Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and Urban Water) Share this | Hansard source

I did not hear that one, but I will not ask for it to be repeated. I did have a solution to Tasmania's problem of not having a football team, but that is another issue.

We are serious about this issue, and the way in which we have progressed it as a government is the way it needs to be progressed. If the Greens or the opposition, or any other group, such as local councils, are interested in solving the problem at a national level, short of making the South Australian scheme a national one, then we have to work through the proper processes. There is a bit of history to where we are at the moment. I am not sure if Senator Rhiannon was in the New South Wales parliament when this issue was subject to examination in 2003. The New South Wales parliament investigated the issue of container deposit legislation and came to the conclusion, I think it would be fair to say, that it was generally a positive thing to do. But we are now nine years on, of course, and what we know is that New South Wales have not progressed the issue and there has been nothing done at that state government level. The issue continued to be discussed. Victoria and the ACT, using similar methodology to New South Wales, came to the conclusion that introducing container deposit legislation would actually have a negative impact on kerbside collections. This was an issue Senator Rhiannon referred to, but the evidence of those studies in the ACT and Victoria raised question marks about whether or not this might be counterproductive to the way in which other states had dealt with the issue of kerbside collection. There was a further study in the ACT and it found that kerbside recycling is more cost efficient than container deposit legislation and that the introduction of container deposit legislation could actually increase costs. So, as we can see, the states have done a variety of things.

Given that as a government we have introduced the landmark product stewardship legislation we want to move forward in a consistent way, so COAG has been dealing with the issue. The COAG Standing Council on Environment and Water has been investigating the national options for addressing this issue since 2008 and in 2010 the environment ministers across all jurisdictions introduced a regulatory impact statement. Senator Rhiannon was a little bit dismissive of this process, but we work through all of the proper processes and the way in which this issue is appropriately progressed is through what we call the RIS—regulatory impact statement—process. That is what has been occurring.

There was a Senate inquiry into the bill when it was introduced in the first instance in 2009. Senator Ludlam has been an active advocate for this bill, as have other senators in this place who are now no longer with us—one was Senator Fielding, who was also very keen to progress this particular legislation. But that Senate inquiry found that there was insufficient information to assess whether a national deposit scheme would increase recycling and decrease litter at least cost to the community. The RIS process that we are now going through is designed to provide us with that information.

COAG decided in 1995, as part of an agreement to implement the national competition policy and related reforms, that all national regulatory activity should be subject to the RIS process. That is the requirement under the COAG scheme and that process is now underway. It is a little bit frustrating from the point of view of the government and of the person in the government responsible for this issue to find, when we are asking groups to tell us what they think of the RIS and we are in the consultation process, that we have this bill before the parliament. I would have thought the far more sensible thing to do—and I am not one for giving the Greens advice—would have been to wait until we at least had—