Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment) Share this | Hansard source

I'm glad to make some remarks on the tabling of the report of the Standing Committee on Industry, Innovation, Science and Resources, Fromrubbish to resources: Building a circular economy, and I thank the member for Higgins and other members of the committee, including the deputy chair, the member for Cunningham, and the member for Moreton, for their work. It's true to say that reviewing the operations of what is a $15 billion industry in this country is no small job. It means considering how we deal with some 70 million tonnes of waste per annum and how we deal with that in a way that is much better for our environment and much better for our economy than we do currently.

I want to acknowledge the stakeholders who were part of the inquiry process, because I know that the waste crisis in Australia has meant that all those involved in waste and resource management have been under significant pressure, and they've also wanted to contribute to how Australia does a better job of dealing with our waste and the resources that they represent. I'm sure that there are members of the industry that would be forgiven for having a little bit of inquiry fatigue, because they've participated in a number of reviews recently and in the process that has led to the government's legislation that has just passed the Senate this week.

When we look at this area, it is worth starting by understanding the state of play. We do have a waste crisis in this country. Other countries have decided in the last 18 months or so—or perhaps a bit longer than that—that they are not going to accept waste from Australia. That's forced us all, particularly the general public, to realise that we've been kidding ourselves a little bit when it comes to how we deal with waste and resource management, to a significant degree. Rather than having a genuine recycling and reprocessing to manufacturing type of system, we have had a collection and transport system. We have sent a significant amount of recycled material overseas.

Plastic is one of the most pernicious categories of waste. We barely recycle 12 per cent of plastic. In fact, the latest numbers are even more disappointing than that. But, to the extent that we did recycle 12 per cent, more than half of that was being sent somewhere else So the amount of actual recycling that happens in Australia is very little indeed. On the whole, we recycle about 58 per cent of waste. The target is to get to 80 per cent by 2030. The way things have been going in recent times doesn't give us a huge basis for confidence in that. We do need to keep making changes. This is going to be a reform effort that takes ongoing energy and the sort of follow-through from government that we haven't seen a lot of.

I want to refer to the most recent numbers that that came through the ABS waste survey. They showed that we've gone from 67 million tonnes annually to 76 million tonnes annually, which is a 13 per cent increase. That's running in the wrong direction. The National Waste Policy target was to get a 10 per cent reduction on that 67 million 2030—to actually reduce waste overall to around 60 million tonnes. We're out to 76 million tonnes already. Plastic has actually gone down from its already poor rate of 12 per cent recycled to nine per cent. We are now at the point where there are three tonnes of waste per member of the Australian population produced annually—up from 2.7 million to three million tonnes. When you think that only a little bit more than that is recycled, that means that the equivalent of a small- to medium-sized car worth of waste is going into landfill for every single one of us every single year, and that's something that we need to do something about. It has a lot to do with much better environmental outcomes but it actually has to do with much better economic and job outcomes as well.

If you think about sustainability as a whole, what we currently have in Australia and in most other parts of the world is very much this linear economy—we take limited resources, we turn them into things that we often don't use for very long and then we throw them away. That is literally unsustainable, and we are depleting resources at a rate that cannot continue. The way that we then dispose of that material is taking a toll on the environment, and the best example is in marine plastic. Something like 10 million tonnes of plastic goes into the ocean each year. It's accumulating at a faster and faster rate. There are lots of very scary measures of what that will mean in the future. The estimate is that by 2050 there will be as much plastic by weight in the ocean as there currently are fish. Added to that is the fact that global plastic production is expected to triple by 2040. This is a massive environmental and human health problem, and so far we are not doing enough to combat it.

I want to go to some of the recommendations in the report that I think are particularly valuable. Recommendation 3 talks about the need for the Commonwealth, through the national waste policy, to lead a sort of strategic approach to the transportation and infrastructure requirements. I think that's really important. We are at the moment trying to grade up our recycling infrastructure because what's there is so poor. In Australia today, we have less infrastructure capacity for reprocessing plastic than we had in 2005, yet we're now at the point where we cannot export our recycled plastic. So that capacity needs to really grow. As it grows, we need to make sure it's distributed fairly and strategically. Australia is a continental land mass with significant cities dotted here, there and everywhere; you're not going to get infrastructure at scale everywhere. So we need to consider this carefully. Government needs to lead the process by which we get that infrastructure where we need it and consider the transport arrangements where we have a jurisdiction—it could be Western Australia, Tasmania or Far North Queensland—where some kind of export, in a sense, within Australia is still going to be needed.

Recommendation 5 states:

The Committee recommends that the responsible Minister report annually to Parliament on the progress of the targets and actions set out in the National Waste Policy Action Plan 2019.

I think any greater transparency and reporting in this space is really valuable. We haven't, unfortunately, over the last seven years seen the minister come and make that kind of report to parliament. That would be one of the reasons why we've seen so little progress and so little action on that front.

Recommendation 12 suggests that the Commonwealth design and implement a national public education and awareness campaign. I think there's some value in that, too. There are probably a few things that go underneath that around harmonisation of the approach to waste. It's very hard to have a national campaign when things are so different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, with different container deposit schemes and different municipal waste collection arrangements, but that would certainly be valuable.

At the moment, to some degree, what people think of with respect to our waste system is disconnected from the reality. People, with all the best will in the world, separate, clean and sort their recyclables and put them in the yellow bin, and there would be some disappointment if householders reflected on the reality over the last couple of years in terms of how much actually got recycled and particularly how much of it got reincorporated in that true circular model, because the reality is very little. Plastic packaging is a good example. We have a target to get to 50 per cent recycled content in packaging by 2025. With plastic, it's currently at two per cent. Of all the plastic stuff that we use and throw away, only two per cent on average across the packaging field incorporates recycled content. That is not enough. We need that demand—we need that the pull through—in the manufacturing, if we're really going to get circularity.

The final recommendation I'll point to is recommendation 15, which talks about coordinating a national assessment of capacity and potential in rural, regional and remote communities. I think that's really important. The disadvantage that faces rural, regional and remote communities with respect to waste is like the disadvantage they face in many other areas of Australian life. I met with representatives of the Torres Strait Island Regional Council last week. They represent 15 island communities. You can imagine what a challenge waste is for them in terms of preventing waste from polluting their environment. So we need to think about how we can better support those communities.

Finally, the areas that the government has talked about—and where it is yet to show much by way of achievement—are procurement, producer responsibility and labelling. On procurement in particular, the National Waste Policy Action Plan says that the Commonwealth will provide clear procurement guidelines for the purchase and incorporation of and tendering processes for recycling material by the end of this year. There are only a few days left. We haven't seen that yet. The Prime Minister promised it at the Plastics Summit in March, and we're still waiting.

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