The once-recalcitrant giant supermarket chains earlier this year handed Australian environment ministers a golden opportunity to get rid of lightweight plastic bags from all stores once and for all.
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Woolworths and Coles announced they would ban the bags from mid-2018. They bowed to public pressure and retreated from their previous position almost in lockstep.
They long objected to the cost of navigating between state regulations. Their belated change of mind sees them now follow Aldi, which never provided single-use plastic bags since arriving in Australia in 2001.
Australian governments have been just as recalcitrant. They have pussyfooted on plastic bags for at least 13 years. The last big push was in 2005 when a voluntary code for a 50 per cent reduction was agreed to by federal and state ministers and retailers. Regrettably, that initiative ran out of puff.
Two years later, Kevin Rudd and Peter Garrett pledged to ban the bags in an election campaign but baulked at the cost and the opposition from supermarket chains. With Canberra showing little leadership, it was left to the smaller states to push reform. South Australia, the NT, ACT and Tasmania (and some individual towns) banned the ubiquitous single-use plastic bags made of high-density polyethylene.
NSW has a sorry record of broken promises on plastic bags. In 2004, the then Premier Bob Carr suggested he might ban or impose a prohibitive tax to reduce the use of plastic bags. Little came of that and seven years later, with Labor still in office, the NSW Climate Change and Environment Minister Frank Sartor announced the bags would be effectively banned with their gradual replacement by compostable bags.
Nothing happened. Fast forward to 2017, and the current NSW government has turned plastic bags into a second-order issue, preferring to get its deposit scheme for plastic bottles up and running first.
Previous generations made do with string bags, shopping carts or cardboard boxes thrown out by supermarkets but when plastic bags arrived 30 years ago, they revolutionised shopping. But despite the community's awareness of the damage done to the environment, habits have not changed and Australians use more than 10 million every day.
The supermarkets’ change opened the way for this NSW Government to finally do the right thing and ban the bags.
Why is it not taking action to do so?
