Container Deposit Scheme

The Hon. R.L. BROKENSHIRE (15:18): Supplementary, based on the minister's extensive answer: can the minister rule out extension of CDL by his government going to the wine industry with their wine bottles?

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation, Minister for Water and the River Murray, Minister for Climate Change) (15:18): It's worth noting that the Hon. Mr Brokenshire has a routine in this place of demanding that ministers give guarantees of this or that, or ruling this or that out.

The Hon. R.L. Brokenshire: That's what you get paid for.

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER: That's not what I get paid for, Mr Brokenshire, not at all. Let me tell you about why the CDL was brought in, in the first place. If you recall, going back to the seventies, there was an explosion of new technologies around beverage containers, and these were disposable containers at the time. There was a huge amount of them just tossed out into our streets and our parks; it was a disaster, and the community was rightly complaining.

There are pictures up on the EPA's website, I'm pretty sure, that show you what this place looked like with littering being at its peak. You need only look at some of those old photos of beaches and Adelaide's Parklands and ovals after functions and concerts to see that the proliferation of disposable beverage containers was getting out of control.

The CDL that was brought in by the government then was focused on removing those items from the waste stream. The reason why wine bottles weren't at that time—and even still now—put into the scheme was that they don't appear in the litter stream. You don't see wine bottles, and you don't see beer bottles, because in fact there is already a recycling scheme. You can take them down to your local 'marine', as we used to call them in those days.

The Hon. R.L. Brokenshire: Beer bottles have a CDL.

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER: No, they don't.

The PRESIDENT: Will the minister not respond to interjections, please.

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER: Yes, Mr President. I was thinking of longnecks, of course, in the seventies. You used to pack these up in the brown hessian bags that we used to have, put them in the back of the car or the ute or the trailer and take them down to your local marine depot. They already were part of that process, and they still are part of that process. The Hon. Mr Brokenshire now talks about the modern beverage containers that he probably chugs on—what do they call those floral confections? Not shooters, the other things.

The Hon. J.M.A. Lensink: Cruisers.

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER: Cruisers. Thank you, the Hon. Michelle Lensink. Pre-mixers and cruisers that the Hon. Mr Brokenshire—

An honourable member: RTDs.

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER: RTDs—and it is quite right.

The Hon. K.J. Maher: All the kids are doing it.

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER: All the kids may be or may not be. Certainly, the cool kids like me aren't, but others who aren't quite so cool, like the Hon. Mr Brokenshire, may be. There is a reason why certain products get this CDL legislation applied to them: because they actually appear in the litter stream. You can now see, as we have been able to see for many years, that the result of the CDL is that when there is a value put on this waste, people pick them up, or people don't discard them in the first place. As they learn about this process, they actually become quite proud of their state and the condition in which we keep our parks, our streets and our facilities and they stop throwing them away at all, even if they don't have a CDL attached to them, because they understand that it is the right thing to do for our community, for safety, for health and for general amenity.

The legislation, whilst it had a very functional value, also has a very important educative value, and South Australians have embraced this legislation over many years. I think I have mentioned in this place previously that it has attracted a listing as a heritage icon by the SA Heritage Council, the only piece of legislation that I know of that has ever been awarded the state heritage icon. That is, I think, testament to the fact that South Australians love the CDL. They love the amenity that has been created in this state because of the CDL and want to drive it to even higher levels.

That is the reality for the Hon. Mr Brokenshire. We don't just apply these CDL deposit schemes to any old beverage container; we apply it to those that create a problem in our environment, to fix up that problem. As I say, all the evidence before us, certainly that which comes from KESAB and other authorities that keep this data for us, is that these sorts of bottles that the Hon. Mr Brokenshire was talking about don't appear in the waste stream because they already have their own recycling value, which they have had for many years, and so don't need to attract the CDL deposit.