Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This is the Auditor-General's performance report, Australian government implementation of the National Waste Policy Action Plan for the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. This is a very important audit report. Effective management of waste is absolutely critical to us here in Australia. It's something the Greens have been campaigning on for well over a decade because, of course, sadly, we've seen a lot of waste, especially plastic waste, make its way into the ocean and the environment.

Also, creating a circular economy where everything that is produced is designed for its end of life and stays in the system—so we actually essentially eliminate waste—is absolutely critical for climate action. It doesn't matter whether the waste is organic waste, food waste, textile waste or plastic waste; if we design things for their end of life, we can create more jobs, we can have a very exciting and vibrant economy and we can eliminate a significant environmental problem while we do that.

Of course, governments have a very important role to play in eliminating waste and building a circular economy. The National Waste Policy Action Plan, the NWPAP, was designed by the government in 2019 and was intended to guide investment and national efforts in Australia to reduce waste and support more sustainable resource use to 2030. To put it another way, it was to help move us along the path to creating a circular economy and getting to zero waste.

This Auditor-General's report looked at the implementation of this national plan over the past four years. Unfortunately, the results weren't necessarily good. The Auditor-General found that the department's implementation of this national plan was only partly effective. They also found:

The effectiveness of the department's implementation and coordination of actions, and monitoring and reporting of progress, is reduced by lack of agreed action scope or deliverables against which progress can be assessed.

I'm very concerned about this because the last government talked a very big talk about reducing waste and taking action, for example, on things like banning single-use plastics.

If you go to the plan, you will see there are eight key components to it. The first one is to ban the exports of waste, and we've talked about that a lot in here. The second is to reduce total waste generated in Australia by 10 per cent per person—only 10 per cent. We should be looking to eliminate waste in this country, and we can't even measure whether we've achieved that or are on a pathway to achieving that. The third target is: '80 per cent average resource recovery rate from all waste streams following the waste hierarchy by 2030.' In other words, that is getting 80 per cent towards building a circular economy by 2030. Target 4 is: 'Significantly increase the use of recycled content by governments and industry.' In other words, that is having governments buy recycled content to help the recycling industry. Target 5, which is critical to me personally, is: 'Phase out problematic and unnecessary plastics by 2025.' By the way, it's not just the Greens that want to phase out plastics—especially single-use plastics—that are killing marine life; the recycling industry wants to get rid of them because they foul up the system. They contaminate our waste streams and make recycling very difficult.

There are a whole bunch of other ones that are really critical around eliminating organic waste, or at least halving the amount of organic waste that goes to landfill by 2030. Target 7, which of course underpins all this, is: 'Make comprehensive, economy-wide and timely data publicly available to support better consumer, investment and policy decisions.' We are working with the state environment ministers and various departments to achieve this, but, unfortunately, I haven't got time to go into it today. I urge senators to read this. We'll certainly be asking questions at estimates. The report found that there is basically no way we have any idea if we're on track to do any of this stuff.

Of course, under the very important legislation the last government brought here, the Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill, we also have product stewardship schemes, where we have packaging covenants, like APCO, the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation, that have voluntary targets to reduce packaging waste. Do we trust the department to be on track to monitor someone like APCO to achieve their objectives? These are some big questions we have to answer following this report. You can be assured the Greens will be in here doing exactly that.