Page 1217 - Week 03 - Thursday, 31 March 2011
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We are always investigating ways to support and encourage the resource recovery sector and we are considering at the moment, as members know, the draft ACT sustainable waste strategy. And I do look forward to the new measures that will be put in place as a result of our implementation of that strategy.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (3.41): I very much welcome this matter of public importance as I think this is very much core business for this Assembly. I think many people in Canberra still very much see the ACT government as a local government authority. Many people associate the ACT government with council services, and a quintessential council service is managing waste, including waste to landfill but also, and increasingly more so, waste that can be recycled.
Like Mr Stanhope, the Canberra Liberals are also committed to the waste hierarchy and it is something that has been reflected in our policies of the last few elections. It was the 2008 election, I believe, where the opposition took quite a progressive policy with regard to organic waste collection and the third bin. That is something which has been spoken about a great deal in this place, yet people in Canberra are yet to receive the benefit which many other councils in Australia are providing and often for lower rates than we pay here in the territory.
I realise that there are issues with the collection of organic waste, especially putrescible waste, and the compromising of the organic waste stream which can occur, but they certainly can be overcome if we are willing to be creative and to genuinely invest in the future of recycling here in the territory.
However, we do have to be reasonable and we do have to make sure that we are spending taxpayers’ money wisely. If we have a finite budget for recycling, we need to make sure that the money that we are allocating to various recycling programs is indeed returning the best bang for our buck. There are some recycling programs which are extremely expensive and every dollar we put into those programs—the recycling of batteries I believe is one—is money that cannot be invested into other, more efficient, recycling programs. I am not saying therefore that we should just write it off. But we do need to make sure that we have an appropriate balance with regard to our recycling strategy that actually does concentrate on the outputs, not on the inputs, in terms of getting a good return after recycling takes place. We could spend a fortune, for instance, on recycling batteries and get very little return, or we could spend a fortune on recycling classic co-mingles and we would get a much better return for the people of Canberra and a much better return for the environment as a whole.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of having a tour of some of our recycling and waste operations here in the territory. I went down to the Mugga resource management centre and also to the resource recovery estate. I am very grateful to Mr Chris Ware and also to Shane Breynard for facilitating that tour; it really was most informative. It certainly opened my eyes to all the dirty secrets of the territory and exactly what does happen to all that rubbish. But it was an eye-opener and I think it is very important for as many people as possible to get out there and see what actually happens, see the consequences of waste to landfill but also into the recycling stream. I understand that is something which the department take seriously and they have what
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