Extended Producer Responsibility Scheme for Packaging (No Time to Waste) Bill 2026
Senator WHISH-WILSON (Tasmania) (09:01): 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.