Waste and recycling management
Tim READ (Brunswick) (09:48): I wonder if the Victorian Labor government have looked at their own circular economy policies lately, because I have, and what they have put down on paper is not quite the same as what they are doing in the real world. When we think about waste, we often think about what is in our bins at home, and while we should certainly try to reduce our own waste, a lot of the waste we carefully sort into our different coloured bins was not created by us. Were saddled with it by companies who do not care what happens to their packaging once it reaches us. Victoria’s principle of waste management hierarchy states that it is better to avoid generating waste than to manage its consequences. I agree. So you would think that the government would follow its own hierarchy and support all of us to avoid and reuse, before recycling and recovery even come into it. But while South Australia continues to take active steps to ban unnecessary single-use plastics, Victorian Labor seems to have stalled on any attempts to actually stop waste at the source, instead forging ahead with its unpopular and backwards plan to make Victoria the incinerator capital of Australia. It is almost as if they are abandoning the waste hierarchy just to make sure there is enough rubbish to feed these incinerators for decades to come.