Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 and associated bills. I want to particularly acknowledge the work that my colleague Senator Whish-Wilson has done through his extensive advocacy on this issue, his work in multiple inquiries on waste and the detailed amendments that he has circulated and been negotiating on across the parliament with regard to these bills. Senator Whish-Wilson has been on the case of waste management and the need for better waste management the whole time he has been in the Senate.

As we said in our additional comments to the committee report, the Greens feel these bills are a step in the right direction. But it will be a missed opportunity if this legislation is passed in its current form without substantive amendments. We recognise that there are some very positive elements in these bills, but there is much more that needs to be done. In particular the idea of an export ban is great, and it has been really good to be here this morning to hear government senators talk about their commitment to recycling, to waste management and to no longer shipping all of our waste offshore. It's a good start. But where we think we particularly need to have more action is in the various targets that are set in these bills; they need to be mandatory. It is not going to be good enough just to have voluntary targets.

Recycling and waste management is an absolutely serious issue, particularly with regard to plastic waste. As Senator Whish-Wilson has already outlined in his contribution, 40 per cent of the plastic used here is single use. It has an average life span of 12 minutes. That's absolutely shocking. Only 16 per cent of that plastic is being recycled; that means 84 per cent is going elsewhere, as waste in the oceans, in our bushlands, in our streets or in landfills. Wherever it is, it's not being reused. It's a waste, and it's having an impact on the environment. We know that 80 per cent of marine debris is plastic and that global consumption of plastic could triple by 2040. There is a horrific amount of plastic in our oceans already, and, tragically, more is on its way unless we act. This matters for all of us; it matters for us, for the fish that we eat, for the oceans that we swim in and for the beaches that we walk on. Without urgent, drastic action, the situation is only going to get worse.

Recycling is something that really matters to people. It's something that people engage with every day. People want to do the right thing. People want to feel that they are contributing to creating a cleaner and a better environment that we all share. They know that they should do the right thing. Essentially, the role of government is to make things easier for them. So we need legislation that has the government doing its bit and businesses doing their bit so that it makes it easier for everybody. That means you need to have mandatory measures in place so that all businesses then know where they stand. You can't have some businesses playing the situation off against each other.

I cannot understand the reluctance to implement mandatory targets when we basically have the industry saying: 'Look, it's not going to cost us any more. We've got some quite ambitious targets. We think we're going to meet them.' Why not make them mandatory? Why not put in legislation that this is where we are absolutely committed to heading? We have mandatory targets and mandatory standards across all other parts of our lives. Whether it's in health and safety, whether it's in sporting competitions, whether it's in industrial relations or whether it's in human rights, we have standards that are absolute commitments that we have to meet. I cannot see why those standards should be voluntary rather than mandatory in the critical area of protecting our environment.

Plus, having mandatory standards gives certainty to business. It makes it clear that those are the standards that they are going to reach, and it gives business the confidence to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars that are going to be needed in the circular economy. It's the same situation we are in with the lack of certainty about investing in renewable energy, with all of the toing and froing and with businesses not knowing where they stand. They are saying that that is the reason there hasn't been as much investment as there otherwise would have been. The same will go here: it's not going to be good enough just to have the export ban; you need to give businesses certainty to invest in the industries that are going to be part of the circular economy.

People are aware of how damaging plastic waste is, and we know that lots of people have taken action to try and remove plastic from their lives altogether. They want to see government working with them to make it easier for them. Like so many other people, I try and reduce the amount of plastic that comes into my household. I bring my own cloth bags, reuse plastic bags, wash plastic bags and resist buying takeaway food if it comes in single-use plastic containers, and I know there are millions of Australians like me who are just as passionate. Of course, I recycle everything I can, including plastic packaging and soft plastics. But at the moment it's hard work, because we don't have an industry set up to be using that plastic. We don't have the recycling industries. We know currently with the drop in the amount we've been able to export, with countries saying, 'No, we don't want your plastic waste anymore,' the market for recycled plastics has collapsed. Local governments have stopped collecting the amount of plastics that they used to, because there's just not anywhere for them to go. I now bring my mother's plastic containers, which she gets with her Meals on Wheels, home from her place because her local government is no longer recycling them. Basically, you've got to be committed to doing that and committed to the recycling of soft plastics, which you've got to take off yourself and take to the supermarket. We need to be making it easier for people. We need the government to be working with the community and working with industry, and that means having the mandatory targets. It means doing more than what is set out in this legislation.

