Ross Cadell (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Recycling and Waste Reduction (Fees) Amendment (Export of Regulated Waste Material Fees and Other Measures) Rules 2024, made under the Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020, be disallowed [F2024L00850].

I don't think any responsible party here moves a disallowance motion on fees with joy or happiness. This is something that has come about through inattention to a serious problem that saw commodity based recyclables heading to landfill, which is a perverse circumstance and not what we try to do in the renewables industry.

As part of Senator Whish-Wilson's very well-run recycling inquiry, we had industry coming to us and saying it wasn't working and something had to be done. The putting up of this disallowance and the subsequent delays and putting off in the vote were to give time for the government to get together with industry and other stakeholders and come to a commonsense opinion that everyone would think they could work with. So we have no joy in being here, and we are not saying, 'This is a great day for Australia; we've rolled something.' It is sad that the minister's office and the department couldn't meet with industry and come to a compromise.

I will speak very briefly about that. I note that, in my office, I did not have success in getting through to the minister's office on the phone. Two of my staff went across to the minister's office seeking someone and were given the business card of someone who would potentially call us later. That has not happened. To this day, we have had no ability to sit down and discuss this at length. The industry tell me, very similarly, that they haven't been consulted or worked with to make these things happen. At the estimates, we had an answer, but we couldn't pursue that further to get to a position where this motion would not be put today. It could very easily not have been put today. It could very easily have disappeared into the ether with a happy industry and a happy conversation. It hasn't happened. It is a disappointment that we are here, but we will be voting for this motion today, simply because it is wrong that good recyclable products end up in landfill, and it is wrong that an industry that wants to work on a full circular economy is being held back because of that. I commend the motion to the Senate.

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

The Greens will also be supporting this disallowance motion today, and I also would like to convey that this was avoidable and it would have been my preference that we not have to disallow this today. The Senate inquiry that the Greens initiated to take the pulse of where the government was at in driving Australia to a zero-waste future looked at this issue specifically in the terms of reference back in March and April this year. We had a whole day of evidence in Sydney, and let me tell senators: the evidence from the resource recovery industry, sometimes called the waste industry, and the recycling industry was unanimous that these regulations that are here before us today are unworkable for the businesses and will create perverse outcomes and unintended consequences that will undermine recycling and circular economy objectives, and no-one is going to win from these. So we wanted to avoid this today. Let me tell you that the government's own consultation on these regulations had pages and pages of issues raised by industry saying, 'These are unworkable.' These issues were published, and every senator could go on there and have a look for themselves, but they were never addressed.

I'd like to read one example. The industry associations have written to the minister, urging her to change these regulations. A number of companies have written to her. But my understanding is that, despite Senator Cadell and I having tried to get the department to meet with industry to sort this out, it didn't happen. I will go back to look at the concerns that were being raised by industry. Perhaps I could give senators a bit more of an understanding. We've had a series of disallowance motions come before this Senate in the last four years relating to the RAWR Act, the Recycling and Waste Reduction Act. This was brought in by the previous government. We're the only country in the world to put restrictions on the export of recycled commodities. Alongside that, there was a series of other initiatives to help grow recycling in Australia so that we would be capable of recycling this stuff ourselves. I think the intention was a good one. Supposedly, we were going to have packaging reform so that we would have local demand for this stuff and, when it was recycled here, it could be sold here and used. But there has been no progress in the last five years on creating a market for recycled product—no progress.

Recycling companies and resource recovery companies have had no choice but to export what is a valuable commodity. Contrary to what a lot of Australians think, we're not talking about contaminated waste here. We're talking about waste that has been recovered that is now a valuable resource and can be sold. If it weren't exported, it would go to landfill, which is exactly what we wanted to avoid. If it were exported, it could be reused as recycled product and recycled content in things like packaging and reduce the demand for virgin material—another outcome for a circular economy that we want to achieve.

Here is another perverse outcome. Let me read some of the concerns written directly to the minister back in August this year. This one was from Veolia, but I can tell you the concerns are pretty much unanimous across the industry: 'If the rules that were before us today were passed as they are, we will see more recyclables landfilled, and recyclables will be stockpiled, will lose financial value, and, of course, present a fire risk, as we've seen all around the country. The cost impacts to the industry will be passed on to councils and therefore ratepayers that recycle. There will be significant business disruption and closure, and there will be international trade failures.'

These businesses clean up the mess, that's their job. They point out to us that there are no restrictions on companies that want to import material into Australia—none at all. It's not a level playing field. Nor are there restrictions on importing recycled material into Australia, yet we're the only country in the world that is penalising exporters of a valuable commodity. That is still part of a circular economy; it's just a circular economy in our region.

