Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Acting Deputy President. That's the contention at the centre of this bill—that we stop sending our waste overseas and that we keep it here while doing nothing to address the core reasons that it's created and do not a damn thing, not a damn thing, to hold corporations to account for their creation of this waste, for building into the system wasteful processes that make it more difficult to care for and manage waste. You will not see a single line in this bill that talks about product stewardship, one of the central tenets of addressing waste and recycling. There is nowhere near enough emphasis on making sure that corporations that manufacture and profit from the creation of wasteful products actually do their bit in cleaning up the outcome.

I would also like to speak—and I will zero back in on this during the committee stage of the debate, with the leave of my good Tasmanian colleague—on an often overlooked element of this debate, and that is that there are folks in our community for whom certain plastic products are not a mere convenience but indeed a mobility aid. Here, of course, I talk about plastic straws and the need by many disabled people in our community to utilise plastic straws in our consumption of food and beverages and what have you. I said that rather robotically; what I should say is that sometimes you need a plastic straw to be able to go out of an evening and smash a JD with your mates! That's just the way it works. The reality is that the renewable, recyclable equivalents of straws—reusable straws, for instance—are not yet up to scratch to be able to replace their plastic counterparts. There are also challenges when it comes to the safety of some straw replacements. Metal straws, for instance, might result in harm to folks in our community who experience periodic spasmodic muscle episodes.

As you can imagine, we in the Greens have heard very clearly from the disability community about the need to address these issues appropriately in any legislation in these areas, recognising that fundamentally, centrally, the need, the pressure—the emphasis, the expectation—to create alternative solutions should fall upon manufacturers. It should not be the responsibility of disabled people to advocate their right to be able to consume food and liquid like the rest of the community. Although we must limit the use of plastic products to the greatest degree possible, we must do so while continuing to allow disabled people to use some of them as the necessary mobility aid that they are for so many people. That is why, within the amendments being moved by Senator Whish-Wilson in the course of this debate, there will be targeted exemptions created for the purpose of allowing these products to still be accessed and used by disabled people when they need them. I shall talk in more detail about those exemptions during the committee stage, but, for the second reading period of the debate, I think I shall leave it there.