The Hon. Max Frederick Willis) Took the Chair at 2.30 P.M
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LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL Wednesday, 15th September, 1993 ______ The President (The Hon. Max Frederick Willis) took the chair at 2.30 p.m. The President offered the Prayers. STANDING COMMITTEE ON STATE DEVELOPMENT Motion by the Hon. J. P. Hannaford agreed to: That the Hon. Beryl Evans be discharged from the Standing Committee on State Development and that the Hon. J. H. Jobling be appointed as a member of such Committee. JOINT SELECT COMMITTEE UPON WASTE MANAGEMENT Report The Hon. J. F. RYAN [2.35]: On behalf of the Chairman I desire to lay upon the table of the House the report of the Joint Select Committee upon Waste Management, dated September 1993. Ordered to be printed. The Hon. J. F. RYAN, by leave: In tabling this report I should like to thank all members of the committee for their efforts in bringing the report together. I am sure the Chairman in another place would appreciate my thanking on his behalf the members of this House who served on the committee and the staff who helped in the production of the report. Most members agreed with the recommendations contained in the report. It was well worth investigating the many serious issues and I am sure all members appreciated the unique process by which not only members of Parliament but also a series of reference groups worked together to produce the report. That successful experiment allowed the community to have some input. However, there were two matters with which I was not pleased. Important details of the report were revealed to the press before the document was tabled, and I understand that regrettable action is not in accordance with the normal procedures of this House. I understand also that a number of remarks have made this report controversial. The last recommendation of the report is that no legislative changes or policies be introduced that would make New South Wales industries uncompetitive with those in other States. I saw this as a recommendation that members of this Parliament would have supported. Regrettably, five members of the committee, some of whom are members of this House, voted against the recommendation - one that I regard as a motherhood statement - that we would do nothing in this State to disadvantage industries and jobs. I regret that members of this Parliament were not prepared to stand up for industry in New South Wales. The Hon. R. S. L. JONES [2.40], by leave: I had very high hopes that the Joint Select Committee upon Waste Management would come up with some of the answers to our increasing waste problem. However, I regret to say that the committee was divided almost exactly down the middle - with the Government members on one side and members of the Australian Labor Party, the Democrats, the Independents, including Peter Macdonald, the Nature Conservation Council and local government on the other. One section of the community was on one side and the Government was on the other. The committee disagreed on whether putrescible landfills should be privatised. Putrescible landfills should not be privately owned; that would create an economic incentive to take putrescible waste into the landfills. The Government should take control of landfills and implement a program of waste reduction, particularly of putrescible landfills. Waste should be composted and reused on the land. The Government still supports incineration. Members of the committee saw the Waterloo incinerator at work. It is an utter disgrace. We saw truckload after truckload of aluminium cans, bottles, paper, food waste and garden waste - every possible piece of waste - going into that incinerator and 85 per cent of it was capable of being either reused or recycled. Peter Macdonald and I believe the incinerator should be closed down immediately. The Australian Labor Party will no doubt outline its position with respect to the incinerator. The Local Government Association, the Nature Conservation Council, Peter Macdonald, the Australian Labor Party and I all support the introduction of container deposit legislation. Peter Macdonald and I and the non-government contributors to the report believe that such legislation should be introduced as soon as possible. Such legislation has been effective in South Australia, and particularly effective in North America and Europe. I have seen it. It works very well. It removes broken glass from beaches and it enables people who have a low income to make a little extra by picking up bottles, cans and other containers and taking them back, as we used to do in our childhood. That legislation should be introduced. It would remove a significant amount of the wastestream. These are the three issues on which the committee disagreed. Even though some of the words between the recommendations are fine, the recommendations will not solve Sydney's waste crisis. We have to get serious about the waste crisis. We have to get serious about composting all garden waste and food waste - there is no reason why that cannot be done. We have to get serious about the reuse of materials that we can reuse. I do not see any inhibition upon that. We need to get serious about not Page 3122 allowing kerbside recycling to be cross-subsidised by aluminium cans, bottles or paper - each item should be self-funding. Industry should take responsibility for its waste. Industry, the committee and the Government should be serious or we shall end up with a mountain of waste by the end of this century. We shall not meet the Australian and New Zealand Conservation Council target as proposed in this report. The majority report is a failure. It should have recommended the minority recommendation. That would have meant that we were serious about waste management. This report is not serious about waste management. The majority recommendations of the report will not be the answer to Sydney's waste crisis. The Hon. JAN BURNSWOODS [2.44], by leave: I am shocked, to some extent, by the remarks of the Hon. J. F. Ryan about the members who dissented from this report. I am particularly shocked that the proper procedure for those sorts of remarks - the moving of a motion - was not followed by the honourable member. However, when I think about it, I am not all that shocked. I think Government members are so ashamed of this report that the kind of performance we just saw from the honourable member is not all that surprising. I make it clear that the dissenting report contained within the report on waste management is not a minority report - it is a report of five out of the 10 members of the committee - and that the majority report, so-called, is in fact a report of the Government members, who have spent 12 months wasting the time and the money of the rest of the committee and of many other people by producing a report that does nothing to address the problems of waste management in New South Wales. The more pious and useless recommendations of the report have been adopted without dissent but of the 47 recommendations 20 have been dissented from. I emphasise in particular that the report reflects the Government's attempting to totally opt out of all responsibility for waste management in New South Wales. It basically continues the spitting-the-dummy practice that the Government adopted in the green paper last year. It proposes that the State Government will no longer manage waste: it will be foisted on local government even though local government has made it very clear that it does not want to be handed that responsibility. Instead of the State taking responsibility for the ownership and management of landfill, the Government proposes to privatise it. Just as it is privatising water and privatising, or attempting to privatise, the school cleaning service, now the Government has decided to privatise garbage. In other words, through this committee the Government has recommended that the State Government cease to play any meaningful role and hand responsibility to local government and control of landfills to private enterprise. The other major area in which the majority report, so-called, of the committee fails is that it does not address the overwhelming problem of reducing the quantity of waste created. The report should have come up with proper strategies to minimise the amount of waste and to reuse waste at the source. Instead it contains a series of pious statements on those subjects. It will do nothing to reduce the amount of waste. The only way that the majority report, so-called, suggests to minimise waste is to hit ratepayers and other people in New South Wales with higher and higher charges to pay for an essentially privatised waste management system. It adopts no sensible strategies to minimise waste. It is a cop-out. It is a way of getting the Government off the hook that it created for itself in late 1991 and throughout 1992 when, unable to proceed for political reasons with the proposals at Lucas Heights and Castlereagh, it decided that if it could not get what it wanted it would not do anything and would hand the problem over to someone else. If the Government gets its way, this important area is to be completely ignored. I predict that the report will end up where it deserves, and that is in the garbage bins of Sydney. PETITIONS Homosexual Vilification Legislation Petitions praying that the House support those schedules of the proposed Anti-Discrimination (Amendment) Bill that will make homosexual vilification unlawful, received from the Hon. Dr Meredith Burgmann, the Hon. Jan Burnswoods, the Hon. Elisabeth Kirkby, the Hon. P. F.