Senator ALLISON (9:57 PM) —I rise to speak about recycling and local government. It is some time since I last addressed the chamber on the dire predicament of kerbside recycling. But it is turning into a perennial bad news story, and little has changed in the last 12 months or so. Earlier this year 12 councils across Queensland were forced to shut down their recycling schemes because of expense, and other councils are currently reviewing their schemes. The Queensland Local Government Association attributes the failure to high costs and the refusal of the packaging industry to share responsibility for some of that waste.

At present, federal, state and local governments and industry are negotiating the national packaging covenant, and included in this is a $35 million rescue package. This sum, to be spent over three years, falls well short of the $25 million a year needed by local government. The Queensland Local Government Association says that upgrading landfills to comply with state legislation in Queensland alone will cost around $700 million. So where is this money to be found? The story of recycling in Australia unfortunately can be summarised in one word—and that is `buck-passing'.

Local government is expected to perform magic disappearing acts on the waste that we generate. We are a country with one of the highest recycling participation rates in the world; Canberra, at 80 per cent of households, has the highest in the country. It would be a tragedy to now subvert this painstaking public education campaign by which we have achieved this level of awareness and participation so far. One of the consequences of councils being forced to cut recycling services is a loss of public faith in environmental action.

Australia is a larger generator of waste than Canada, Europe and Japan and is exceeded only by the United States of America. Australians need to do a much better job in cleaning up our backyard. This entails cooperation. The net cost to local government of kerbside recycling is $75 million to $100 million a year. That is the gap between the cost of collecting and cost recovery, even taking into account the cost of avoided landfill. Such a cost is unsustainable. To lighten the burden on local government, federal and state governments, and particularly the packaging industry, need with some urgency to assume far greater responsibility for this problem. Local government is very wary of signing off on the $35 million rescue package because it is simply not adequate to meet the task of a genuine rescue effort. The industry contribution is a mere $17.5 million over three years, or one-ninth of the annual cost.

Recently the CEO of the Packaging Council of Australia, Mr Gavin Williams, said it did local government no honour to be calling for a higher industry contribution. I would suggest that the industry has got off very lightly. The majority of the cost of recycling is borne by ratepayers rather than governments or even consumers. There is little incentive at the moment for industry or consumers to clean up their act. As noted by the industry, there has been no action to date on importers of packaged products. These importers are under no compulsion to contribute to recycling or reprocessing.

The industry has said that it will not sanction its contribution to the rescue package being used to `prop up' kerbside recycling. What an extraordinary statement that is! What is often not taken into account is the real but often hidden cost to the community of landfill. All that is being asked of industry is to take more responsibility for the waste it produces. The use of the phrase `prop up' is not an entirely innocent use of language. Any expenditure for public or private good can be seen as propping up, depending on one's perspective. The general public props up private enterprise by paying taxes which are then used to construct roads which benefit private enterprise, particularly freight oper ations. Industry assistance, R&D funds and bailouts are some of the many projects that benefit from the public good, as does private enterprise that is propped up, usually by taxpayers.

This is not to say that there have not been councils that have signed unsustainable recycling contracts. The ALGA has said that efficiencies of up to 15 per cent in kerbside recycling could be achieved. But that would result in even more material flooding onto what is already a depressed market for recycled materials. In general, the public, especially ratepayers, have had to prop up an unsustainable cost to the environment of waste from packaging practices. Let us not forget that the Australian Supermarket Institute, one of the signatories to the covenant, is resistant to supporting measures such as charging consumers for plastic bags. We need to ask why it is that supermarkets cannot do what a host of small businesses and cooperatives are doing. I applaud the efforts of outlets such as Friends of the Earth grocery shops in capital cities, food cooperatives and the like—originally the domain of universities but now spreading into inner suburbs.

According to the Australian Local Government Association, the cost of kerbside recycling has more than trebled in three years, thanks to burgeoning supply and the closure of overseas markets as a result of Asia's currency crisis. The ALGA has said:

Were it not for the fixed price of contracts for paper and cardboard, local government would be in a far worse position.

The net cost of kerbside recycling to local government in Sydney and Melbourne combined is $44 million per annum, and that is $9 million more than the poultry rescue package. One proposed solution is to allow councils to raise revenues through an identifiable surcharge, and this would entrench the status quo. It would not encourage industry to devise better packaging practices. The ALGA resolved in March last year to promote national container deposit legislation along the lines of the South Australian model. This may be the only alternative if industry and state and Commonwealth governments fail to provide adequate support for comprehensive recycling programs.

Back in 1984 a Victorian state government committee recommended the indefinite postponement of container deposit legislation. The industry then said it needed time to show that a voluntary effort would be preferable to a regulated outcome. As a result, the glass, aluminium and PET industries were instrumental in promoting kerbside recycling as an alternative to container deposit legislation, but it appears that the time for such industry optimism has now passed.

The New South Wales Local Government Association has called for a national week of action on container deposit legislation from 30 November to 6 December. A kit has been prepared in anticipation of this and the Democrats wholeheartedly support this initiative. It is my hope, however, that the campaign will be enthusiastically adopted by other states. It is one thing to consider ourselves tardy in adopting trends overseas, but it is quite another to ignore the success of the container deposit legislation on our own doorstep in South Australia. This is an idea that definitely needs recycling. It is one that I commend to the Senate. I hope the minister for the environment will at last take up this now urgent issue.