Making best use of our resources and reusing and recycling is not just about plastics. There has been a lot of focus on plastics. Urgent action is needed in another area: we need more action to encourage the recycling and the reuse of paper products. That will have a direct impact on protecting our forests. Five years ago, in 2015, I moved a motion calling on the government to ensure that government agencies were using 100 per cent recycled paper. Of course, the response was some waffle about one agency, of the many across the entire Commonwealth, that was using 100 per cent recycled paper. They didn't address the real issue, which was using the procurement power of the Commonwealth to support paper recycling. It's tragic, because if we had used that power of procurement and, again, if we had mandatory targets that said, 'This is the level of recycling we are going to have,' it would have directly impacted on the amount of wood pulp for paper that we needed to get out of our native forests.

We are continuing to devastate our native forests, primarily for woodchips for pulp, whether it's for here in Australia or for export overseas, when we have paper in waste streams going to waste. We've got a situation where we are still continuing to log our mountain ash forests in the Central Highlands of Victoria, home to the critically endangered Leadbeater's possum, to feed the pulp and paper mill at Maryvale, the Nippon mill in the Latrobe Valley, and yet they've got a recycled paper line there that is underused. If we had procurement from this Commonwealth government saying, '100 per cent of the paper being used in Commonwealth agencies needs to be recycled,' that would enable that production to lift and it would enable us to be getting less of the pulp from our native forests. These things have consequences. These things are connected, and there are actions that people want to see being taken that government is in a position to actually implement.

Think of the situation that our forests are currently in. Last summer—we're heading into another summer—the devastating bushfires wreaked havoc on our native forests. The impact on our forests from fire was the biggest ever to any continent in the world. Places that have never burnt before were aflame because of the hotter temperatures drying them out. Lives were lost. Homes burnt to the ground. Our firefighters were working days on end, protecting lives around the country. Our forests are under incredible threat from the climate crisis. But still, after last summer, the Liberal Party and National Party are in denial. It wasn't the time to talk about our climate crisis; it was too soon, they said. Well, it's a year later, we're heading into another summer, and we're still waiting for a meaningful acknowledgement from them of the climate crisis. We are still waiting for meaningful action on climate, and this is connected with what we're talking about today, because there is a suite of actions that need to take place in order to protect our environment. You can't get up and give fine-sounding words about your commitment to recycling without seeing that these issues are all interconnected. Yes, you need to be taking action on recycling, but it's not enough just to have fine-sounding words and voluntary targets. You need to be addressing the pressures on our environment across the board, and that means taking action on our climate crisis.

Going back to forests, instead of taking action on our climate crisis, instead of saying we're going to have mandatory targets for paper recycling, they're extending the regional forest agreements, extending the devastation of our native forests by years, when they should be shifting all of our forestry into plantations and getting out of native forest logging as quickly as possible to protect our precious wildlife, protect our water supplies and do something about protecting the carbon stores that our forests are. We should be protecting our forests because of, just intrinsically, how beautiful and precious they are in their own right.

Our handling of waste and recycling matters—it matters today for all Australians. We can have the Prime Minister rocking up to the UN and saying that he wants Australia to lead the world in recycling, but we know the truth, and the truth is that Australians are actually tired of being taken for mugs by this Prime Minister. People used to criticise Mr Shorten for having different answers for when he was talking to people in Brunswick from when he was talking to people Townsville. But the truth is that when you base your approach, particularly to the environment, on marketing spin, you're going to be caught in the same trap. The Prime Minister was very happy to make a big, flashy speech at the UN talking about how much he cares about the environment and wants to lead on recycling and waste handling, but it's time he stopped taking Australians for fools. We can see the truth behind the smirk. You cannot be serious about the environment unless you are being serious about the climate crisis.

This is the same Prime Minister who brought his lump of coal into the parliament and sat on the front bench fondling it, like Gollum holding his precious. The truth is that, despite all of Prime Minister Morrison's marketing spin, if you care about the environment, you must act on the climate emergency. The Prime Minister is happy to wear a hard hat and talk about mining coal when in Queensland, but, when he goes to the UN, he won't admit to being one of the world's worst polluters or holding back action on emissions. Instead, he pretends to be doing something by talking about recycling. Well, Australian voters see past it. They see past the spin to the fossil fuel lobby that is propping up the Liberal Party. In conclusion, these bills are a small positive step in the right direction, but so much more needs to be done. More than that, we need, in addition to action on recycling, action on our environment crisis and urgent action on our climate crisis—not tomorrow but today or, even better, yesterday.