The Newcastle Herald printed my response to the Government's opposition to the Plastic Bags Bill today.

You can read the article on the Herald's websitehere.



Why Won't the Government Ban the Bag?

Lastweek in Parliament, the government opposed a Labor-initiated Bill to remove single-use plastic bags from circulation in NSW.

It takes around 500 to 1000 years for plastic to fully degrade, so the plastic we use today will still impact the planet long after we are gone. That means that every bit of plastic that humans have ever produced still exists in our environment.

But more than ever before people want action to address this environmental crisis. We all know that using plastics is alluringly convenient. It is so normal for us to use these plastics, that we often don't stop to think about the inconvenient truth that these plastics remain in our environment for hundreds of years.

The Boomerang Alliance says that: "plastic bags pose one of the greatest impacts to ocean wildlife ... they break up into smaller and smaller pieces - having devastating impacts on the environment."

As a country, we once used 4 billion plastic bags every year, that was more than 10 million every day.

Thankfully things are changing. Back in 2005, every Australian State and Territory agreed to phase out single-use plastic bags.

The World Wildlife Fund recently rated NSW as the second worst state or territory in addressing and leading the way on banning single-use plastic in Australia. NSW is now the only state to refuse to ban single-use plastic bags.

We use a single-use plastic bag for an average of 12 minutes. That same bag then spends 1000 years in landfill, in our oceans, or on the side of the road. Every year, six million tonnes of rubbish are dumped into the world's oceans. 80 per cent of this is plastic bags. We need to stop hiding at the rear, and step forward to take a lead.

We all know that the challenge is great. It may even seem insurmountable to us. I agree with those in the government who say that there is more to be done. I agree that we have yet to address the irreversible challenges to our environment of a great many other kinds of single-use plastic. They need to be addressed, and we need a road map.

Plastic pollution is a major threat to wildlife. Because plastic bags look like jellyfish in the water, and because small pieces of plastic break down, plastic presents a real danger for marine life and sea birds when they mistake pieces of plastic for food. Globally it is estimated that 1 million seabirds and over 100,000 mammals die every year as a result of plastic ingestion or entanglement.

Change is needed, and such change will require a paradigm shift in our thinking.

But my Labor colleagues and I do not accept that the challenge is so great that we should freeze in in-action, or that we should remain in a kind of non-active paralysis. The truth is that every paradigm shift begins with a series of small steps.

Last week we had the opportunity to take one of those steps in the Parliament of NSW, to legislate for the eradication of single-use plastic bags, within six months, across our state. Not the last step, but a solid first step. My Labor colleagues and I know that inaction is itself a decision. Not acting is to say that we have been defeated by a crisis of our own making. I don't believe that that is good enough.

Every week that we do not take action, another 234,000 additional plastic bags enter our rivers and waterways. That is over one million bags every month, and over 12 million bags every year clogging our drainage systems, entering our waterways, polluting our rivers and lakes and beaches

I voted in favour of the Bill because I know that first steps matter. I do not accept the argument that we need to wait for a fuller suite of measures, although I know that they do need to follow. I did not think that the Plastic Bags Bill was the limit and extent of our environmental aspirations.

There are a great many other instances of single-use plastics that need our attention. But first steps do matter because they signal our future intentions.

The government blew it last week when it refused to vote with us to take the first step by banning the use of single-use plastic bags in NSW.