Extended Producer Responsibility Scheme for Packaging (No Time to Waste) Bill 2026

Senator HODGINS-MAY (Victoria) (09:34): I want to start by acknowledging and thanking my colleague Senator Whish-Wilson for his relentless heart-driven work on this important but inherently solvable issue. Senator Whish-Wilson, alongside an extraordinary movement of community groups and ecologically minded but commonsense groups, fights for change and to protect those shearwaters that he spoke so passionately about.

I remember seeing a turtle wash up with the plastic ring from a beer sixpack around its neck. Just seeing the horror of that, I thought: 'This is entirely preventable. How is this allowed to continue?' For 15 years, Pete and these advocates have been fighting.

I hear the government get up and say, 'We're not supporting this. We're not ready. We need more time.

We need more time to talk this through, more symbolisms, more international conventions.' I'm sorry, but the clock is ticking. Those shearwaters need more than talk. They need more than conversation and diplomatic words.

It means nothing to them. Thank you, Senator Whish-Wilson, for the passion that you've brought to this. I don't know of anyone else who could have made this issue of waste as significant and wide reaching as you and the movement have managed to make it.

We're so grateful, and those shearwaters and turtles are grateful, because this issue matters enormously, and I think that most Australians know this instinctively. We've walked along the beach and had a Coca-Cola bottle lid dig into our foot. I was on Elwood Beach last weekend and I gave my kids a bucket and said, 'Go and see what shells you can collect,' so I could read a few pages of my book.

They came back and their buckets were full of trash. There were bits of plastic, metal and all sorts of things, and that was in about 10 minutes of walking along the beach. We've all seen this, we've all experienced it and we all know what a great tragedy it is.

It comes back to the question of where the leadership is on this. Takeaway containers, coffee cups, wrappers and plastic bottles are all designed and sold in minutes, but they are capable of remaining in our environment for decades and decades. People are asking a simple question: why is this an issue of individual responsibility when individuals have no say over how the product is designed or packaged in the first place?

They want leadership on this, so why should it come down to them? This bill, put forward by Senator Whish-Wilson, would do something about that. I want to acknowledge the environmental groups, the community organisations, the campaigners and the advocates who have been pushing for this reform alongside Pete, including the Australian Marine Conservation Society and the Boomerang Alliance, as well as the Elwood Canal Action Team, Love Our Streets and all of those little groups who are out every single week picking up rubbish before it ultimately hits the bay.

They trundle along the canal, using their personal time to do something that leaders in this place should be acting on. Their work gives us an opportunity to do something genuinely important, and that is to make Australia a world leader in how we deal with packaging and waste. Let's not wait for the others.

Let's get on with it. Let's lead. Since when do we have to be the little deputy waiting for someone else to show the courage to do something?

Let's set a global example. How about that for an idea? We—Australia, the world—are not winning the war on waste.

Plastic pollution is one of the biggest environmental challenges of our time. This isn't some distant problem; we know that. It's not floating around in an ocean somewhere else for someone else to deal with.

It's everywhere. It's in our waterways. It's on our beaches.

It's in landfills. It's in our bodies. It's breaking down into microplastics that are increasingly entering our bodies in the environment.

There is another reason we need to take this seriously. Most plastic is made from fossil fuels. Plastic production already accounts for around 45 per cent of the petrochemical sector, and the expansion of plastics is expected to be one of the major drivers of the demand for oil in the decades to come.

As the world moves away from fossil fuels for energy, the fossil fuel industry are licking their lips and looking for new markets, and plastics is an enormous one of them. So when we talk about plastic pollution we are also, of course, talking about climate action. We're talking about shifting away from fossil fuel extraction and the power of some of the world's biggest corporations to shape the products that end up in our homes, streets, oceans and bodies.

We ingest something like a credit card's worth of plastic every year. For too long, governments have put this burden unfairly onto consumers. And how's that going for us?

We're told to recycle harder, to sort our rubbish more carefully and to make better choices at the supermarket. I don't know about you, but my supermarkets don't allow me to choose a cucumber that's not wrapped in plastic—or even bananas, God forbid! I don't decide whether a product needs three layers of packaging.

I don't decide whether the packaging is actually recyclable in the future. We don't have these options. We don't have these choices.

The producers do. The brands do. The retailers do.

