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

It gives me great pleasure and it's a real honour to stand up here today and open the debate on this—I believe it to be—very popular private member's bill across this nation, to have an extended producer responsibility scheme, which in simple terms means that producers of plastic packaging are responsible for the end of life of their product. This is not really necessarily an environmental or green issue; it's actually very much an economic issue. This is about whether we want to waste resources and ask ourselves the fundamental question: why are we making things that end up going to landfill and aren't kept within a circular economy? It's a very simple concept. Every bit of packaging in this country should be made for its end of life. The corporations that produce this packaging, like plastic packaging, need to design their products for end of life so that they stay within the system, so that they can be reused, recycled or composted. It's actually not that hard. I want to keep it really simple today, because around 80 countries around the world have gone down this road, of putting in place some form of extended producer responsibility, making producers of plastic responsible for the waste and the pollution that they create and the end of the life of their product.

Over my lifetime, most Australians have been the ones who have been told they need to be responsible and put it in the bin. They need to be responsible and recycle. They need to be responsible and, to quote the slogan, 'do the right thing', while the producers of this rubbish take no responsibility. They're all care and no responsibility for the end of life of their product. One of my first campaigns as a senator was to get container deposit schemes in place around the country. We didn't manage to get a national scheme, but the states went it alone, and my home state of Tasmania, I think, had the most successful container deposit scheme out of all of them. A container deposit scheme is a recycling refund scheme. It puts a value on what we might have called waste and makes it worth something so that people bring it back for recycling. The beauty of this scheme—it is a producer responsibility scheme—is that the producers play a role, the consumer of the product plays a role and the government plays a role. All three key stakeholders play a role in solving the waste crisis in this country—solving the problem of plastic pollution. As I said, many other countries around the world have gone down this road.

Let's name this up. Plastic pollution is one of the biggest pollution issues on the planet. It's not just the plastics in the ocean, which I'll get to in a minute, which is where my journey started. We now are getting very disturbing, very chilling research about the impact that plastic and microplastics are having on human health, from fertility to cancers—a whole range of different health and immuno diseases because of microplastics. It is very much an emerging area of research. There's a lot we can do to stop this from happening.

My journey to today started well over 20 years ago. My first campaign on plastics specifically was called the Rise Above Plastics campaign, in 2006, when I was a part of Surfrider Foundation. Now this is a global campaign. Twenty years ago, it was about trying to remove plastics from our life—to get problematic single-use plastics banned and to get these kinds of product stewardship schemes in place for different waste streams.

I want to say it has been not just my journey; it has been the journey of all these amazing people that I've got to work with over the years. Last night in the Senate, I gave a shout-out to my old colleagues from the Surfrider Foundation and from Surfers for Climate. I'm not sure if they're here. There they are. Fantastic. My other tribe, Josh Kirkman and Tim Silverwood—few have done more than Tim. Josh does amazing work, but Tim has been a campaigner on this ever since I can remember. Certainly he predates my work on this, with Take 3 for the Sea and a whole bunch of other initiatives.

This is one of the most popular environmental issues anywhere, in any place. It doesn't matter what your demographics are or what your politics are, people support getting action on plastic pollution and waste. They just don't like it. It shouldn't happen. And the reason it's happening is that governments aren't stepping in and solving this externality. Every first-year economics student and, in fact, school economics student can tell you what an externality is. It's when a corporation produces something that has an external effect, like pollution that impacts people, and it's the government's job to step in and solve the problem. It's our job to protect you from plastic pollution, okay? But we're not. We're letting corporations produce as much of this stuff as they want, and there's no regulation on them whatsoever.

That's what this bill does. It puts in place some basic regulations that mandate national targets. The industry has had voluntary targets for years, and they've failed. This bill not just mandates those national targets and says, 'There are consequences if you don't meet your own targets,' but also provides the framework for doing that. We had a Senate inquiry into this—it was very short, with a number of amazing stakeholders—and there are some issues with this bill, and I expect that they'll be pointed out, and they're in the report. They're easily solvable with simple amendments. We can make those amendments to this bill, and we can pass this legislation, send it to the other place and make sure the Prime Minister and the government get the message that the Senate wants to see action on plastic pollution.

Some of those stakeholders that came to the Senate inquiry in Sydney—and, by the way, thank you to the Labor Party for giving me the floor for the entire day. It was one of the hardest days of my Senate career! I like to hand the questions to someone else so I can think about what my next question is going to be. But it was 10 hours of non-stop questioning, made very easy for me by the incredible people that were there, who I have seen at every Senate inquiry we have had into this issue. There have been three of them that the Greens have initiated, where we've worked across parties—across the Labor Party, across the Liberal and National parties, across Independents.

The first one was in 2015. The report was called Toxic tide. It was the first Senate inquiry of its kind in the world. That looked at the impact of plastic pollution on marine life. The next one was when we did have a real waste crisis in this country, after China's national sword decision, when we couldn't export our waste; we had to learn to deal with it ourselves. That report was called Never waste a crisis. Unfortunately, we have. We're more than 10 years down the track now and we still don't have in place the proper legislation.

