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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for the Environment and Water (Senator Watt) to a question without notice I asked today relating to plastic pollution.

I've been campaigning against plastic pollution and trying to do something about this issue for nearly 20 years, including 13 years in this place. While we have always been aware that plastic is dangerous in the environment, especially in the marine environment, recent studies—and there have been a lot of them—talking about the human health impacts of plastic congestion, especially microplastics, are really quite chilling. This includes recent evidence that microplastics are now being linked to higher levels of cancer in young people, which is a significant area of ongoing research.

This is an environmental issue where it doesn't matter what your politics are, what your demographic is or where you're from; everybody wants something done about this issue. If you want any evidence of that, look at the outrage around the country when REDcycle collapsed a couple of years ago, because people wanted to do the right thing by taking their soft plastics back to the supermarket. People really care about this issue, and they want action from government.

Of course, it makes sense for the world to have a global plastics treaty and a high-ambition coalition of countries that will work to actively reduce plastic pollution by tackling it at its source: where it's produced, how it's produced and whether it's produced for its end of life—that circular economy concept. But—and I could have told you this 20 years ago—the reason we are not getting legislative action that's binding is that the companies and businesses and the countries where these businesses are domiciled do not want to see regulatory action. They want to put the responsibility onto you, as a consumer of plastic. I've always had the view that it should be both. You should be responsible when you use plastic, but the companies that produce it should produce it for its end of life so that it can be properly recycled or reused.

This is where the rubber hits the road at these global plastic negotiations. Some plastics just need to be banned—and even the industry itself recognises that—because of the harmful chemicals they have in them. Other industries, like the recycling and waste industries, want to see problematic plastics banned. These are plastics that make it really inefficient and expensive at collection and sorting depots, from the local government level all the way through to big business. It's on us as decision-makers in places like this, in the parliaments of the world, to make the decision. That means the good old-fashioned textbook case of regulating an externality, because where a business produces a product that creates an externality, like an environmental harm, the cost of that harm should be built into the cost of the product. That's something my first-year economics students could have told you many years ago, and it's remarkable how powerful these companies have been around the world and how effective they have been at stopping any regulations.

I wish this global plastic treaty success next week in Geneva. It has repeatedly failed, to this point, to get an outcome because the lobbyists that turn up have outnumbered the countries and the NGOs and other organisations trying to get action on this issue. They have literally gatecrashed these negotiations and have made sure that they have failed. They have been repeatedly pushing for a weak, voluntary, non-binding agreement that allows them to basically do nothing and, in fact, to greenwash the—I was about to say something unparliamentary there, but I won't. They are going to use this as a greenwashing opportunity, and everybody knows that. They have done it in this country for 20 or 30 years, and they are doing it everywhere around the world.

So the minister's department is going to go there next week and lobby for a legally binding global plastics treaty. But the problem is this: we don't have it here in Australia, so how can we be taken seriously as leaders in this space when we don't have it at home? You know what? If we get a globally binding plastics treaty, it will be a big celebration, but then we've still got to come home and do it, and all the solutions are at our fingertips. I can point you to four Senate inquiries in the last 10 years—three of them I've chaired myself—all with very similar recommendations. The previous government went part of the way to achieving what needs to be done. We all know what the solutions are. We've just got to get on and do it.

Question agreed to.