So they should carry responsibility for what happens to that packaging at the end of its life—a very simple proposition. This is the principle of extended producer responsibility. Find me an individual who isn't influenced by massive corporations or peddling the lines of the fossil fuel industry who'll genuinely rebut that and argue a case against that.

Find me someone who won't benefit financially from plastics and get them to put a case for why we should not have an extended producer responsibility. I throw down a challenge to you. This bill would establish a uniform national EPR scheme for packaging, creating a direct, legally binding obligation on producers, importers and distributors for the end-of-life management of the packaging that they put into the Australian market.

It would also make Australia's national packaging targets mandatory and legally binding. It's beyond time. It's not enough that we simply clean up the mess—not that we're doing a great job of that either—we also need to stop creating so much of it in the first place.

We need to prioritise avoidance and reduction. We need proper eco design standards. We need to build markets for recycled materials and a genuinely circular economy where products and materials are designed to be reused, recovered and kept in circulation.

This can work and this must work. Look at the container deposit scheme, where producers are responsible for the costs of recovering their products. We've seen dramatically higher collection rates.

Around 60 per cent to 80 per cent of containers are now being collected for recycling. Compare that with Australia's plastic packaging recycling rate, which sits at around 12 per cent. It's 12 per cent for plastics and 60 per cent to 80 per cent for aluminium containers.

The difference is not that Australians suddenly become better recyclers when they get a refund. The difference is a system. This requires system change.

Australians have had enough of voluntary targets that industry can simply fail to meet with no repercussions. Sixty-three per cent of Australians support mandatory packaging laws to replace voluntary targets, rising to 70 per cent among Labor voters. Here we have another example.

Seven in 10 Australian Labor voters are supporting leadership and action from the people that they elected to represent them but are being told: 'No, this is too hard. It's too difficult.' Again, follow the money, the donations that are going to these corporate parties to peddle their interests, to save them money and to make profits for their shareholders. I've had a gutful of this mob over here coming in to represent their donors over the Australian people.

What sort of statistics do we need to get for you to take some leadership on this issue? Australians understand that, if you make something, sell something and profit from something, you should not be able to simply walk away when that becomes waste. The Greens have been campaigning for decades to overhaul Australia's waste and recycling system.

Senator Whish-Wilson has chaired three Senate inquiries into this issue over the past decade. Senator Whish-Wilson: Five. Senator HODGINS-MAY: I correct myself—he has chaired five Senate inquiries into this issue over a decade.

The evidence has been gathered. The community has spoken. Industry itself is increasingly supporting mandatory reform, which is really encouraging.

That is a remarkable legacy that he's passing the baton on. I just want to note that evidence received from the EPA said that this wouldn't be complicated to implement. It could take between six to 12 months.

So what are we waiting for—six to 12 months to make an enormous difference for our communities, for our marine ecosystems, for our oceans and for humans who are ingesting this crap. We're running out of excuses. We need political will now.

In 2022, Australia's environment ministers committed to reforming packaging regulation. Four years on—tick, tock—Australians are still waiting. Excuse the pun, but there is no time to waste.

This bill gives parliament an opportunity to finally put responsibility where it belongs—with the companies that design, that produce and that profit from packaging—while creating the certainty we need to build a genuinely circular economy with less waste in our streets and our oceans, less demand for virgin plastics, more recycling and reuse, new markets, new jobs and a cleaner environment for future generations and every living organism that we share this planet with.

I thank Senator Whish-Wilson for his incredible persistence. There is enormous respect for him from across the sector and I'm sure from across the aisles, frankly, if we're honest. This is a commonsense policy.

How many more inquiries do we need to have? How much more talk do we need to have in this place to do what that 70 per cent of Australians want us to do? So thank you, Senator Whish-Wilson.

Thank you to the advocates and the community campaigners who have refused to let this issue disappear and I know aren't going anywhere. We will win this. It's just a question of how many shearwaters and turtles lose their lives before we get this outcome.

But we're not going anywhere. How many more Senate inquiries do we need to have? I hope not many.

I hope that the government sees the light on this—that they see the common sense and act for our environment and for our communities who are demanding action. It is not enough to keep asking Australians to clean up the mess they made. We must change the system that creates the waste in the first place.

Thank you again, Senator Whish-Wilson.