Page 5809 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 7 December 2010
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purposes, whether it be carrying dirty football boots home from the footy, whether it be from sport after school, whether it be wet swimmers. I know my wife, when she takes our little fellow to his swimming lessons, uses them. You have wet gear to bring home. What do you do? You put it in one these little bags.
How many people line the small bin in their en suite or in their toilet or in their bathroom with one of these bags? How many people use these bags time and time again before they are disposed of? Then they are recycled because most of the supermarket providers now have a bin where you can take your small shopping bags back to recycle again. We have, I think, a very aware community and I think we have a great understanding in this community of what these bags are and how they should be used.
Ms Le Couteur mentioned in her speech that we might use nylon bags or things like that. My understanding was that nylon actually came from the petrochemical industry as well. If we are going to ban these things because they are bad and because they are derived from oil, we are on a very slippery slope because nylon and a whole lot of other alternatives will go out the window as well. And this is what happens when we just have a knee-jerk reaction. It sounds like a good idea at the time. As Chris Peters said, this is a solution looking for a problem.
I point out to members that the average family might do the shopping once a week or once a fortnight. For most of us, I am assuming—I would be surprised if there is not a household in the ACT that does not have a number of the heavy duty recycling grocery bags; four, five, six or maybe even 10—an average shop for an average family will not fit in that number of bags. And heaven forbid, you actually saw a special, you lashed out, you got a little extra and you ran past the capacity of the number of bags that you have taken.
What the current array of shopping bags provides is convenience for people. Yes, we have got to weigh up the environmental side of it but there are times when people buy more than they plan to buy. Shame on them! Shame on them for consuming! And this is what this seems to be about. This seems to be more about people consuming rather than behaving responsibly. If you have got a bigger family—heaven forbid if you had four, five or six kids and your weekly shop tends to go past the normal spread of the bags that you carry with you—how dare you ask for the convenience of a shopping bag! How dare you ask for that!
This is the unreal world that some members of this place now choose to live in. Heaven help you if on your way home you got a phone call from your partner, your spouse, your wife, your husband to say, “Can you stop off and pick up the milk and a few other things? Make sure you separate the vegies from the meat and put them in separate bags.” Heaven forbid that you would run in and, not having shopping bags in your boot, ask for the convenience of bags. That is what we are banning. You will now carry that load out in your arms, I assume, somehow or be forced to purchase another heavy duty bag of some description.
There is an air of unreality about all of this, without searching for or seeking other solutions—solutions that programs like no waste by 2010 were driving, solutions that
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