The Greens introduced a private member's bill in 2020 to do what we're doing today, and it was a tied vote. I wanted to remind the Labor Party of this. The Labor Party supported the Greens bill at the time to mandate national targets and to have a producer responsibility scheme in place. They did, I must admit, knock back some elements of the bill because some states had already gone it alone, but they supported it. One Nation even supported it right to the bell. We had the numbers to get this bill through to the House, and I was so happy. Pauline Hanson's One Nation flipped at the last minute and didn't turn up to vote. We had a tied vote, and the President cast the vote, unfortunately, as they do, in favour of the government. We had a tied Senate. We could have got reform six years ago, and we wouldn't be having to do what we're doing now. We came so close to getting that bill into the House. I ask senators to think about that.

Nearly everybody agrees. The coalition recently chaired a Senate inquiry into the effects of plastic pollution on human health. In those recommendations—I think it was the fourth recommendation—was a recommendation that the government consider an extended producer responsibility scheme, which is exactly what this bill is today. This bill is based on both the existing legislation that we have that enables this under the RAWR Act—the Recycling and Waste Reduction Act, which I commend the Liberal Party for bringing in in 2020—and it uses the New South Wales extended producer responsibility legislation and moulds the two together. It's a good piece of legislation in this bill. It's not perfect; it can be amended. Senators, please, can we not deal with the technical details today? I know it's an easy thing to do. This bill is doable with some minor amendments.

We need to talk about why we're not doing this. We really need to understand why, after 20 years of having voluntary targets, they're consistently not met by big corporations. Well, they're not met by big corporations because under law they're required to maximise the present value of future cash flows, which means to make as much profit as possible for their shareholders. Of course they're not going to do anything unless they're required to. It's great to greenwash and say you're going to do all these things. There have been some good companies, by the way, who have done the right thing, but they're not going to do it unless they're forced to. It is the role of government.

This is what I wanted to say today, and this is really, really important. In all the time I've been campaigning on this—and in all the time that other legends like Jeff Angel at Boomerang, the godfather of waste in this country who everybody knows; Kate Noble, an amazing campaigner; Cip at AMCS; and all these other people that have been campaigning—this is the first time in this public debate that all the ducks are lined up to get this done. The recycling industry, which employs 90,000 Australians—a shout-out to Gayle Sloan and Suzanne, who wanted to be here today—wants to see this legislation. They are desperate for it, as they were in 2020. The packaging industry, including APCO, who've always been agnostic or anti regulation, and a number of the big packaging producers, wants to see mandated in law an extended producer responsibility scheme. Some of them may have differing opinions on what that might look like, but I can tell you it's not often you see corporations asking to be regulated. They understand this is coming. It's happening all around the world. There have been global negotiations to get a plastic treaty in place. By the way, we as a country have been pushing for a legally mandated global scheme when we haven't had one at home. This is our chance to do that, so I ask senators to look at this bill.

I wanted to finish where I started with this, which is plastic in the oceans. I was invited on a fishing trawler to go down to the south-west of Tasmania. It literally is one of the last wilderness areas left on the planet where you can go and be at peace. While it was one of the most stunning places I've ever seen, the beaches were covered in plastic. This plastic has washed up from all around the world—not just from Australia but from all around the world. We got there after one of the biggest storms ever recorded in Tasmania. The Navy buoy was ripped off its moor on the west coast of Tasmania. The swells had washed away the sand dunes that were 60 feet high. I saw, stratified in these sand dunes, the Anthropocene—levels of plastic going back 20 or 30 years. It was the most incredible thing I've seen and a massive motivator for me to actually do something about this, not to mention all the plastic that I found on the beach. That's what you can see. It's what you can't see, the microplastics, doing damage to marine life as well.

It's not just surfers and coastal communities; all Australians want this. I wanted to do a special shout-out to Dr Jenn Lavers from Adrift Lab, who's been campaigning on trying to get governments to have this kind of legislation, firstly, to raise attention and awareness on the impacts that plastic pollution in particular is having on seabirds. Jenn's an international expert on shearwaters. She goes with the team to Lord Howe Island every year. Minister Watt, if you haven't been to Lord Howe, please go with Adrift Lab. I know Minister Plibersek went and spent some time with their crew. You'll do what I did. You'll go into the rookery at night-time.

These shearwaters are the great athletes of the sea. They're like triathletes. They fly from Lord Howe all the way to Japan and back, and, by the time they get home, they literally hit the trees. They've got no energy left. They hit every bloody branch on the way down. Then these clumsy little buggers land on top of you, and they look at you, and then they waddle away to find their chicks in their nests.

These rookeries are full of plastic. I sadly witnessed—as you will, minister, when you go there, and I hope you do—all the dead chicks that we had to take out of the rookery that had been fed plastic by their parents who'd returned from their trip to Japan, because these birds sometimes cannot differentiate between plastic from the ocean and sea life. In one bird, we broke the existing record; we cut 840 pieces of plastic out of this poor little creature. We called it the crunchy bird. It made international news, sadly, but that's what is required for people to understand how serious this issue is. We picked this bird up and it crunched. You could hear the plastic in its stomach. It literally starved to death. It choked to death.

We have a responsibility. These are the effects. These are the impacts we are having on our natural world. I just ask senators as human beings—you're all humans too. You must understand we have to do something on this. The rest of the world wants us to do something on this. The oil and gas industry doesn't. They've openly said that they see that 50 per cent of all future oil and gas production is going to go into plastic production. They want plastics to grow—they're the only ones who do—because they're making so much frigging money out of this.

