Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 11 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 3321 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Plastic bags are a small proportion of the total waste stream by volume or weight, but they are a particular nuisance waste. The HDPE plastic bags are non-biodegradable. Their light weight means that they are easily blown away, thus adding to litter problems. They are a particular problem in coastal areas and in our waterways, as bags floating in water can trap birds and animals. Some sea animals eat plastic bags, because they mistake them for jellyfish, and die of intestinal blockage.

This Bill takes one small step in the ACT towards dealing with this national problem. It requires retail businesses to charge their customers directly for any plastic shopping bags they provide for the purpose of carrying items from the store once sold, at a price that is not less than the cost paid by the business to buy the bag. At present, shoppers are given plastic carry bags free whenever they buy something in a shop. But, of course, the bags are not free. The retailer has to buy these bags from a bag supplier, but then this cost is spread as an overhead across all products in the shop, just like rental costs, employees' wages and administrative expenses. Shoppers are still paying for these bags through the goods they buy, but the cost of the bag is hidden. The cost to the environment of the bags cannot even be quantified, yet it is very real.

There is thus no incentive for shoppers to refuse a bag. Anyone who goes to the trouble of bringing their own carry bag is still having to pay for the shopping bags of others through the cost of the products they buy. There is no way they can refuse the cost of the bag. This Bill, however, will give them a way. It turns the tables so that a person doing the right thing by reducing the number of bags they use will actually save money by not having to pay directly for the shop's bags.

Those people who still choose to take the shop's bags will not be paying any more than what they currently are paying for plastic bags, except for some possible rounding up of the cost of the bag, as currently occurs with any goods bought. The cost of the bag will also be a specific item in their bill rather than being a hidden cost. The Bill does not impose any levies or additional charges on plastic bags, and no revenue is collected by the Government. I admit that this was our original idea when we publicly floated this proposal over a year ago, but the levy idea had to be abandoned because the legal advice we received indicated that a levy could be interpreted as a sales tax, which States and Territories cannot impose under the Constitution.

There are no additional costs to retailers, apart from the slight effort of ringing up an extra item for plastic bags on their cash registers and putting up signs telling customers what the charges for bags will be. We have not set a specific price for the bags, provided the price is at least the cost at which the retailer bought the bags from the supplier. Some people have argued that shops could actually exploit this Bill because they would now be charging directly for bags yet they may choose to keep the price of their products the same as before, when they incorporated the cost of bags as an overhead. This may be the case, but the prices of goods tend to fluctuate anyway across shops and at different times of the year because of the nature of the free market. This type of problem certainly has not stopped John Howard in his plans to remove sales tax on various goods.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .