National Waste Policy Action Plan
Senator VAN: Thank you for appearing tonight. As most people who follow this committee know, I've got a big interest in how we handle waste. Looking at the feasibility and environmental impact of the waste export ban, it obviously depends in large part on Australia's capacity to recycle our waste onshore. Are you able to outline how measures like the Recycling Modernisation Fund will help boost this domestic capacity?
Ms Tilley: Certainly. Mr Knudson mentioned previously that in formulating advice to governments and COAG about the waste export ban, there was some fairly rigorous economic analysis that was undertaken both through independent market analysis and then cost-benefit work that fed into the regulation impact statement. At a headline level, that found that the waste export ban as agreed by COAG would see the Australian economy grow by $3.6 billion in turnover and $1.5 billion in GDP over 20 years, and that overall the waste export ban would be of net economic benefit to Australia in line with those figures. Separately, if you then look at the purpose of the $190 million Recycling Modernisation Fund, it was designed to leverage one-for-one-for-one funding—Commonwealth, state and territory, industry—such that there would be about a $600 million investment, in the next four years, in industry capacity. That then sits behind as one of the main drivers for that 10,000 job figure that we referred to before; the export ban and the investments under the Recycling Modernisation Fund will lead to the 10,000 jobs. So hopefully that helps with the headline figures to your question.
Senator VAN: It does, very much. Can the department provide an update on what work has been done to make sure that the demand for recycled materials will be there to match this increase in supply that we're going to see?
Ms Tilley: Certainly. As you're probably aware, Senator, and as I mentioned before, banning the export of waste is a pretty direct impact, and Australia needs to work out what to do with that waste so it's no longer going offshore. And that's around 650,000 tonnes of waste when the full form material export ban comes in. That's why the Recycling Modernisation Fund was designed—to deal with the reprocessing—and what we do with that material now on the supply side is an additional question you refer to as well. We know what we're doing to reprocess that waste, but then what happens? Where's the demand side? In addition to COAG agreeing on the terms of the ban—the materials and the time line—COAG also agreed on a response strategy that all governments said would need to be implemented effectively by any number of Commonwealth, state and territory, local and industry stakeholders to ensure the ban was implemented successfully. That touched, to a large degree, on the need for significant uplift across governments and industry in procurement of recycled content products. In the National Waste Policy Action Plan we were talking to before there is actually a target that governments have agreed on to significantly increase purchasing of recycled content. And, as you may be aware, on the Commonwealth's end the Prime Minister earlier this year announced that the Commonwealth will be strengthening its procurement guidelines, such that every procurement undertaken by a Commonwealth public servant will need to consider sustainable practices, including use of recycled content in those purchases. So that's one of the key measures the Commonwealth is using to drive the demand for those materials. States and territories are equally doing a lot, and certainly industry has a role to play in that space as well.
Senator VAN: Great. Is Australia on track to achieve the seven key targets agreed in the National Waste Policy Action Plan? How will recent developments such as the legislation that is currently before the parliament help the achievement of those overarching targets?
Ms Tilley: What I can offer you is a personal view. The targets were just agreed less than a year ago and many of them are 2030 targets. A number of them are quite ambitious, to be really frank. We are setting up the foundations to be able to achieve those targets. Arguably, the government's had a lot of investments, announcements and commitments in the past year so that signals its clear intention and ambition to meet those targets. One of the measures we were talking about earlier with Senator Green is the $24.6 million set aside for a new waste data repository that will be publicly available to track and see the flows of waste around the country. While that will be a very important tool for policymakers, the public and industry to be able to innovate and come up with new policies or new business ideas, the other really important thing it will do is will enable us to track progress against the 2030 targets and the other targets under this action plan. Sorry, that doesn't directly answer your question. We don't have quantifiable metrics at this point in time but we are setting the system up to fairly soon show our status towards those longer term targets.
Mr Knudson: One of the things that gives me a fair amount of confidence in this space is this is part of a global push on managing waste. APCO, the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation, now has several hundred member organisations, some of the largest in the country. You're seeing things like, for example, the Department of Defence changed from plastic cutlery for some of its joint military operations with the United States. Think 30,000 people eating three times a day, all using disposable plastics; they are not anymore. When you see these types of signals from government, from business and from citizens all aligned in the same direction, I have more of confidence in this space than often one can have in public policy. I would argue that this comprehensive set of actions geared towards trying to really push Australia towards the front end of leadership on this type of issue is something that I as a public servant take a lot of pride in.
Senator VAN: Don't worry. Most of us parliamentarians do too.
