Page 1219 - Week 03 - Thursday, 31 March 2011
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distributed around town instead of the larger ones. It is disappointing. I think we should maintain a reasonable-sized bin because, quite frankly, having a smaller bin does not mean we produce less waste; it just means that less waste is taken away and more waste is put into the yellow bins, thus compromising the waste stream, which is of course a big no-no, as I was told on the tour.
I thank Ms Hunter for raising this matter of public importance. I hope it does continue discussion leading up to the territory election.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (3.51): I must thank Ms Hunter in particular for her contribution, but also Mr Stanhope and Mr Coe for their contributions, in discussing this important matter. As Mr Coe says, waste is a core issue for local governments and the ACT Assembly is a local government as well as a state-level government.
In looking at this issue, I might just try to go back to the basics. The basic is that we live in one world. It is a finite size. The Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment has worked out Canberra’s ecological footprint. She has unfortunately come to the conclusion that our ecological footprint is four times the size that is sustainable for the world, given the world’s population and assuming that we all have equal rights to consumption. It is four times the size. We cannot continue to do that.
One of the ways we must look at reducing that is by regarding the things that we consume not just as being waste, but as being resources for future re-use. That is really what this MPI is about. It is about waste and it is about how we can best use it, how it cannot be a negative, but how it can be feeding into our future.
We also talked on Tuesday about peak oil, which is a concept I am afraid that the Liberal Party found amusing, I guess is the word. But there are in fact even more alarming potential peaks in supply in the world. The one I would particularly like to mention is peak phosphorus. All Australians should be aware of phosphorus, because it is one of the nutrients which we are very low on. Anyone who is fertilising land in Australia, unless they are growing native plants, is probably using phosphorus. The world at present rates of consumption has about 30 or 40 years of phosphorus left before we peak.
Phosphorus is essential for food production. What we do at present is excrete the phosphorus in our waste and it is also in the organic waste. The phosphorus from both sources is not put back into gardens or food production. My colleague Ms Hunter talks about organic waste being turned into compost. That is what we need to do if we are to keep a viable agricultural sector in Australia.
If we are to keep on growing the food which we all need to survive, we need to look after our soil. We need to look after the nutrients in our soil and phosphorus is one of the peak nutrients. As Ms Hunter said, we can do it. She mentioned Goulburn and the city to soil program. Goulburn is only 100 kilometres from here. If they can do it, we can do it.
There are lots of other examples. There is Port Macquarie and Germany. Germany I mention in particular. Having a daughter who lives there, I spent some time not in
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