Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (Senator Conroy) to a question without notice asked by Senator Ludlam today relating to a container deposit scheme.

I put a couple of questions to Senator Conroy on the subject of a national container deposit scheme, but I would like to open by acknowledging the volunteers and organisers of Clean Up Australia, which occurred over the weekend. Many hundreds and thousands of people around the country got out to clean up their bit of bush, their bit of verge or their local park. Without this huge mobilisation of people that happens every year, the situation would be very much worse—the litter that piles up around the country would be much worse than it is.

It should not really fall to this, though, because we know that we can avoid a large fraction of the stuff winding up on the side of the road, in parks or in our local waterway by reclaiming it. This is material that is going to waste. Some of this stuff is valuable—it is plastic, aluminium, tin and cardboard cartons—and most of it can be recycled. We know how to do this, because South Australians have been doing it since 1977, as my colleague Senator Penny Wright, from South Australia, knows well. That is why it was all I could do not to bang my head on the table when Minister Conroy read in the fact that we are now going through another review—that there would now be more consultation. This thing has been consulted into the ground. It has been consulted into a state of absolute paralysis. It has been consulted to the extent that the peak bodies and the national environment groups who have been working on the idea of a 10c deposit—that is all we are talking about—on a beverage container and who have been wondering why this has taken so many years boycotted the last range of consultation. They did not participate in the development of the regulatory impact statement, because they realise what an unbelievable, time-sucking waste of energy these things are. Even the people who draw these things up privately acknowledge that. We are getting economists to put together spreadsheets to tell us whether or not monetising the willingness to pay for recycled materials to be put in a bin is worth it. We need to simply get on with it. The states and territories are following South Australia's lead at long last—the Northern Territory is getting into it—but leadership needs to be shown from here in Canberra.

In the time that it takes me to make this five-minute speech, around 114,000 drink containers will be used and only about half of those will be recycled. The rest of them are going to be turfed. They are going to end up in landfill; they are going to be thrown away—114,000 in five minutes. It would presumably be enough to fill the centre part of this chamber up to our knees. Can we please get on with what the South Australians have been doing for 40 years.

Last Friday, federal, state and territory environment ministers met and, despite so many years of delay and the benefits that have been identified in two Senate inquiries and reports too numerous to count, they failed again to establish a national container deposit scheme. It is no wonder the states and territories, and to their credit coalition governments and the parliaments of Victoria and New South Wales, with a lot of pushing from my Greens colleagues in those state parliaments are finally starting to get active on this. It is happening in Western Australia—my state colleague Robin Chapple is going to introduce a bill.

The beverage industry and the packaging industry would have to think: 'We do not want a patchwork of schemes. We do not want eight different schemes set up around the country, all with slightly different architecture.' They may want to rethink their opposition, such as that we saw from Coca-Cola Amatil which took the brilliant initiative of threatening to sue the Northern Territory government and take them to court for introducing a container deposit scheme in the Northern Territory! That kind of attitude, if the beverage industry is not careful, will lead to a patchwork of seven or eight different schemes around the country, and they will only have themselves to blame.

Western Australia is by far the country's worst recycler and needs a container deposit scheme to lift its performance. There is a waste management act in Western Australia that I suspect no-one has read since it was introduced. It is just an empty shell. We are diverting just over 28 per cent of rubbish from landfill in Western Australia. Other states and territories do far better.

We have seen from the leadership taken in e-waste space by television manufacturers and computer manufacturers—it has come very late but it is happening—that when industry gets on board government will eventually come to the party. Now we have got what looks like quite a coherent scheme to bring back computers, televisions, appliances and so on and recover those materials. Every day the Commonwealth delays the introduction of a national container deposit means an extra nine million recyclable containers go to landfill. I have just about used up my five minutes. There are 114,000 containers a day. Can we please hurry this process up.

Question agreed to.