Extended Producer Responsibility Scheme for Packaging (No Time to Waste) Bill 2026
Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (10:02): It was in the first half of last year—I think around May—when I was in Sydney Airport and Senator Whish-Wilson, my colleague, was walking past the other way. He looked pretty upset. I had a chat with him.
He'd just come back from Lord Howe, and he said: 'David, I'm going to show you this. It's really upsetting.' I remember him pulling out his phone and showing me those images of those little baby mutton birds, the shearwaters. One of them had been dissected by researchers.
The whole of this furry little body was just full of plastics. Pete said to me: 'It's just all of them, David. It's just all of them.' We were looking at this picture of this little bird, and again I saw how much Senator Whish-Wilson gets this.
You'd think Lord Howe Island, more than a thousand kays off the coast, would be isolated. You'd think it would be away from the waste streams being produced. It's thousands and thousands of kilometres from North America, thousands of kilometres from north Asia, a thousand kilometres from Australia, this little island.
Yet these little mutton birds on Lord Howe—according to the researchers, when they weighed one of them, one fifth of its body weight was plastic. They can't properly digest food. Their intestines get perforated by the plastics.
If they do survive, they have a life of pain. These little creatures have a life of pain. That life of pain is, yes, delivered by the plastics industry, the oil industry and the fossil fuel industry, but it's also delivered by governments and parliaments that won't act to keep that industry under control.
That little bird suffering in pain—that is also delivered by parliaments like this who refuse to support legislation like this. What does this legislation do? It establishes a uniform national extended producer responsibility scheme for packaging.
This is something that this government, the previous government and the one before that said that they want. It's like St Augustine: 'Oh, Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.' Never yet—it's never yet for this lot. They say they want it.
They say that they've got this process in place. I'll go through and talk about some of the wash—this endless stream. The one thing they recycle isn't plastic.
The one thing they recycle is the talking points of the industry and the fossil fuel lobby who want to keep making their profits from polluting this planet on a scale and with a product that is literally poisoning our waterways, poisoning our oceans, poisoning our bodies, poisoning our food. If that little shearwater, that little baby mutton bird, is not a warning to us, if that's not a reason to act, I don't know what is.
The purpose of the bill, the Extended Producer Responsibility Scheme for Packaging (No Time to Waste) Bill 2026, is to do something the plastics industry, the fossil fuel mates and the billionaires who own them have been fighting for decades. It's to place a direct and legally binding obligation on producers, importers and distributors of packaging for the end-of-life management of the packaging.
You make the waste, you deal with it and you pay the cost of it—not some little baby shearwater, not some mum who's worried about the plastics that are poisoning her baby from birth, not all of us as we worry about the plastics we're ingesting through the food we eat and through the water we drink. Those who make the waste are responsible for it. Every so often, you hear about personal responsibility from the coalition.
You hear about One Nation saying, 'That little eight-year-old kid should be personally responsible for his actions.' Or they say, 'Those school students should be responsible for their actions and not go out on strike about the climate. They should all be responsible for their actions.' But it turns out, from the coalition and from One Nation and, tragically, from Labor too, that the one part of this society they never talk about having responsibility is corporate Australia, the plastics industry, the fossil fuel industry—your donor mates.
Suddenly, this whole rhetoric of responsibility just ends at the door of a big corporate donor for you lot, and you're unwilling to take on what is unquestionably a powerful industry. Look at the Pratts of this world. I don't often agree with Donald Trump, but he did have a colourful description of that bloke, which I won't repeat because it's a little bit unparliamentary.
But look at the Pratts of this world, who have made obscene profits from polluting our country, with a multinational company literally polluting the planet. He uses those profits to buy his way into private meetings with the Prime Minister and private meetings with a minister. Senator Whish-Wilson: Katy Perry.
Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Yes, he'll fly Katy Perry in and then invite the political class from One Nation and the coalition and Labor to a Katy Perry concert, and say, 'Isn't this lovely? Aren't we all great friends? Would you mind if I just kept polluting the world?' 'Yes, sure.
No worries. Katy sang beautifully, though.' That's how the political class operates in this country. You don't care about polluting our food and polluting our water.
You don't care about it, because you care about the money that can flow and the influence that can flow from Pratt and his packaging empire, and you want to keep your donors in the fossil fuel industries and their billionaire owners happy. That is why we're not progressing this bill—not for the reasons that were given by the usual suspects from industry. It's not for the reasons that are given by the majority in this report.
Here's something: sent out to do the government's dirty work is Cameron Hutchison, the branch head of the circular economy division of the department. I think it's 'circular' insofar as they produce circulars and just share them amongst the department and they make sure that never has any kind of reference to actually fixing the world! He said: The department is currently developing advice for government on packaging reform.
Isn't that comforting? They're currently developing advice! Did I mention that this has been going on for decades?
Anyhow, apparently the department is 'currently developing advice for government on packaging reform'. He said: This work has been informed by extensive consultation with industry, governments, non-government organisations and the community, and reflects strong stakeholder interest in nationally consistent arrangements. The department is also undertaking a statutory review of the Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020.
The review report is anticipated to be delivered to the minister shortly and will subsequently be tabled in parliament. … implementation of any national scheme would involve detailed design work, consultation with industry and jurisdictions, development of supporting rules and guidance, and establishment of administrative arrangements. That kind of word salad, which is everything other than action, everything other than legislation, everything other than binding obligations, is the reason why people are losing faith in government.
People see a little baby shearwater riddled with plastics and get told that 'implementation of any national scheme would involve detailed design work, consultation'—blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you wanted a summary of the Albanese government's action on dealing with plastics, dealing with pollution, I reckon 'blah, blah, blah, blah' would be about the neatest summary I could think of, as the Albanese response.
And that's what the majority did in this report. In the committee review—you only have to read this stuff to kind of lose faith in humanity—the majority report says: 'The committee considers'— The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Shoebridge, the time for the debate has expired.