Not only do we have a responsibility to look after human health, even just as a precautionary principle; we have a responsibility to the natural world and to these creatures that can't run for parliament, sign petitions or phone in to the radio. They need us to go in to bat for them. I'm going in to bat for the shearwaters, the scientists and all the stakeholders I've worked with. Please pass this legislation.

Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Whish-Wilson, you are a fierce advocate for the environment and particularly the marine environment. You're a great person. I know this is a topic that is so close to your heart. It is so close to the heart of so many Australians, including people in this chamber and certainly people in the government.

The government will not be supporting this bill, the Extended Producer Responsibility Scheme for Packaging (No Time to Waste) Bill 2026. However, we recognise the problems that we have with plastic. We are drowning in plastic. I'm going to wear my environmental hat, and I'm going to wear my medical hat. I was recently on the community affairs committee's microplastics inquiry, and I heard some truly sobering and alarming testimony, and I did my own personal research. With respect to plastics, we are in the midst of a pandemic of plastic.

With regard to microplastics and nanoplastics, they are ubiquitous. They are all over the environment. When you go looking for them, you will find them. They're in the soil. They're in the air that we breathe. They're in the clothes that we wear; polyester is derived from plastics. Our foods are wrapped in plastic. And, when you go looking in the human body, you actually find plastic—microplastics—in every single organ of the body and in our fluids. It's in the brain, the placenta, the lungs, the heart and the musculature. It's in semen.

In terms of the health problems that are associated with microplastics and nanoplastics, plastics are linked to a litany of problems from in utero all the way to childhood and adulthood. This has probably been best studied by the Minderoo Foundation, who recently, in March this year, published a paper in Nature. Minderoo have done a power of work. We heard testimony from Minderoo and scientists and medical specialists.

These microplastics—or plastics in general—have about 16,000 chemicals. The chemicals are loosely bound to a polymer matrix. In other words, once these are ingested into the body, the chemicals can leach out into the body, and it's that leaching out which causes problems.

And it's not just PFAS, folks. It's 16,000 chemicals. We don't really understand what most of these chemicals do to the body, but we've got some clues. We know that these are endocrine disruptors, so they damage the endocrine system. By the way, our endocrine system means tiny, tiny chemical amounts of hormones that make our body function. So you have something in there that disrupts the hormonal axis. It leads to all kinds of knock-on effects.

One of them is infertility. We heard testimony that, in the last 30 years, IVF success rates in Australia have not shifted. We spend billions on in vitro fertilisation, but success rates have not shifted. Why? Has it something to do with microplastics and their transmission across the placenta in what was termed by a Minderoo expert as 'toxic trespass'—that these chemicals are crossing the placenta and may in some way be then harming the growing fetus? If I read out the list, you would all be in the foetal position, but I'm going to read out some of the harms: in utero miscarriage, preterm birth, low birth weight, small head size, genital malformation, asthma, wheeze, bronchitis. In childhood there are ADHD, autism, obesity, asthma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma—a whole litany of problems as long as my arm. In adulthood that list gets even bigger. It is linked to endometriosis, uterine fibroids, sperm concentration and quality problems, diabetes, PCOS, insulin-resistant type-two diabetes—and it goes on and on and on. These are linked. They are not necessarily causal but are linked.

What was also alarming from this inquiry that we did was that we heard testimony that big oil is planning on increasing plastic production. In fact, this was in the Lancet. It was published in the Lancet last year. The Lancet Countdown on Health and Plastics produced a weighty document, and there was one passage that jumped out at me. It basically said that the Saudi Arabian oil company plans to channel about one-third of its oil production to plastics and petrochemicals by 2030. They are pivoting. They're pivoting away from oil and fuel to plastic production. They're looking for another market. What is driving this is, overwhelmingly, single-use plastics. We've got to get ahead of this.

One thing that was also evident was that we had a really good discussion with the CEO of the Australian Council of Recycling, and I'm going to read from the Hansard of 20 March this year. And this was her view with regard to the extended producer responsibility scheme, which has been operating in Europe for decades. The problem is:

Even in Europe over the last 18 months or so they've lost about a million tonnes of processing capacity for recycled plastic because the demand for the product hasn't been there and you can buy it much more cheaply offshore. So, whilst we really need extended producer responsibility for packaging, and, by the way, for most manufactured products, we also need to see much stronger procurement drivers to make sure that what we remake here has a market and we can keep that system viable.

In other words, when you talk about plastic—and she laid it out for us—you're talking about three components: collection, processing and then markets. Where this has fallen down in Europe is in the market side. Because there hasn't been a market for recycled plastic, it has meant that they've had an overcapacity, plants have shut down and they've lost one million tonnes of recycling capacity. That's in Hansard. The reason for that is, of course, because recycled plastic is more expensive than virgin plastic. This is why Saudi Arabian oil wants to churn out more plastic. It's going to make them money, right? But it's our job as a government and as a parliament to figure out a holistic approach to this that will ensure that it actually works and we land this. That means that we have to collaborate and consult widely with industry and with the states and territories as well, because they collect these items. It's not as easy as just pulling one single lever, calling it the EPR and saying, 'Job done,' because we've seen in Europe that their history has shown that, without the market signals to procure this recycled plastic at a higher cost, the whole system can fall over.

