new soft-plastics-recycling facility, one of 60 soft-plastics-recycling facilities that we've rolled out across the country as part of our billion-dollar investment in upgrading recycling facilities across the country.

We're also, of course, working with state and territory governments on packaging regulation. We need to create less of this waste in the first place. We need to make sure we're making demands on packaging makers like upping the level of recycled content in packaging, reducing unnecessary packaging and getting rid of those particularly bad additives. Of course, we're also banning the import or severely restricting the use of around 500 of the PFAS group of chemicals from 1 July. Again, that'll make a huge difference on this side.

And we're working internationally, because, of course, this is an international problem. We're working with countries in our neighbourhood, like East Timor and Indonesia, to deal with issues like the ghost nets and the ocean plastics that are washing down from our neighbourhood. We're working to take those plastics out of the ocean. Right now—today, in fact—negotiation on the global plastics treaty has started in Busan. This is the final stage of the negotiation. Australia has been advocating very strongly for an ambitious treaty that restricts the production of new plastic and focuses much more on recycling the plastic that we already have in circulation globally.

We are absolutely determined to reduce the amount of plastics being used. It's such a shame that those opposite teamed up with the Greens in the Senate to disallow amendments to the cost of licences to export our waste overseas. It was your policy when you were the minister. Why would you disallow it?