The Greens have not disallowed any of the other regulations around export restrictions. We have not opposed them, and we don't oppose the licensing fees that are in this disallowance motion today. We believe that's fair. If you want to export recyclate, a valuable commodity, the department should check it because there have been environmental concerns in the past. What we have a problem with—that we've tried to get the minister and the department to solve—are what's called the variations, the rules and fees on the variations of that license. A company that may have a customer, loses a customer or changes customer has to pay an exorbitant fee—even though it has already got a license fee and it's been approved by the department. Just to change a customer in another country, it has to go through a whole new process, a process that can take up to six months for the department to approve. It doesn't work for anyone. The department has not been able to explain it to me—and I do thank Minister Plibersek's office for answering the many questions we have put to her department in recent weeks—and it didn't satisfy me. It didn't provide any new information. This is an issue that has now been before us for years, and it hasn't been solved.

This will be disallowed today. My hope is that it will go back to the drawing board, and the department will sit down with industry, work on these variations and find a way where they can continue to export a valuable commodity for recycling that won't go to landfill, which will take pressure off using virgin materials, like virgin plastics, which require fossil fuels for their use—a really important circular economy outcome. They will sort that out and bring it back to the Senate so we can pass it. It should have already happened.

I know that the Labor Party will speak on this today. They will say that we haven't been meeting with the minister's office about this, and so on and so forth. Well, I dispute that. I wrote to Minister Plibersek nearly one month ago and was really clear. We urged her and the department to meet with industry to sort out this mess. Everyone who looks at this thinks it is a mess and should have been sorted out some time ago. It's fine if you want a revenue-raising measure, and that seems to be what this is all about—it's a revenue-raising measure for the government. They do need cost recovery, but it can be done better than this, and not at the expense of recycling outcomes, circular economy outcomes or the industry that employs up to 90,000 Australians and is cleaning up our mess. It is a hard enough industry to run as it is. It has very low margins. It's very complex.

Here's the other thing I wanted to raise today. Maybe just a little bit of history here will be important context. When the RAWR Act passed in 2020, I stood in this chamber and moved a motion to mandate a product stewardship scheme for packaging. One of the critical targets in the mandate was for minimum recycled content of Australian or locally recycled material. This is one APCO's, the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation's, own goals that was set by state and federal environment ministers. I wanted that mandated so that industry would meet that target and there would be a demand and a market for recycled content. We failed that by one vote in the end—the Senate President cast the deciding vote—and we lost the opportunity to actually hold to account big businesses, big packaging companies, big producers of plastic, big retailers of plastic and the brands that keep putting all this packaging into our life.

Five years later, guess what? It's a mess. We've still got almost no recycling of plastic packaging. We still haven't got a product stewardship scheme where producers are responsible for the plastics that they produce. Fine, the minister has talked a lot and the government has talked a lot. We've had lots of reviews. We've had consultations. We've had forums. We've appointed taskforces. But we're a few months away from an election, and the things that urgently require action have not been done. I have campaigned for 20 bloody years to get an outcome on this, including before I came into the Senate, and I am furious that I'm still standing here in 2024 and it hasn't been done yet. So you'll have to forgive me if I'm a little bit peeved that we have to do this here today.

The department has not taken the battery fire issue seriously and come up with a product stewardship scheme that the industry has desperately been calling for in recent years. They still haven't moved on a product stewardship scheme, and I doubt they will in this parliament. Who knows what will happen in the next parliament. We may well have lost that opportunity. There has been almost no action where it has been required.

These disallowance motions are the only things that have come before this Senate in this term of parliament on an issue that I can tell you is the most popular issue across all of Australia in the environmental space. I've been campaigning on this for 20 years, as I said. Every Australian—it doesn't matter what colour their politics is or what their demographic is—supports action on moving to a zero-waste future. Everybody hates the idea of pollution in the oceans, plastic in our bodies, things not being recycled or there being no efficiency, and we need to support local jobs. This will undermine businesses and local employment. It will undermine attempts to move to where we need to go.

I've worked with this industry now for nearly a decade, and I have disagreements with some of the big recycling companies, some of the packaging companies and some of the waste resource companies. For example, we have a very strong disagreement around waste to energy—like incineration of waste—but I can tell you that they are good businesses doing good things and trying to work in a very difficult industry but they are at the end of the waste pipe. It's always lumped on them. The regulations are lumped on them. In this case, excessive, exorbitant and unworkable costs and delays are lumped on them. But, at the front of the pipe, the people putting all the waste in our lives—the big packaging companies, the big retailers, the brands and all the chemical companies producing plastic—don't get any regulation. They are the problem.

So, fine, ban experts or put restrictions on exports if you want to grow the local market and the local business, but you need to do that too. You can't just penalise these companies and not do other things that are required to build a circular economy and a waste-free future in Australia.

There's a lot of context to this today that is really important, but the most important thing is that we have heard unanimous evidence that these regulations are unworkable. We will support a new set of regulations that make companies pay a licence fee so the department can raise revenue, but we want to make sure that the variations in that licence fee actually work for the businesses that employ people, work for the environment, don't lead to more landfill and don't lead to the use of virgin materials and the importing of this stuff ad nauseam. If we want to build an industry in Australia where we use recycled Australian content we need to listen to this industry, and that is exactly what the Senate are doing today—we are doing our job. I don't think I've ever seen a more cut and dried case of rejecting this and asking the department to fix it and bring it back to the Senate.

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion moved by Senator Cadell be agreed to.