Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

Labor welcomes these bills. We generate 67 million tonnes of waste a year and a large portion of that waste is recyclable. On a per capita basis, we generate more than a hundred kilograms of plastic each and every year, yet we recycle barely 12 per cent of that waste. We're not alone in having that problem. Globally, more than 10 million tonnes of plastic finds its way into the oceans every year, and that is only expected to grow. Some estimates are that it will triple in the next 20 years—wrap your minds around that proposition. We are going to need to come to grips with this as a parliament, as a country and, frankly, as a planet, because the environmental effects of large amounts of plastic entering the ecosystem are stark and well understood. Everyone has seen the horrific photos of the impact on wildlife—turtles with straws, birds that have ingested large amounts of plastic—and we're confronted by the visible reminders of our waste habits when we see the debris in our creek beds and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which swirls around in the ocean environment that we inhabit. The evidence for the impact on human health is growing. We know that microplastics have entered marine ecosystems and are accumulating in the food chain, with uncertain effects.

Our current practices are not sustainable in any sense of the word. Limited materials are sunk into ultradisposable products—many of them have a life span of minutes before being thrown away—and there is no doubt that the best future for Australia and for the world lies in building a more circular economy, where materials are seen as a resource to use minimally and to reuse and recycle to the maximum extent possible. There's a strong economic incentive to act. In addition to being environmentally responsible, it allows the prospect of creating new resource recovery and manufacturing opportunities, and that means jobs and employment. For every 10,000 tonnes of waste recycled, 9.2 jobs are created, and you can compare that to the 2.8 jobs when the same amount of plastic goes into landfill.

The Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 and related bills build on an important Labor legacy. Labor supercharged the process towards a more sustainable approach to material management by creating a national waste policy in 2009. We introduced the Product Stewardship Act in 2011, and that was a major step forward in developing a regulatory framework to encourage responsible waste management in partnership with industry. Labor created the one co-regulatory scheme in existence, the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme, and the well overdue statutory review of the relevant act confirms the fundamental value of this scheme. 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 changes to the substantive rules for product stewardship.

The government should have acted significantly sooner, but it has dragged its heels on this question. These bills are best understood as a response to our inability to export our waste, as we previously were able to do. In January 2018, China instituted its National Sword policy, which banned the importation of most categories of waste. Until that point, a large proportion of Australia's waste products were sent to China. Similar announcements were subsequently made by India, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand, and there were reports of paper and glass building up in waste management centres across Australia. Some municipalities resorted to dumping recyclable waste in landfill to deal with the problem. These changes forced Australia's hand, and in March this year COAG agreed to ban the export of waste glass, plastics, tyres and paper.

The reality is that exporting our waste was never a good solution. It is ultimately, and indeed by definition, unsustainable. It is not a real long-term solution. There were reports that material was not necessarily being recycled in the jurisdictions we were exporting this waste to. In some cases rubbish was burned, buried or thrown into rivers. Nonetheless, exporting that waste could have, in theory, bought us time to deal with our own waste problem, but that time was not used. The government could have been transitioning to a more sustainable use of resources during their time in office. Instead, next to nothing has been done. The amount of waste we exported actually grew under this government. Three million tonnes were being exported in 2006-07, compared to 4.5 million tonnes by 2018-19.

As I've already indicated, they didn't even do the required statutory review on time. That review of the Product Stewardship Act was supposed to be handed down in 2016 but was handed down three years later. There are consequences for the endless delay on almost everything by this government on matters of substance. On this question, a Senate inquiry into this bill heard from the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation. and they said:

I think it [the review of the NEPM] would have been a useful contribution to the discussion. The NEPM, like any regulation, has both positive and negative in it, and there are things that we recognise could be done better going forward. I think the fact that we're 20 years into that regulation and there hasn't been a review is probably more indicative of some of the issues or some of the perceptions that are currently out there, and I think that if a NEPM review had been done earlier then obviously it would have informed this discussion and given rise to thinking around other alternatives as well.

Since taking office, the coalition has taken no action in listing any new item for co-regulatory or mandatory schemes. It is clearly not a priority for this government, whose indifference to the natural environment is scandalous.

As I said, we welcome these bills. They are an important step but they do not go far enough. There are a number of specific amendments before the Senate to improve the operation of this act, but we also need practical steps to support recycling. The government announced a recycling fund after last year's election; however, it turns out that $100 million of this was, in fact, merely a reallocation of existing Clean Energy Finance Corporation funds, and questions to the government this year confirmed that not a single dollar had been loaned to support recycling infrastructure through the CEFC. The $20 million National Product Stewardship Investment Fund has not made a single grant.

The Senate inquiry into this bill noted the urgent need for the Commonwealth 'to adopt sustainable procurement models to provide leadership and boost the recyclables sector'. The inquiry recommended that the government should expedite consideration of a cost-benefit analysis of large infrastructure projects, including mandatory targets for the use of a percentage of recycled material. Most importantly, as the Labor senators noted in the inquiry's report on this bill:

Australia's lack of capacity to recycle the waste we produce, especially in certain material categories like plastic, is not unrelated to the lack of demand for recyclate, and there is no doubt this must be an area of focus and support, both through relevant procurement arrangements, and through product stewardship arrangements that are effective in seeing changes in product design and the lifting of recycled content outcomes.

The failure of the Morrison government to finalise market incentives for the use of recycled materials before implementing an export ban is creating a risk that domestic reprocessed materials which can be repurposed may still go to landfill after the bans are in place. As noted, such matters can only be addressed through the adequate provision of procurement targets that would drive the acquisition of waste materials. As the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia noted:

I think the perverse outcomes we were talking about first and foremost were the fact that we've lost access to markets by bringing in the export bill without the commensurate demand onshore. The opportunity existed, if there was more emphasis on the product stewardship, with the paradigm shift towards generator responsibility, of utilising that product onshore. So, if I'm the packager that's making the plastic that was previously getting exported, now I have to use that packaging material in Australia, because it's good food grade. We could have avoided those perverse outcomes of additional stockpiling or landfilling. So the opportunity that's being missed today is the integration of these packages to change the shift of the paradigm to say, 'This is good material that could be used over and over in Australia and create jobs'.

I'll conclude by making the obvious point that this is a disappointingly familiar story. The previous Labor government put in place a scheme to tackle a major problem. The scheme suffers neglect under the coalition. It turned out that there were consequences for literally taking no action at all, and the government was forced to take action. But, instead of getting a proper scheme that would stimulate jobs and build industry, we get a minor regulatory fix. Recycling, climate, energy—that is a story that we see time and time again. This government is incapable of recognising environmental problems as being worth fixing. It is incapable of recognising the economic opportunities that come when you engage with environmental challenges properly. These bills are a necessary first step, but they're a step that should have been taken years ago and been accompanied by real action to build a real market for recycled materials in Australia.