Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Chair. I'm very pleased to take a call in the Estimates debate for the environment sector. I'm quite pleased actually—this is my first time going through all of this and it was actually quite an exciting process because the environment is on all of our minds. We've got issues around a plastic waste crisis that's happening at the moment. The Government raised our expectations around water quality single-use plastics and bottled water so you've got a country whose expectations are raised. We're all thinking about it people in my electorate are thinking about it and we put a lot of those questions around those areas to the Minister at select committee. Being my first Estimates hearing I had assumed—wrongly so—that the Associate Ministers would turn up to the meetings given that they were invited and I'll draw your attention to page 2 of the report where we made clear that they were invited but didn't actually turn up.The fact that Minister Sage the Associate Minister with a delegation for waste didn't show up frankly is appalling. It's appalling because we are facing possibly one of the biggest waste crises potentially ever—certainly in my lifetime—around plastic. We know that China are no longer taking it. We know that it's stockpiling around the country in warehouses that are bursting at the seams. We had some questions to ask the Minister around the appropriation and what her plans were and we weren't able to do that and frankly that was appalling.We didn't get Minister Mahuta either. We did request that she turn up and I know that she's doing some work around Three Waters which is something that I'm interested in and would have liked to ask her about but unfortunately I didn't get that chance. Again other select committees did get their Associate Ministers and I don't understand why in this case we didn't. Given that this was the greenest Budget ever as proclaimed by the Government one would have thought that these Ministers would have wanted to turn up to crow about all the fantastic things that they are doing and all of the appropriations because it's such a green Budget.Now in my Budget speech I pulled that apart. [Interruption] Well Vote Environment actually decreased 15 percent and they can tell you about the reasons why that might have happened but the point is it didn't increase. So here we are with massive crises in waste. We've got raised expectations in water and single-use plastics and bottled water and we've got a Budget that decreased by 15 percent. So this was our chance to sit down with Minister Parker and go through things line by line and ask him questions about what his plans were given that it wasn't at all clear from the Budget when we looked at it at first glance. So here we are with the Minister by himself—it wasn't three out of three. We didn't even get two out of three; we got one out of three which is—Todd Muller: Outrageous actually.ERICA STANFORD: It is. It's outrageous and it's pretty much par for the course for this failure of a Government.But I'd like to bring the committee's attention to some of the things that we asked the Minister. So we talked to him about the proposed levy for bottled water for export and frankly what he had to say was it wasn't a priority for this Government. Given all of the rhetoric prior to the election around what they were going to do and they had all the answers and they knew exactly what was going to happen and what all the solutions were when the rubber hits the road when we get him in front of us and we ask him What are you going to do?"—nothing. Actually all he did was give us a whole lot of excuses about why it couldn't be done and why it wasn't a priority. So here we are seeing quite clearly what was promised before the election and all the hype and all the raised expectations but here it is in black and white: they're not going to do anything about it.Then we went on to talk about plastic waste management—as I said earlier possibly one of the most important areas right now that we need to be talking about. Minister Sage doesn't turn up so we have Minister Parker and what do we hear from him? Well there are some discussions going on Minister Sage is talking to councils about separating glass from plastic recycling and they're not considering a ban on single-use plastic bags at this stage—not putting anything in front of Cabinet. So again we see prior to the election all the answers; when we get him in front of us at select committee: nothing. They bat it down the road: "We're thinking about it maybe we'll do it maybe we won't." Well they've been in power for 10 months and we've got nothing.Todd Muller: 10 long months.ERICA STANFORD: 10 long months and we're sitting with the Minister in front of us and what is he doing about bottled water? Nothing. What is he doing about single-use plastics? Nothing. What is he doing about our waste crisis with packaging? Nothing. What a disgrace."