Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 and the package of related legislation collectively represent a giant and gaping missed opportunity to tackle the waste crisis that is engulfing not only our country but in fact the entire world. As the Senate inquiry into these bills made abundantly clear, these bills do not go nearly far enough to tackle the waste crisis. Let's be clear: this is an absolute crisis. Microplastics have been found in the deepest parts of our oceans. They are leeching into the waterways and oceans on every part of our planet and they are choking and poisoning our ecosystems, in particular our marine ecosystems.

We've all seen the shocking photos and images of giant drifts of plastics, whether they are lapping up on beaches, packed so solidly that you cannot even see the water, or whether they have congealed into giant mid-ocean rafts. This terrible habit that we have collectively got into of using fossil fuels—and, remember, plastic is generated from fossil fuels—to create products that we use but once and then dispose of simply by chucking them out the car window into the ocean when we're down at the beach or off the sides of our vessels has to end. We are choking the planet and its ecosystems with plastic. We know that fossil fuel companies are cooking our planet, but, when you remember that the people who make plastic are also fossil fuel companies, they're not just cooking our planet; they are choking our planet with rubbish and with microplastics.

These bills are completely inadequate. I want to congratulate Senator Whish-Wilson on the way he has engaged with this legislation and on the amendments he has developed, and I commend his amendments to the chamber. On some of the flaws in this legislation: it overlooks plastic packaging, which is one of the biggest sources, if not the biggest source, of the plastic waste problem. The bills contain no mandatory targets. You would have thought we would have learned from history, which shows us clearly that simply asking big corporations to modify their behaviour is not going to work when they believe that the changes required to modify their behaviour will impact on their bottom line, on their profits. It's blindingly obvious. It happens time after time after time. When we bring in these voluntary codes of conduct for corporations, they are almost never adhered to. What we need is legislated targets here to make sure that corporations do what they should be doing for the public good and to look after nature on our planet.

As a general principle, humanity simply cannot continue to create as much waste as we do, we cannot afford to continue to burn as much waste as we do, and we certainly cannot afford to continue disposing of waste in the way that we do and in the quantities that we do. Of course, as with so many of the topics we debate in this place, the good news is that we can actually have a win-win here. We can look after nature, marine ecosystems, our environment and our climate and create jobs at the same time. Looking after waste is incredibly job intensive. We need to make sure that we've got enough jobs for people who want them in this country, and currently we don't. Despite all the spin that we'll get from the government benches, there are simply fewer jobs in Australia than there are people who want to work. That's not a controversial statement; that is simply a statement of fact. So why wouldn't we look to create jobs in areas where jobs have extra benefits over and above the simple creation of work—looking after nature, looking after our oceans and reversing the climate breakdown, for example?

That's why the Greens have been talking about significant investment into the infrastructure that will reduce waste and help to rebuild our domestic recycling industry, because we've got lazy over the last few decades in this country. Overwhelmingly, we've made decisions to not invest into a domestic recycling industry but instead to export our recyclable products overseas. For various reasons, that hasn't worked, and particularly in recent years it's worked less and less. So let's invest into rebuilding our domestic recycling industry so that we can create jobs and address one of the most significant environmental issues facing our planet.

Of course the Greens want mandatory product stewardship and a national container deposit scheme, but we also want to phase out single-use plastics. I'll tell you now: when the history of this time is written, there are going to be some pretty big villains writ large in those pages, and those villains are going to be the people who dug in and resisted real climate action, the coal huggers and gas sniffers of this place. They're going to be some of the biggest villains, and they're the people who, when they're retired out of this place, are going to have to answer to their children and in particular to their grandchildren. But it's not just the fossil fools who are going to have to answer those questions; it is those who either stood in the way of meaningful action on waste or put forward solutions which are not strong enough to deal with the problem and then claimed that in fact they were dealing with those problems.

So we have to phase out single-use plastics. How are we going to explain to our grandchildren that we allowed mass marine extinctions and micoplastics to permeate every underwater crevice on this planet, simply because we kept using fossil fuels to generate plastics which were used once and then cast aside to pollute our oceans in the long term?

Addressing our waste crisis will take real leadership. It will take leadership far, far above and beyond the mere tinkering that is encapsulated in the government's legislation. What real leadership would look like would be leadership that did in fact phase out single-use plastics and that did introduce mandatory product stewardship so that the corporations that create the waste are ultimately responsible for managing it right through to the end of its life. Real leadership would look like a national container deposit scheme, and real leadership would look like significant investment into rebuilding our domestic recycling industry. Our land environments and our marine environments, which are already under massive pressure because our climate is breaking down around us, are also under pressure because of the massive amounts of waste that we generate.

We need to see a circular economy with a booming and productive recycling industry. We need to put the onus on companies that are creating this problem to take responsibility for fixing or for being part of fixing these problems. I will tell you now: if you make it cheaper for companies to change their behaviour, rather than simply engage in the status quo, they will take that option. If you make companies pay for the end-of-life management of plastic products, for example, then it might become cheaper for them not to use the plastic in the first place. That's what we want to see. We want—in fact, we not only want but need—to see companies changing their behaviour. We need to see them phasing out single-use plastics. We can do that at the corporate level, and we should do it at the corporate level. We can also do it at the community level, and I want to give a shout-out to Ben Kearney, who led the campaign for and the ultimately successful introduction of a ban on plastic bags in the township of Coles Bay, one of Tasmania's premier tourist towns. Ben, as part of that community, had the conversations that he needed to have, built the community support that he needed to build, and, ultimately, Coles Bay became the first town in the country to ban single-use plastic shopping bags—a small but extremely significant step that shows that we can do this if we're prepared to make the effort and put in the work.

It is time, undoubtedly, to take far, far bigger steps than what the government is proposing in its legislation. It is time to get serious about addressing these problems. We owe it to nature and to all the beautiful creatures, whether they be seabirds or aquatic mammals choking to death on plastic beer can holders or ingesting dozens of plastic bags a day and dying because their digestive systems can't cope with them. We owe it to nature to look after nature, but we also owe it to ourselves. We owe it to humanity and we owe it to all the people who believe we should have a clean environment and respect nature so that nature can continue to look after us. Let's end these small steps from the government. Let's put in place a policy framework that would actually give us a chance at significantly addressing what is certainly a major problem that we are facing. That's why the Greens amendments to be moved by Senator Whish-Wilson are so important. They show the pathway to the kind of leadership that we collectively need and that every person on this planet collectively needs so that we can get on top of one of the biggest environmental challenges facing humanity.