Wednesday, 10 September 2025

Waste and recycling management

Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (18:53): (1954) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Environment. Victoria has a waste governance scandal hiding in plain sight, and the action that I seek is that this government make the regulator and the law fit for purpose to protect industries, the environment and human health. It is becoming very clear that bad faith contractors handling contaminated soil are mixing different classes of contaminated loads together in order to dilute them so that they scrape under the lab-testing thresholds. They then sell this off or give it away as so-called clean fill. It is contamination laundering, and it cheats honest businesses, endangers families, harms the environment and corrodes public trust. The regulations state that blending or diluting priority waste to change its classification is prohibited, yet in practice the EPA can wave it through with special approvals, and the rest is clearly slipping by undetected. Once mixed it is almost impossible to police.

In New South Wales the asbestos-in-mulch scandal forced inspections at more than 300 sites and triggered multiple prosecutions, all because traceability failed, and in Victoria we still have not closed those same loopholes. The Auditor-General and the Ombudsman have both warned that Victoria lacks reliable data and oversight of waste flows. This is the blind spot. It is the exact thing that means contaminated material gets rebadged and reused without any credible chain of custody. But when the unsuspecting landowners or councils take it in, they are the ones who end up possibly being liable for pollution or the ruinous clean-up bills, plus they have their investment and their property devalued. This government cannot even service the interest on their debt and the daily operating costs of this state, and yet it is missing out on precious tax revenue. At landfill levy rates of around $250 a tonne, this represents tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue that should be going to hospitals, schools and roads. Instead, it is just vanishing under this government’s nose, while compliant operators are undercut and everyone is put at risk. Please just take action and fix this.