Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I'm very pleased to say that One Nation will support this bill. It's a rare event when I can honestly compliment the government for the quality of their drafting and the sincerity of the process. We have the courage and the integrity to give credit where it's due. This bill has been developed over many years of consultation, public submissions, exposure drafts and fine-tuning. The Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 is an excellent outcome.

The provisions allow the minister discretion to pick the approach on an industry-by-industry basis, yet with enough written discretion for the minister so that there can be no backsliding. The time frames envisaged in the legislation are appropriate. The Greens amendments, sadly, are bringing forward time frames to the point where they will place an onerous burden on industry, and that means on jobs. Industry must have time to change their practices in a sensible and orderly fashion. Products with outdated packaging must be allowed to work their way through the supply chain so that small businesses and family supermarkets and low turnover areas—often rural and regional Australia—are not left holding products that are illegal to sell. Where industry doesn't cooperate, there are penalties in this bill to ensure compliance. Those penalties are fit for purpose. The Greens amendments to increase the penalties would place a burden on small and medium business such that they are likely to threaten the future of those businesses.

Almost every policy that comes from the Greens demonstrates a complete failure to understand rural and regional Australia and small business—in fact, a failure to understand Australia. Australia is more than the big cities. It's more than the inner big cities. The Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill finds the right balance between urgency and fairness. And there is urgency required around this issue. Every year 645,000 tonnes of waste is exported to Third World countries from Australia. The locals there sift through the waste to remove anything of value, and, sadly, the leftover waste is often dumped into rivers, where it makes its way into our oceans. I often see social media posts pointing out that the garbage problem in the oceans comes from just seven major rivers and, therefore, is not our problem. The point that social media is missing here is that the waste from those rivers originated in countries like ours. It's our waste, and we need to own it and deal with it ourselves. This bill does exactly that.

Processing such a large amount of extra waste will create additional employment here in Australia. Now, I appreciate that the Morrison government is getting quite the reputation for dodgy job creation stats—trying to look good, not do good. The budget laid claim to creating more jobs than there are unemployed. For example, 400,000 JobMaker positions turned into 40,000, one-tenth. I was pleased, then, to fact check the figures for job creation contained in the explanatory memorandum to this bill and to find, to my surprise, they are accurate. This bill should create 10,000 new jobs, at a time when those jobs are badly needed. This bill is a win for the environment, a win for local industry and a win for the countries that we will no longer be using as our rubbish dumps.

In the waste reduction space, I often hear the phrase 'circular economy'. What it actually means is reusing plastics by cleaning them and then melting them down to re-enter the production process. As such, recycled resins compete with new resin. The suggestion on the CSIRO website is that the cheap cost of new resin makes the high cost of re-used resin commercially unviable. The Greens would add a carbon dioxide tax to new resin, meaning oil, to make the new option dear enough to make recycled resins attractive. Adding cost needlessly is typical Green thinking. Their solution is always to tax it or ban it.

One Nation has a better idea. Our CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, has a role to play here. I acknowledge that it's been a long time since the industrial element of their charter has been used. The CSIRO, after all, has become in some ways a propagandist for global governance. Yet, I live in hope that the organisation charged by the Australian people with finding industrial solutions to everyday problems and challenges can come to our rescue here.

Let's talk about what the CSIRO is actually doing on this topic. Their website states:

Has the CSIRO gone mad? The next one is:

Won't that create so called greenhouse gases—the dreaded carbon dioxide? What rank hypocrisy from the CSIRO. It says:

Isn't that the Productivity Commission's or Treasury's job? How is that anything to do with the CSIRO? The last point from the CSIRO is:

biological catalysts—

and identifying recycling options and new bio-materials that could be less destructive to the environment.

There we go: finally a mention on contributing the science behind a whole new Australian industry for biodegradable and compostable plastics that will drive billions of dollars of economic growth.

I remember when the CSIRO invented things and solved problems that Australia faced. The CSIRO, sadly is now more interested in telling us that we have a problem than they are in fixing the problem, and, at times, the CSIRO helps politicians fabricate problems. I'll get back to the bill, after suggesting my hope for the CSIRO.

This bill is a massive opportunity for free enterprise to fix the problem of human progress. I urge the CSIRO to work with industry to produce biodegradable and compostable plastics that will allow Australians to simply switch from environmentally-damaging materials to environmentally-friendly materials. There is an opportunity, because pollution is waste. There is an opportunity for higher productivity. There is an opportunity for higher profits to those who are sensible. For example, safety was seen as a cost burden, yet incidents are a waste, so improving safety by removing incidents is an aid to reducing waste. It's an aid to improving productivity and profit. That's changing. Fortunately, people are starting to work out safety is not a cost and not a burden; it's potentially a boost to productivity.

Secondly, quality used to be seen as a cost, as a burden. Defects are obviously waste. Now quality is starting to be seen by enlightened management as improving productivity and profit. The environment is similar. The environment is seen as a cost by many—seen as a burden. Yet pollution is waste. Pollution is the enemy of productivity. Pollution is waste, and when we remove the waste—remove the pollution—it improves the environment and it improves productivity and profit.

Real environmental problems, like real pollution of air, soil and water, are costly to humanity, to business and to profits. Fortunately, humans address real pollution. In California, for example, the pollution coming out of car exhausts is now one-thousandth of what it was in the seventies. That has led to more efficient use of fuel, which has saved money for people—