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

I will address some brief remarks to these amendments. I am a bit surprised that the minister did not see fit to at least briefly describe to the chamber what they actually do. There are a number here, and I am happy to address the issue of publication in advance. As Senator Birmingham has indi­cated, you would have to be not paying attention for a very long period of time to be caught out by the government's intention to regulate in one of these product stewardship schemes; these things I think are agreed well in advance. All the same, the Greens cer­tainly will not be opposing the listing in advance. That was one of the things that the committee recommended should happen to provide clarity. We would see that these amendments would work in concert with the creation of the advisory group, whereby, after the whole process has been gone through of setting priorities and hopefully establishing targets and at least implied consequences for failure to meet some of those targets, they would then make their way onto the proposed register to give everybody in the community and the industry clarity about where the process seeks to go. I do not think there is anything controversial about those amendments.

I should also acknowledge that the amendments the government is seeking to batch up here and move also affect the way that this legislation will interact with state and territory laws. As I said at the outset we know that, in the policy vacuum that effectively has been the Commonwealth response to waste management in recent decades, the states and territories have gone ahead and done their own thing in many areas. So one or two of the amendments that the government is seeking to pass here ensure, for example, that state laws that might be stronger or more effective than processes established at the Commonwealth level are not expunged or wiped out by the bill. The importance of this could be seen in the example of South Australia, where we have a container deposit scheme that is very much worth preserving.

The South Australian container deposit scheme has been operating since 1977 and it has been an inspiration for the rest of the country. We have seen that initiative now spread to the Northern Territory and, as I said earlier, Colleen Hartland MLC, my colleague in the Victorian parliament, is moving possibly as we speak to introduce a similar scheme in Victoria. In South Australia the service has expanded to include kerbside collection, expanded the range of containers to which deposits and refunds apply and increased the deposit to 10c. But that is a scheme that careless legislation by the Commonwealth could accidentally wipe out, if we were not careful.

South Australia now has a drink container recovery rate of over 80 per cent and there is a notable lack of litter on highways, on parks and on beaches. South Australians recycle over 1½ tonnes per person per year. The container deposit system in South Australia also benefits community organisations like scout groups that operate container collection depots. That is one of the areas where, again, we could accidentally do quite a bit of damage in here if we wipe out a scheme that has been operating successfully in South Australia. The collection depots that the Australian Greens seek in our national container deposit bill would be paid for by the operation of the scheme which would establish a network of neighbourhood recyc­ling places. While they would start out as being just for beverages they would end up being used to collect a great deal more. Scout groups in South Australia, for example, earn $9 million a year from that recycling activity, and 92 per cent of South Australians report a high level of support for their container deposit system.

Today in the Victorian parliament, as I said, Colleen Hartland MLC is reintroducing her bill for a 10c refundable deposit on drink bottles, cans and cartons in Victoria. In 2009 her private member's bill passed in Victoria's upper house, the Legislative Council, where it gained support from all opposition parties. The then government quite famously refused to debate the bill in the lower house, where they had an absolute majority. It is worth noting that the Victorian opposition MPs who supported her 10c deposit legislation in 2009 are now in government, so it will be very interesting to see the outcome now. What this means, of course, is that because of Commonwealth inaction in this space we now have developing a patchwork of different pieces of legislation. All of them, I suspect, will work very well, but nonetheless there will be different sets of regulations applying to industries differently in the states and territories when the Commonwealth could have taken a leadership position rather than simply burying the proposal for a national scheme.

In the Northern Territory, 10c deposit legislation passed unanimously. It did not end up getting party political; it ended up being the Northern Territory assembly versus the beverage industry, which was fascinating to watch. We do not seek to politicise these issues, as we have seen in the way this debate has been conducted today. What I would invite the minister to do, though, is address something that these amendments are silent on, and that is: what will happen when a Commonwealth scheme comes into effect? We know that it will not squash a state or territory scheme that is better, that it will operate at a Commonwealth level, and that is appropriate. But what will be the case where the Commonwealth brings in legislation that is better than a state or territory scheme? What will be the impacts when a product stewardship scheme introduced under this framework legislation conflicts with a state or territory scheme when the Commonwealth scheme might be an improvement? How will that actually work?