Page 1479 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 7 May 2008
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to counter and adapt to climate change is becoming ever more obvious and it moves up the list of things that people expect governments to provide leadership and take action on. I suspect that voters already understand the need for an effective packaging recycling scheme. It is smart, it is efficient, it makes economic and environmental sense, it is overdue, and I am hoping that the government will see fit to support it.
As I said, the voluntary covenant scheme is proving to be an abject failure. Even the packaging industry has largely withdrawn its support for the scheme and, while the true life cycle costs of packaging are being borne by society, government and the environment, the packaging industry continues to rake in the profits, while governments seem to paralysed and are playing the old ‘wait for COAG to fix it’ game. Well, as usual, we could be waiting for an awfully long time for COAG to come with what could well be another “please all the major lobby groups, political donors and industry bodies” lowest common denominator uniform bill model.
While it would obviously be better for there to be a uniform container deposit scheme around Australia, my bill is designed to operate as a stand-alone scheme if necessary. I acknowledge that this bill may be improved upon and I would welcome further discussions with the relevant ministers and their advisers to help them reach a model which they feel they could support or table themselves. Results are what matter. This issue is too important to let petty political games get in the way. If the government feels it must not ever be seen to be supporting a Greens proposal, then by all means draft your own bill.
Reducing the production of single-use containers minimises landfill space as well as energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from mainly fossil-fuel-generated power stations, mining activities, metal smelters, canneries and bottle production facilities. It also reduces unsightly litter along roads and in other public spaces, and for that reason I would expect Mr Pratt to get right behind this bill.
One-way packaging consumption is unsustainable and a patent failure to internalise, at the appropriate source, the environmental costs of container packaging. While I do not believe that user or producer pays makes sense in all areas, it does make economic and social sense to force the packaging industry to internalise the life cycle cost of its products. The covenant definition of product stewardship is based on a principle of shared responsibility between the industry and government, but the government is left with the responsibility for the overwhelming bulk of the expense of dealing with unrecycled beverage containers, as Mr Hargreaves would well know.
While some sections of the industry are taking steps to bring their operations and business practices into line with responsible corporate ethical behaviour, there are many more that are not. This makes it very difficult for the ones that are trying to do the right thing to compete. This is a recurring problem in a free market system that rewards those companies with the lowest environmental and ethical standards. We have to set the ground rules within which the packaging and beverage companies compete, in order to compel, and hopefully reward, environmental and socially responsible business practices.
We might ask whether the recent trend to buy one’s water in plastic bottles in a city with some of the best, cleanest and most reliable water in the world is not, in fact, a
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