Victory of the bagmen: a new temperance crusade

Nick Cater
January 16, 2013
The Australian

IF you are reading this in South Australia and bought the newspaper at the supermarket, congratulations. Since plastic bag prohibition was introduced in 2009, it takes the skills of a juggler to get to the car without losing a can of something on the way. To have got this far with a newspaper as well is, by any measure, a skilful gesture of defiance.

Being green is not easy at the best of times, and if you want to lead the nation in the crusade against lightweight, single-use, disposable packaging you have to expect some complications.

It is complicated enough trying to work out why the parliament of South Australia thought fit to pass the Plastic Shopping Bags (Waste Avoidance) Act 2008 at all. Two years earlier, the Productivity Commission concluded that the case for banning plastic bags was “particularly weak”. It concluded that they take up little landfill space and only 0.8 per cent of bags end up as litter. Even then, they account for only 2 per cent of litter, and studies blaming them for the death of wildlife were unreliable.

Even without the PC’s solid advice, common sense should have told South Australian legislators the arguments were dodgy.

If the world’s resources were depleted, and the plastic wells were drying up, the bags would eventually ban themselves, so to speak, or at least become so expensive that only shops in Unley would stock them.

The most convincing explanation for the decision to outlaw what had hitherto seemed a relatively harmless object valued by the hessian-challenged citizens of the poorer suburbs is that the government was setting up a new statutory authority, Zero Waste SA, and its employees could not in all conscience sit around doing nothing. Zero Waste SA is responsible for ensuring that shopkeepers do not knowingly sell or give away a lightweight polyethylene bag “as a means of carrying goods purchased or to be purchased from the retailer”.

The shopkeeper will find himself up for a $5000 ticket unless a court is convinced “that he or she believed on reasonable grounds that the bag was not a plastic shopping bag”.

There is no room for sophistry; section 6, parts (a) and (b) of this artfully written legislation states: “If a person sells, supplies or provides a bag to another knowing that it is a plastic shopping bag; and prior to, or in the course of, selling, supplying or providing the bag the person represents to the other that the bag is not a plastic shopping bag, the person is guilty of an offence.”

Anyway, it has all been worth it, the government’s website tells us, since there are now “almost 400 million less plastic bags”. They probably mean “fewer”, but only a pedant would quibble over semantics now that small native creatures can safely graze without accidentally ingesting a lump of discarded packaging.

It is, however, tough on those who once relied on checkout bags to line their bins. Zero Waste has responded with a fact sheet, The Bin Liner Dilemma, available on its website (please think twice before printing it off). Abandoning the bin liner altogether would reduce the volume of landfill, Zero Waste advises, but water use might increase, since bins may need to be washed more frequently. Environmentally conscious bin cleaners, the fact sheet informs us, might like to do their rinsing outside, where the water can be recycled to freshen up the garden. Customers should, however, go easy on bin cleaning products, since they may have “associated environmental impacts”, presumably in this case brown patches on the lawn.

Plastic bags, it transpires, have their good points; plastic lined wheelie bins are less odorous and discourage vermin; naked bins, on the other hand, pose health risks and mean extra work for garbage collectors. The risk of “accidental littering” increases with commando-style waste disposal, the fact sheet tells us, particularly “if waste is collected in windy conditions”. Hence the dilemma; plastic bags might be the scourge of the checkout, condemned by one arm of the state government as “an extremely visible and unsightly component of litter”, but Zero Waste, another arm of government, says unbagged garbage is “inappropriate”, which is nanny’s gentle way of saying don’t do it. Zero Waste concludes: “There remains no clear environmental impact-free solution to the bin liner dilemma.”

Even Ross Garnaut would struggle with that one.

Where does all this nonsense stop? How can the true environmental impact of the South Australian parliament’s plastic bag prohibition be reliably measured?

The possums and bandicoots might be better off, but what of the vermin prowling the kerbs of Adelaide in search of the spilled detritus from unlined bins? What of the feral cats, which will no doubt proliferate, feasting on the rats and mice? What if these introduced predators were to turn their attention to the wildlife we were trying to protect? The circle of biodiversity is a wondrous thing.

Like the alcopop tax on pre-mixed drinks, ugly cigarette packages, government subsidies for solar panels and the installation of public bicycle pumps around cities, plastic bag prohibition is genuinely well-intentioned.

Each of these measures purports to address a genuine concern: excessive alcohol consumption; lung cancer; global warming; and traffic in crowded cities are things most reasonable people would want to avoid. Yet the effectiveness of each is dubious, to say the least, and each carries a string of unintended consequences. The zeal with which progressives fight for these causes, despite their public policy limitations, demands further explanation.

Compared with the emancipation of women, the abolition of child labour or the end of the White Australia policy, today’s social reformers are down the small-change end of civilising capital, yet each of these measures is accompanied by the trumpets and drums that befit a temperance crusade.

As so often, the real purpose of the exercise seems to be mount the wagon of moral vanity and condemn the rapacious lifestyles of the masses. It is not about righting wrongs, but being seen to be the kind of person who thinks wrongs should be righted.