In terms of Australia's response, we should be incredibly proud of the advocacy led by former environment minister Tanya Plibersek and now Minister Murray Watt. Within a few months of our forming government in 2022, in November of 2022, Australia joined the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution. This is a coalition of over 100 countries from all continents around the world. There is a recognition around the world that we have a pandemic of plastic. Actually, we heard testimony during this inquiry that Australia is relatively 'clean' when it comes to plastic, which tells you that automatically it is much, much worse elsewhere. In the Pacific islands and in South-East Asia, there are rivers literally clogged with plastic. So we have to work globally to reduce the supply of plastic right at its source.

To that end, Australia also supported the Global Plastics Treaty, and we were very vocal in wanting it to pass. We were very vocal, staunch supporters of this measure. But, unfortunately, talks broke down in August of last year, and it was kiboshed by the big petro states: Saudi Arabia, the US and Kuwait—no surprise there. Had that plastics treaty actually passed, it would have led—and this is the nub of it. It's not just about recycling, folks. Recycling doesn't fix this problem. It's about actually committing to reducing plastic production and putting in restrictions. In allowing that to happen, you then create space for alternatives—bioplastics, for example. These are plastics or plastic-like materials that are derived from seaweed and other types of biodegradable materials. As a committee, we also saw evidence from scientists here in Australia who are developing these kinds of materials. They are already there. They need a market. They need to have space created so that these alternatives can be used by Australians and by businesses and hospitals, which are huge producers of plastic waste around the country. But they're crowded out because virgin plastic is so cheap.

So we've got to get to the source, and that will require, I think, global cooperation and countries standing up to these big petro states and fossil fuel interests. Australia has nailed its colours to the mast in that regard. We want this to pass, and we're going to have to work now in alternative channels to figure out a way we can land this Global Plastics Treaty. But talking about this problem is part of the solution. Mobilising Australians and the global community to back this kind of treaty is incredibly important.

That's why I thank you for your sustained advocacy in this space. I know it will disappoint you that we're not going to support this bill, but understand that we get it. We get the problems here, but we want to work in a collaborative way in order to land a solution that will actually have teeth and be effective and will not just deal with plastic recycling, which is—and this should really be the take-home message—not the full solution. It's about stopping this at its source and calling out those fossil fuel interests who are looking for new markets, and that's going to take a global effort. I might stop there.

Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Whish-Wilson for his bill, the Extended Producer Responsibility Scheme for Packaging (No Time to Waste) Bill 2026. I acknowledge Senator Whish-Wilson's passion for reducing environmental waste and his efforts, which resulted in a ban on Australia exporting recycling waste to Third World countries where it was picked over and then in some cases dumped into rivers which took the rubbish out to sea. Australian waste was partially responsible for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

I do agree there's a need to control waste from excessive packaging. This bill, though, is not the answer. The purpose of this bill is to provide for the government of the Commonwealth to establish a uniform national Extended Producer Responsibility, an EPR, a scheme for packaging through a legislative instrument. The Extended Producer Responsibility scheme would place a direct and legally binding obligation on producers, importers or distributors of packaging for the end-of-life management of the packaging they place onto the Australian market. This bill would see Australia's National Packaging Targets made mandatory and legally binding. The bill would cumulatively serve to meet the intent of reducing demand for virgin plastic, preventing plastic waste, supporting the economy, increasing recycling and resource recovery rates, as well as reducing emissions and better protecting the Australian environment. These are represented in the National Packaging Targets, which in this context are as follows. The scheme enforces benchmarks for 100 per cent reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging alongside a 70 per cent plastic recycling rate and 50 per cent recycled content. Currently, this is voluntary. This bill would make it mandatory—compulsory. The law applies a strict nationwide mandate to anyone defined as a 'responsible person', which covers commercial manufacturers, importers and distributors of packaging. Businesses can no longer opt out or ignore recycling targets. It replaces fragmented state rules with a single, uniform, Commonwealth-led framework. The core economic driver of the scheme is a producer funded fee structure. Companies pay levies based on the type and total weight of the packaging they introduce into the Australian market. Hard-to-recycle materials, composite plastics and virgin plastics face heavy financial penalties. Levies are heavily discounted—that's 'eco-modulated', to use their term—for businesses using highly recyclable materials or high percentages of local recycled content. Modulated!

Now the part which is typical of the Greens, sadly, taking the kernel of a good idea and taking it so far it becomes intolerable. I'm talking about their bill's lifecycle data tracking. The scheme requires transparent continuous data reporting into an independent national tracking system. Companies must log exact material weights, chemical composition and supply volumes. I'll say that again: companies must log exact material weights, chemical composition and supply volumes. This data is used to calculate their exact financial obligations and verify whether they're meeting the mandatory 2030 recycling targets. The revenue collected from producer levies forms a dedicated stable funding stream explicitly earmarked to build up Australia's circular economy. Now, the phrase 'circular economy' is code for everyday Australians never owning anything new. The wealthy will be able to pay the price penalty for new products; everyday Australians will not.

