ADDRESS BY THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON P J KEATING, MP
LAUNCH OF WASTE MINIMISATION AND RECYCLING STRATEGY, DARLING
HARBOUR, SYDNEY 22 JUNE 1992
Ladies and gentlemen
The Government's Waste Minimisation and Recycling Strategy is
more than it seems.
This environment strategy is also an industrial strategy, and
a social strategy.
In this way it goes to the heart of some of the key questions
facing Australia today.
For instance, it is concerned with industrial modernity and
efficiency. It will play a part In determining how
significant our role will be in the modern world.
Increasingly this can be said of all good environment
policies: they are not regressive, as the critics used to like
to say, and as some of the more uncouth ones still do.
Strategies like this one do not advocate a more primitive way
of life, but a more sophisticated one.
They do not deny development, but they say it should be
intelligent. They look forward not back indeed, in the long term, they
can put us ahead of the international competition and keep us
there. We are encouraging a more efficient use of resources which
means less demand on our primary materials, and just as
importantly, more emphasis on the productive or creative
process. Firms which engage in successful waste minimisation schemes
have focussed on best practice. They are more likely to be
more efficient in other areas, and more likely to recognise
opportunities to create new ways of doing things and new
products.
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They are more open to change, and much more able to compete
with the best firms internationally and domestically.
A commitment to waste minimisation and recycling commits
government and industry to technology in ways we have not been
committed before.
By way of example, in recent years Australia has become a
world leader in-waste. water treatment and recycling for paper
packaging. There have been some outstanding technological advances in the
recycling of other materials: in paper for instance.
The collection and recycling of waste paper has meant that:
-the pulp resource base of the country has been increased,
which has helped us to replace imports.
-jobs have been generated, particularly in the labour
intensive practice of recycling.
-exports have been generated, both through greater
production and in the development of expertise in recycling
technology. Or take the classic example of slag from Australia's
steelworks. There is hardly a more a striking symbol of industrial waste
than a slag-heap.
But slag is now recognised as potentially high quality cement
or aggregate, and new processes are now being put in place to
exploit what was once the stuff of universal monuments to the
ugly side of industry.
Ladies and gentlemen
This strategy is another policy o
imagination. It will help put Au
realm of the creative.
Imagination in the area of waste
can mean new industries, new expo
Waste minimisation and recycling
environment with competitive, eff,
and a culture of creativity and a
This particular strategy, then, i
compliments, our progress towards
development in Australia.
It does not stand alone, even on
deals with. There is a breadth t'
matters. f imagination, f= r
stralian industry in the
minimisation and recycling
rt markets and new jobs.
combines protection of the
icient, expanding industries
daptat ion.
s a key development in, and
ecologically sustainable
the particular issues it
o government actions on these
Our comprehensive Land Care program, involving $ 320 million
over the decade of Land Care, is helping to make agriculture
and farming sustainable and is reducing waste and pollution of
water and air.
In regard to protection of the ozone layer we have been ahead
of the pack in eliminating CFC's. Ozone depletion is a
particularly insidious result of waste generation. And our
strong and ongoing policies on the greenhouse effect will also
lead to a reduction of waste production and pollution.
This waste minimisation and recycling strategy also goes to
the heart of questions of annial PquIy.
Environmental costs, after all, tend to be borne unequally
across the community.
The better of f can generally make sure they don't suffer from
waste disposal problems. Poorer people often don't have the
means to move away.
A national strategy like this one positively discriminates in
favour of those who, since the beginnings of
industrialisation, have borne an unequal share of a national
burden. It is a classic reform in the interests of the nation and in
the interests of all Australians a classic L-ahnr reform.
Though conceived in advance of the February One Nation
statement, it projects both the same broad national goals and
the same means of pursuing them.
As I said, it is a strategy for the universal benefit of
Australians. It also seeks to In-111ad all Australians.
We want, and indeed the strategy depends upon, the active
participation of industry and the community.
It depends on partnerships between business and local, State
and Territory governments.
It sets out ways in which the bodies responsible for creating
household, industrial and commercial wastes can minimise them,
and recycle them when they are unavoidably generated.
It follows that every Australian is responsible for seeing
that the strategy succeeds. The most important partnership of
all is between Australians and their country.
If we all participate in recycling schemes, if we all seek out
goods made from recycled materials, if we all take a care to
minimise the amount of waste we produce, we will all share in
the success.
We are seeking to change attitudes.
If we change attitudes we can not only improve the environment
and the economy and the quality of our lives, I think we can
help create a regimen of care for each other and the land we
live in.
That, I think, is a majnr objective and ghmid~ a be a major
objective of all government policies.
Of course, in launching this strategy today, we should also
recognise that what we do for the environment here we do for
the environment globally.
