Rees tries to take carbon credit - 9 July 2009

"The bread and circuses approach to running the State has reached a new low with Premier Rees announcing a ban on bottled water in Government departments. As Minister for Water, Nathan Rees didn’t bat an eyelid when the community at Peat’s Ridge objected to Coca Cola/Amatil extracting 66 million litres of water from Mangrove Mountain. The company paid the NSW Goverment $200 for a water extraction licence and are now selling it in plastic bottles for more than $10 million a year.

"We’ve sold a public asset, for a token amount and now the Premier has made a token gesture in response - and it’s the public who has to pay for the mess, mostly through council rates. By jumping on the bandwagon being drawn by the sensible people of Bundanoon, Premier Rees is trying to score an environmental point - it would be funny if he wasn’t in such negative carbon credit,”

“The Premier has responded – with about one minute’s thought – to the real public concern about the damage that drink bottles are doing to the environment and about the mountains of unnecessary waste. Australians spend roughly $385 million on 250 million litres of bottled water year and only a third of these get recycled. Every five bottles takes one litre of crude oil to make.”

“Less than a month ago, both the Labor Government and the Opposition voted to oppose my Private Member’s Bill that would have given NSW a complete container recycling scheme – for all drink bottles and recyclable containers along the lines of South Australia’s scheme.”
“The Government threw away a $33.8 million dollar income stream from the recycling market. They voted against reducing in fossil fuel consumption, substantially reducing rubbish on our streets, beaches and parks, slashing council rates, providing consumers with an easy incentive to recycle, and creating hundreds of green jobs.”

“The Bill was a no-brainer for popular appeal and an easy fix for the environment. Consumers would get a 10 cent return on their containers. The Bundanoon ban shows that people are crying out for action on waste.”

“We are five years away from the proposed NSW Waste Recovery target for a 66% increase in recycling by 2014. From 2002 -2008 in NSW it increased by only 2%. In South Australia the recycling rate is over 80% compared with the NSW rate of less than 40%.”

“Premier Rees’ attention grabbing gesture makes a mockery of the people of Bundanoon who have taken decisive action against environmental degradation. As we can see from his recent actions, the Premier is not doing anything serious about water and waste or to curb the excesses of the bottling industry and their lobbyists.”