The elitism of the concept of circular economy sits poorly with One Nation's approach of advancing the lives of everyday Australians. It does seem typical, sadly, of the inner-city Greens, though, marketing themselves as the party of the disenfranchised while bills like this will serve to weigh down the economy, reduce productivity and reduce opportunity for the very people the Greens pretend to represent. This bill will impose a very high cost on business and consumers for a very small and unproven reward for the environment. Everything that comes in a package will go up in price. More inflation, higher prices, less wealth for everyone. This bill, especially its compulsory nature, onerous reporting conditions and cost, is what One Nation means when we talk about excessive green tape. One Nation opposes green tape strangling our society. One Nation opposes this bill.

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to start by acknowledging and thanking my colleague Senator Whish-Wilson for his relentless heart-driven work on this important but inherently solvable issue. Senator Whish-Wilson, alongside an extraordinary movement of community groups and ecologically minded but commonsense groups, fights for change and to protect those shearwaters that he spoke so passionately about. I remember seeing a turtle wash up with the plastic ring from a beer sixpack around its neck. Just seeing the horror of that, I thought: 'This is entirely preventable. How is this allowed to continue?' For 15 years, Pete and these advocates have been fighting. I hear the government get up and say, 'We're not supporting this. We're not ready. We need more time. We need more time to talk this through, more symbolisms, more international conventions.' I'm sorry, but the clock is ticking. Those shearwaters need more than talk. They need more than conversation and diplomatic words. It means nothing to them.

Thank you, Senator Whish-Wilson, for the passion that you've brought to this. I don't know of anyone else who could have made this issue of waste as significant and wide reaching as you and the movement have managed to make it. We're so grateful, and those shearwaters and turtles are grateful, because this issue matters enormously, and I think that most Australians know this instinctively. We've walked along the beach and had a Coca-Cola bottle lid dig into our foot. I was on Elwood Beach last weekend and I gave my kids a bucket and said, 'Go and see what shells you can collect,' so I could read a few pages of my book. They came back and their buckets were full of trash. There were bits of plastic, metal and all sorts of things, and that was in about 10 minutes of walking along the beach. We've all seen this, we've all experienced it and we all know what a great tragedy it is. It comes back to the question of where the leadership is on this.

Takeaway containers, coffee cups, wrappers and plastic bottles are all designed and sold in minutes, but they are capable of remaining in our environment for decades and decades. People are asking a simple question: why is this an issue of individual responsibility when individuals have no say over how the product is designed or packaged in the first place? They want leadership on this, so why should it come down to them? This bill, put forward by Senator Whish-Wilson, would do something about that.

I want to acknowledge the environmental groups, the community organisations, the campaigners and the advocates who have been pushing for this reform alongside Pete, including the Australian Marine Conservation Society and the Boomerang Alliance, as well as the Elwood Canal Action Team, Love Our Streets and all of those little groups who are out every single week picking up rubbish before it ultimately hits the bay. They trundle along the canal, using their personal time to do something that leaders in this place should be acting on. Their work gives us an opportunity to do something genuinely important, and that is to make Australia a world leader in how we deal with packaging and waste.

Let's not wait for the others. Let's get on with it. Let's lead. Since when do we have to be the little deputy waiting for someone else to show the courage to do something? Let's set a global example. How about that for an idea? We—Australia, the world—are not winning the war on waste. Plastic pollution is one of the biggest environmental challenges of our time. This isn't some distant problem; we know that. It's not floating around in an ocean somewhere else for someone else to deal with. It's everywhere. It's in our waterways. It's on our beaches. It's in landfills. It's in our bodies. It's breaking down into microplastics that are increasingly entering our bodies in the environment.

There is another reason we need to take this seriously. Most plastic is made from fossil fuels. Plastic production already accounts for around 45 per cent of the petrochemical sector, and the expansion of plastics is expected to be one of the major drivers of the demand for oil in the decades to come. As the world moves away from fossil fuels for energy, the fossil fuel industry are licking their lips and looking for new markets, and plastics is an enormous one of them. So when we talk about plastic pollution we are also, of course, talking about climate action. We're talking about shifting away from fossil fuel extraction and the power of some of the world's biggest corporations to shape the products that end up in our homes, streets, oceans and bodies. We ingest something like a credit card's worth of plastic every year.

For too long, governments have put this burden unfairly onto consumers. And how's that going for us? We're told to recycle harder, to sort our rubbish more carefully and to make better choices at the supermarket. I don't know about you, but my supermarkets don't allow me to choose a cucumber that's not wrapped in plastic—or even bananas, God forbid! I don't decide whether a product needs three layers of packaging. I don't decide whether the packaging is actually recyclable in the future. We don't have these options. We don't have these choices. The producers do. The brands do. The retailers do. So they should carry responsibility for what happens to that packaging at the end of its life—a very simple proposition. This is the principle of extended producer responsibility. Find me an individual who isn't influenced by massive corporations or peddling the lines of the fossil fuel industry who'll genuinely rebut that and argue a case against that. Find me someone who won't benefit financially from plastics and get them to put a case for why we should not have an extended producer responsibility. I throw down a challenge to you.

This bill would establish a uniform national EPR scheme for packaging, creating a direct, legally binding obligation on producers, importers and distributors for the end-of-life management of the packaging that they put into the Australian market. It would also make Australia's national packaging targets mandatory and legally binding. It's beyond time. It's not enough that we simply clean up the mess—not that we're doing a great job of that either—we also need to stop creating so much of it in the first place. We need to prioritise avoidance and reduction. We need proper eco design standards. We need to build markets for recycled materials and a genuinely circular economy where products and materials are designed to be reused, recovered and kept in circulation. This can work and this must work.

