Roche DeniseDENISE ROCHE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. I rise to speak to this part of the Estimates debate on the environment. I am going to focus my comments on the issue of waste which was mentioned in the committee report but not really in very much detail. The Budget included an increase—which I was very excited about initially—in the Waste Minimisation Fund by about 50 percent. The Waste Minimisation Fund comes from the waste levy that was introduced in the Waste Minimisation Act which was a Green Party member's bill. The waste levy came into force in 2009. The idea of the fund that comes from that waste levy is that it be used to minimise waste and support businesses to find innovative ways to deal with some of the really difficult items in the waste stream and actually find ways to get them out of landfills so that the resources can be reused.So when I saw the Budget I was very excited until of course I realised that a 50 percent increase in the Waste Minimisation Fund equates to a 50 percent increase in the amount of waste going to landfill. This basically suggests that there is no plan to reduce the amount of rubbish that we create in this country. I guess I should not have been surprised because when this Government came in one of the first things it did—and the Associate Minister is probably aware of this—was that it took away the targets from the waste minimisation strategy that had been in place since 2002. So it took them away which therefore means that you cannot really try to find a way to reduce waste because you really do not care. That is obviously what is happening here.The waste levy has been reviewed recently and that is part of the deal of the Waste Minimisation Act—it does get reviewed every 3 years. The original idea with the waste levy—which is only $10 a tonne—was that the levy would be extended. It would increase over time which would act as an incentive to reduce the amount of rubbish going to landfill. It would also be extended to different types of materials and different types of landfills because with the way that it applies at the moment there is only a small number of landfills that are actually covered by the legislation.Despite that there are millions and millions of dollars created every year from the waste levy because the amount of rubbish that we are producing is not going down. In fact at the same time as the review was happening by the Ministry for the Environment about the waste levy a waste levy action group was set up by councils researchers and the industry itself to look at what would be a good way to reduce the amount of stuff going into landfills and it came up with the idea that increasing the levy is the No. 1 way. What its report showed was that actually over the term of this Government and over the term of the waste levy itself there has been a 16.4 percent increase in the amount of stuff going into landfills. Why is this important? It is important because the landfills create greenhouse gases and if we are to ever do anything about our greenhouse gas emissions this is one thing that we could do. It is such an easy thing to do.The report from the waste levy action group basically said that if we increased the levy to about $140 per tonne for some items and extended it to a few more landfills then we could deliver about $500 million in net benefit to New Zealand every year. We could increase jobs by 9000—those are jobs that are concerned with resource recovery—and at the same time we would divert around about 3 million tonnes of waste from landfill which is what we want to do.But I am not seeing any action from this Government at all about wanting to make any minimisation at all in the amount of rubbish we are producing because if this Government did care about it it would be doing things like making a tiny little change that the people of New Zealand want which would be to introduce a charge on single-use plastic bags. Yes I know plastic bags are not a big amount of the waste stream by tonne—they are not—but we use 1.6 billion of them every year in this country and we are not doing anything about it.The industry actually—the packaging forum—set up a recycling scheme with the help of the Waste Minimisation Fund that comes from the waste levy to the tune of about $1.2 million of soft plastic recycling because it did want to see us reduce the amount of plastic that we are using and producing and throwing away in this country. I have to say that recycling is what you do after you have failed—you have absolutely failed—to do the other stuff to reduce waste which is avoid reuse refashion and reconfigure. You do all that stuff before you get to the recycling because recycling itself is resource-intensive.We could be introducing a charge on single-use plastic bags. People will have known and have seen quite recently that nearly all the mayors in this country want us to be able to do something about plastic bags—put a charge on them—and so if we will not at least give local government the opportunity for them to make their own decisions about it. We have had Retail New Zealand which I met with last year say—and it has now changed its tune and said that it knows that its members want to put a charge on single-use plastic bags.I have also talked with the supermarkets which cannot put a charge on plastic bags because it would offer an unfair competitive advantage to their competitors and they cannot agree to do it together because that would be a breach of the Commerce Act because they would be acting like a cartel apparently. So they cannot do it voluntarily but they could have and they would be happy to accept a charge on single-use plastic bags if there was regulation to do it.The magic bullet in the Waste Minimisation Act is Part 2 which is the area where you can declare anything in the waste stream a priority product and you can use that magic bullet to introduce a product stewardship scheme like putting a charge on single-use plastic bags. This Government is so out of touch with what ordinary New Zealanders want. It is Plastic Free July and community organisations right across the country have been talking to the media and talking to people in their communities about the scourge that is plastic pollution in our environment.I probably do not need to go into detail for this Committee about the impact that plastic does have on the environment because it should be obvious. It damages our brand—our clean green" New Zealand brand—to see the littering of plastic all around our country and in our oceans rivers and seas. I will not even get on to the damage it does to marine animals but I probably do not need to talk about that because it is really obvious and apparent that the fact that this Government will not do anything about it is deeply disturbing when this is such a no-brainer. Everybody wants it. We can do it. It should be done. It could reduce the amount of rubbish that is going to landfill and create a reduction in our carbon dioxide emissions. In fact if we got rid of single-use plastic bags altogether it would be the equivalent of taking about 3000 cars off the road which is not much but it is a step. In fact just focusing on plastic bags it is not much but it is a step. It is the gateway drug to the next plastic that we actually get rid of and that will be refunds on drink containers.I think there are heaps of things that we could be doing that are cost-neutral that create jobs that create opportunities that are green and that provide employment. We could be doing lots of things in the waste sector but what we have got is a Government that is saying: "Hey we're going to increase the amount of rubbish going to landfills by 50 percent so we can get 10 bucks off each tonne so we can fund our mates to go and burn some more tyres for fuel." I despair. We are really deeply disappointed with this Budget but we will keep fighting because sooner or later this Government will realise that the people of New Zealand actually want some action and we will provide it when we are in Government."