Those wastes we call greenhouse gases, for instance, present a
challenge to the whole world. We share the world's
responsibility to limit them.
As a developed country we also have a responsibility to put
ourselves at the leading edge of environmental problemsolving.
As the developing countries industrialise the scale of the
problem is bound to grow finding solutions, we can be sure,
is a growth industry.
Ladies and gentlemen we are accustomed to hear of the
balance in nature, or the ecological balance, the delicate
arrangement in nature which assures its continuation.
An equally crucial arrangement, and the one we urgently have
to find, is the integration between the environment and what
we make of it.
The integration of our respect for an environment unspoiled,
our spiritual and physical need for such an environment, and
our need for economic development.
We do nPPA one as much as the other.
We need economic development for our survival as a nation, for
the maintenance of our standard of living and, with that, our
values and institutions.
We also need it, I believe, because it is in our nature to
create and invent.
But in the debate about achieving the right balance, in
searching for the inevitable and necessary compromises which
will enable us to grow without degrading the world we live in
ultimately we come down on the side of the world.
I mean not just that we come down on the side of ecological
imperatives, like breathing clean air, or reducing greenhouse
gas emissions.
I mean that we should come down of the side of conservation
rather than degradation, care rather than neglect, beauty
rather than ugliness.
This strategy I think is notable for making those choices.
And I think it is consistently the case in good environmental
policy that it advances the level of our sophistication when
we decide about these balances.
When for instance, on balance, we decide against mines in
Kakadu; or drilling on the Barrier Reef; or accepting a crude
and environment-degrading pulp mill at Wesley Vale, when more
intelligent applications of technology would make a better
one. So I welcome environmental debate in this country I think it
advances our level of civilisation.
We have been notoriously destructive of the natural
environment out of ignorance, carelessness and greed.
Nor have we cared as much as we should for the aesthetics of
the environments we have built.
In a remarkably short time we have gone from being a country
where space seemed limitless, and the environment incomparably
beautiful and clean, to one in which landfill sites are
becoming scarce and pollution of all kinds threatens the
quality of many urban, rural and natural environments.
It's good for us now to think carefully about how we can not
only make amends, but lead the world in strategies for the
future. What we have tended to take for granted in the past we must
now take as responsibilities.
And again, I think it will do us no harm to be thinking about
the future and about the solutions the future will require.
It will be good for us to think about the way we should be
developing our cities, for instance.
And it's good for us to be thinking along the national lines
which environment policy demands.
And as we go about finding national solutions I think we
should take a great deal of heart from our recent
achievements. Look back on the last ten years and you will see that we have
done remarkably well in achieving that balance between
development and the ecology ecologically sustainable
development that I spoke of earlier.
For we have increased our levels of production GDP has grown
by more than a third.
And we have increased our manufacturing our exports of
manufacturing and services now outstrip mining and
agriculture.
But we've also doubled the size of the protected wilderness
area in Tasmania; trebled the size of Kakadu National Park and
protected it by banning mining; protected the Wet Tropic area
of Queensland; saved the Northern New South Wales rainforests;
extended the Marine Park of the Great Barrier Reef region from
14 per cent to 98 per cent.
We've been international leaders in legislation to protect the
ozone layer and led a world campaign to prevent mining in
Antarctica. We've developed a comprehensive energy conservation program
and a ten year program to protect endangered species.
In the area of the environment, as in much of our social
legislation, we are ahead of the world, and we should be proud
of it, and encouraged by it.
We certainly shouldn't be tempted. to wind back our commitment
either because they are too hard, or as some would have us
believe, because in these difficult economic times we can't
afford them.
The truth is we can't afford not to protect our environment,
or to let future generations pay for our neglect and
expediency, or to miss the opportunities which environmental
imperatives offer to us industrially.
In 1992 nearly a tonne of solid waste will be produced per
person in Australia.
This particularly ugly and potentially depressing fact has one
thing going for it we know it can be changed.
This strategy shows the Government has the will to change it.
By many of its recent actions industry is showing it has the
will to change it. By their responses the people of Australia
also give every indication that they have the will.
We will change it.
Within the next few years that tonne of waste will be much
reduced, and we'll develop both better technologies and better
ways of living on this continent in doing it.
Perhaps within a decade or less the tonne of waste will have
become a tonne of confidence in ourselves, and a tonne of
faith in the nation.
Let me conclude by congratulating the people who by dint of
good ideas and conscientious effort have come up with this
plan for Australia.
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Ros Kelly, of course, deserves much of the credit and much of
the congratulations particularly for the extensive
discussions with industry which she held in 1990, and which
went a long way toward establishing a common understanding in
government and industry.
I congratulate alU those who have been involved, and urge all
Australians to take up the challenge.
This is a major step towards a better Australia.
And it is with great pleasure and pride that I now declare it
launched.