Look at the container deposit scheme, where producers are responsible for the costs of recovering their products. We've seen dramatically higher collection rates. Around 60 per cent to 80 per cent of containers are now being collected for recycling. Compare that with Australia's plastic packaging recycling rate, which sits at around 12 per cent. It's 12 per cent for plastics and 60 per cent to 80 per cent for aluminium containers. The difference is not that Australians suddenly become better recyclers when they get a refund. The difference is a system. This requires system change.

Australians have had enough of voluntary targets that industry can simply fail to meet with no repercussions. Sixty-three per cent of Australians support mandatory packaging laws to replace voluntary targets, rising to 70 per cent among Labor voters. Here we have another example. Seven in 10 Australian Labor voters are supporting leadership and action from the people that they elected to represent them but are being told: 'No, this is too hard. It's too difficult.' Again, follow the money, the donations that are going to these corporate parties to peddle their interests, to save them money and to make profits for their shareholders. I've had a gutful of this mob over here coming in to represent their donors over the Australian people. What sort of statistics do we need to get for you to take some leadership on this issue?

Australians understand that, if you make something, sell something and profit from something, you should not be able to simply walk away when that becomes waste. The Greens have been campaigning for decades to overhaul Australia's waste and recycling system. Senator Whish-Wilson has chaired three Senate inquiries into this issue over the past decade.

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

Five.

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

I correct myself—he has chaired five Senate inquiries into this issue over a decade. The evidence has been gathered. The community has spoken. Industry itself is increasingly supporting mandatory reform, which is really encouraging. That is a remarkable legacy that he's passing the baton on. I just want to note that evidence received from the EPA said that this wouldn't be complicated to implement. It could take between six to 12 months. So what are we waiting for—six to 12 months to make an enormous difference for our communities, for our marine ecosystems, for our oceans and for humans who are ingesting this crap. We're running out of excuses. We need political will now.

In 2022, Australia's environment ministers committed to reforming packaging regulation. Four years on—tick, tock—Australians are still waiting. Excuse the pun, but there is no time to waste. This bill gives parliament an opportunity to finally put responsibility where it belongs—with the companies that design, that produce and that profit from packaging—while creating the certainty we need to build a genuinely circular economy with less waste in our streets and our oceans, less demand for virgin plastics, more recycling and reuse, new markets, new jobs and a cleaner environment for future generations and every living organism that we share this planet with.

I thank Senator Whish-Wilson for his incredible persistence. There is enormous respect for him from across the sector and I'm sure from across the aisles, frankly, if we're honest. This is a commonsense policy. How many more inquiries do we need to have? How much more talk do we need to have in this place to do what that 70 per cent of Australians want us to do? So thank you, Senator Whish-Wilson. Thank you to the advocates and the community campaigners who have refused to let this issue disappear and I know aren't going anywhere. We will win this. It's just a question of how many shearwaters and turtles lose their lives before we get this outcome. But we're not going anywhere.

How many more Senate inquiries do we need to have? I hope not many. I hope that the government sees the light on this—that they see the common sense and act for our environment and for our communities who are demanding action. It is not enough to keep asking Australians to clean up the mess they made. We must change the system that creates the waste in the first place. Thank you again, Senator Whish-Wilson.

Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of this Greens private senator's bill, the Extended Producer Responsibility Scheme for Packaging (No Time to Waste) Bill 2026. Like my colleagues before me, I want to congratulate Senator Whish-Wilson on bringing this bill before the Senate. I think it's a really fitting way to finish your Senate career and your time in this place, and it's a real honour to stand up in support of it.

This place has the capacity to do really good things, but a lot of the time we spend our time talking about things where people are quite ideologically opposed. But it would seem to me that reducing plastics in our environment is something that shouldn't be too hard for us all to agree on. I had the privilege recently of chairing the Senate inquiry into microplastics and other toxics, and I have to admit to being really shocked by some of the evidence that we heard. I don't think it's controversial to say that we all know that there's too much plastic in our environment. Most of us know that we want something done about it, but to really understand the extent and nature of the problem was really eye opening not just for me but for other members of the committee. I know that Senator Ananda-Rajah has spoken about this, but to hear evidence that plastic is in every cell of the human body and we don't really understand just what that is doing to us, I thought was really quite shocking. We went to the University of Adelaide for a site visit and we looked down the microscope at eggs and sperm cells that have plastic in them. Think about that—the unborn child already impacted by plastics before they've even arrived into the world. I think that's something that should really scare us, especially when we don't know the impacts that that's having on childhood and human development.

Researchers think they've got a pretty good idea. They know that it's endocrine disrupting. They know that it has impacts on conditions like cardiovascular diseases and polycystic ovary syndrome, just to name a couple. Given that we know that these plastic products have become so ubiquitous that they're in our soil, they're in the air and they're in our bodies, that really seems like the perfect issue for us to do something about.

Senator Ananda-Rajah put the government's position on the record, saying that the government won't be supporting this bill, and she said that there are a range of issues and challenges, but I put it to the government that we have been talking about dealing with plastic for at least 15 years. Surely there has to come a time where we stop talking about it and we act. The inquiry that I chaired—the inquiry into microplastics and other toxics—produced a consensus inquiry report. That consensus report, supported by Liberal and coalition senators, said that we need to expand extended producer responsibility schemes in this country, and that is precisely what Senator Whish-Wilson's bill is looking to do. We all agree that this is a problem and we all agree that we need to expand EPR schemes to help tackle it. So why don't we get on with it?

As my colleague Senator Hodgins-May said, the inquiry into the bill heard from the New South Wales EPA that it would take only six to 12 months to get a scheme like this up and running, because the bulk of the work has already been done. So it's not that hard. We have a recycling industry which, as Senator Whish-Wilson said, already employs 90,000 people in this country, and it is calling for this to be done. This begs the question then: why aren't we getting on and doing it? The community wants this to happen. The community is concerned about the level of plastic in our environment. When they go to the beach, they see it on the sand dunes. When they go fishing, they see it out in the water.

We've actually tackled some aspects of the plastic problem. I was reflecting just the other day, when I opened my loaf of bread, that we don't have plastic bread tags any more, because they're harmful to our environment and to nature. And so we said, 'Okay, let's put cardboard ones on.' The sky didn't fall in. We've tackled single-use plastics in our supermarkets. We go and get a recycled paper bag to put our groceries in. We use paper straws when we go and buy a smoothie. Again, the sky hasn't fallen in, and our bodies and our planet and the other shearwaters and turtles and flora and fauna that we share it with are better for it as well.

We heard, during the inquiry into microplastics, about the falling over of the treaty on plastic pollution. When I questioned one of the witnesses giving evidence who was at that particular convention, they talked about the fact that the fossil fuel industry reps outnumbered the people actually negotiating the treaty by something like three to one. It shouldn't be the case that fossil fuel companies are hijacking action on dealing with the plastic problem.

Years ago we realised that asbestos was no good for us. We've now recognised that silica in stone is no good for us. There's some pretty compelling evidence that the ubiquity of microplastics in our environment is no good for us, and the precautionary approach would say that we need to do something about that now. We're already seeing, as Senator Whish-Wilson so vividly described, the impact of plastics on nature—shearwaters and penguins and other birds with bellies full of plastic—yet that's something that we can work together on pretty easily to prevent. This bill gives us an opportunity, a framework, to help do that.

It makes no sense that we are out on the international stage pushing for action on plastics when we're not doing that here at home. The majority of Australians want us to act on this issue. We have the capacity to act on this issue. We've already heard that there have been multiple inquiries telling us what needs to be done, and, as leaders in this place, we are the ones—given that, as we said, we've had more than one inquiry that's given a consensus report, we all agree we need to do something about this. So let's get on and do it.

Like my colleagues, I want to thank all of the campaigners and advocates across the country who have consistently pushed this issue. It's not going to go away. We are drowning in plastic; we are drowning in it. We've been put on notice by the fossil fuel industry saying that they want to make more and more and more of it, because, as the world wakes up to the fact that we cannot continue to burn oil and gas and turbocharge the climate crisis that is well underway, those companies are looking for somewhere else to make profit, and plastics is where they want to go.

So we have a choice now. Do we want to wait for the fossil fuel industry, as they watch the markets for coal and gas collapse as we get deeper and deeper into the climate crisis? Prime Minister Andy Burnham has convened Cobra this week because of the impact of the drought in the UK and Wales. Nuclear power stations in Europe are shutting down because there's not enough water to keep them cool. People are starting to get concerned about food security. Meanwhile, people in the Global South have been dealing with floods and typhoons and cyclones and drought and heatwaves long before them.

We are in the middle of a climate crisis. When we wake up to that and the market falls out of coal and gas, the fossil fuel industry is going to be turbocharging its efforts to make sure that plastic production goes through the roof. We have an opportunity to get ahead of that. We have an opportunity to put in place an extended producer responsibility scheme that the packaging industry wants, that the recycling industry, which supports over 90,000 jobs in this country, wants, that the community wants, and that people across this Senate want, as more than one report has said. We have an opportunity to get that done.

So my request to this chamber, given that across the room, across our parties, we know we have a willingness to tackle this problem and we've recognised the issue, is that we work together to get it done. I don't want to see children born with plastic in their bodies as they enter the world. I don't want to keep seeing couples struggling to conceive because the level of microplastics in their body has affected their fertility. I don't want to see people suffering from increases of cancer, cardiovascular disease and other endocrine disorders because there's a really good chance that microplastics are causing those things. I don't want to see penguins and shearwaters and other birds and animals dying because they're starving because their parents are mistakenly feeding them plastic or because they've had a plastic noose around their neck. These are all things that we have the power in this chamber to tackle. So I implore you. The work has been done. The bill is on the table. Let's work together, even if we have to amend it to find a way to pass it.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

It was in the first half of last year—I think around May—when I was in Sydney Airport and Senator Whish-Wilson, my colleague, was walking past the other way. He looked pretty upset. I had a chat with him. He'd just come back from Lord Howe, and he said: 'David, I'm going to show you this. It's really upsetting.' I remember him pulling out his phone and showing me those images of those little baby mutton birds, the shearwaters. One of them had been dissected by researchers. The whole of this furry little body was just full of plastics. Pete said to me: 'It's just all of them, David. It's just all of them.' We were looking at this picture of this little bird, and again I saw how much Senator Whish-Wilson gets this.

You'd think Lord Howe Island, more than a thousand kays off the coast, would be isolated. You'd think it would be away from the waste streams being produced. It's thousands and thousands of kilometres from North America, thousands of kilometres from north Asia, a thousand kilometres from Australia, this little island. Yet these little mutton birds on Lord Howe—according to the researchers, when they weighed one of them, one fifth of its body weight was plastic. They can't properly digest food. Their intestines get perforated by the plastics. If they do survive, they have a life of pain. These little creatures have a life of pain. That life of pain is, yes, delivered by the plastics industry, the oil industry and the fossil fuel industry, but it's also delivered by governments and parliaments that won't act to keep that industry under control. That little bird suffering in pain—that is also delivered by parliaments like this who refuse to support legislation like this.

What does this legislation do? It establishes a uniform national extended producer responsibility scheme for packaging. This is something that this government, the previous government and the one before that said that they want. It's like St Augustine: 'Oh, Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.' Never yet—it's never yet for this lot. They say they want it. They say that they've got this process in place. I'll go through and talk about some of the wash—this endless stream. The one thing they recycle isn't plastic. The one thing they recycle is the talking points of the industry and the fossil fuel lobby who want to keep making their profits from polluting this planet on a scale and with a product that is literally poisoning our waterways, poisoning our oceans, poisoning our bodies, poisoning our food. If that little shearwater, that little baby mutton bird, is not a warning to us, if that's not a reason to act, I don't know what is.

The purpose of the bill, the Extended Producer Responsibility Scheme for Packaging (No Time to Waste) Bill 2026, is to do something the plastics industry, the fossil fuel mates and the billionaires who own them have been fighting for decades. It's to place a direct and legally binding obligation on producers, importers and distributors of packaging for the end-of-life management of the packaging. You make the waste, you deal with it and you pay the cost of it—not some little baby shearwater, not some mum who's worried about the plastics that are poisoning her baby from birth, not all of us as we worry about the plastics we're ingesting through the food we eat and through the water we drink. Those who make the waste are responsible for it.

Every so often, you hear about personal responsibility from the coalition. You hear about One Nation saying, 'That little eight-year-old kid should be personally responsible for his actions.' Or they say, 'Those school students should be responsible for their actions and not go out on strike about the climate. They should all be responsible for their actions.' But it turns out, from the coalition and from One Nation and, tragically, from Labor too, that the one part of this society they never talk about having responsibility is corporate Australia, the plastics industry, the fossil fuel industry—your donor mates. Suddenly, this whole rhetoric of responsibility just ends at the door of a big corporate donor for you lot, and you're unwilling to take on what is unquestionably a powerful industry.

Look at the Pratts of this world. I don't often agree with Donald Trump, but he did have a colourful description of that bloke, which I won't repeat because it's a little bit unparliamentary. But look at the Pratts of this world, who have made obscene profits from polluting our country, with a multinational company literally polluting the planet. He uses those profits to buy his way into private meetings with the Prime Minister and private meetings with a minister.

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

Katy Perry.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, he'll fly Katy Perry in and then invite the political class from One Nation and the coalition and Labor to a Katy Perry concert, and say, 'Isn't this lovely? Aren't we all great friends? Would you mind if I just kept polluting the world?' 'Yes, sure. No worries. Katy sang beautifully, though.' That's how the political class operates in this country. You don't care about polluting our food and polluting our water. You don't care about it, because you care about the money that can flow and the influence that can flow from Pratt and his packaging empire, and you want to keep your donors in the fossil fuel industries and their billionaire owners happy.

That is why we're not progressing this bill—not for the reasons that were given by the usual suspects from industry. It's not for the reasons that are given by the majority in this report. Here's something: sent out to do the government's dirty work is Cameron Hutchison, the branch head of the circular economy division of the department. I think it's 'circular' insofar as they produce circulars and just share them amongst the department and they make sure that never has any kind of reference to actually fixing the world! He said:

The department is currently developing advice for government on packaging reform.

Isn't that comforting? They're currently developing advice! Did I mention that this has been going on for decades? Anyhow, apparently the department is 'currently developing advice for government on packaging reform'. He said:

This work has been informed by extensive consultation with industry, governments, non-government organisations and the community, and reflects strong stakeholder interest in nationally consistent arrangements. The department is also undertaking a statutory review of the Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020. The review report is anticipated to be delivered to the minister shortly and will subsequently be tabled in parliament.

… implementation of any national scheme would involve detailed design work, consultation with industry and jurisdictions, development of supporting rules and guidance, and establishment of administrative arrangements.

That kind of word salad, which is everything other than action, everything other than legislation, everything other than binding obligations, is the reason why people are losing faith in government. People see a little baby shearwater riddled with plastics and get told that 'implementation of any national scheme would involve detailed design work, consultation'—blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you wanted a summary of the Albanese government's action on dealing with plastics, dealing with pollution, I reckon 'blah, blah, blah, blah' would be about the neatest summary I could think of, as the Albanese response. And that's what the majority did in this report.

In the committee review—you only have to read this stuff to kind of lose faith in humanity—the majority report says: 'The committee considers'—

Slade Brockman (WA, Deputy-President) | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Shoebridge, the time for the debate has expired.