Peter Garrett soon to lose the plastic bag portfolio

I think Peter Garrett should have stuck to singing. Everyone allows rock stars to have all sorts of opinions because nobody takes them seriously. However, Peter Garrett evidently wanted to be taken seriously so he's now our Federal Minister for the Environment. Or rather Minister for the Environment Minus Water Minus Climate Change, because even the Rudd Labour government realises you can't take the opinions of a rock star seriously.

So, Peter Garrett decided to get serious about one of the few things left in his portfolio, plastic bags. He's going to phase them out and get people to use canvas bags instead or perhaps buckets. I presume that the"canvas bags" Peter is talking are are in fact the reusable non-woven polypropylene bags (byproducts of the oil industry incidentally), but lets not get picky about the precise materials here. His point is to use reusable bags, or maybe buckets.

Actually, reusable bags are very popular at my local Coles. It's a frequent sight to see people leap out of their cars, unloading their boot of a dozen or so of these reusable bags. They do take up a bit of space, but that's OK because most of the cars are on the large size (4WDs, people movers etc) so they can fit them in. I don't see a lot of them carrying buckets, but clearly they could probably fit in a few buckets as well if Peter were to legislate that way. So you can see that the motorists in my area are really a very environmentally-conscious crowd.

In contrast, the people I don't see coming into the supermarket with an armload of reusable bags and buckets are the people on the bus. People hopping off the bus on their way home who stop for a bit of shopping strangely don't come with an armload of plastic bags, or buckets. Yep, it's those tree-hugging public-transport users that aren't doing their bit for the environment by dragging an armload of reusable bags and a few buckets to work on the bus in the morning so they can carry them home in the bus again in the afternoon in order to pick up some groceries. Maybe people who can show a current bus ticket should be allowed to have a plastic bag in the supermarket? And of course Heaven forbid that anyone might have an unplanned or inconvenient need for groceries and discover they didn't have an armful of reusable bags (not to mention buckets) handy. Maybe we should have some kind of stat dec at the cigarette counter to say you were having an unplanned shopping moment in order to gain exemption from the ban on plastic bags.

Of course, Peter has his finger on the pulse of the latest research when it comes to plastic bags. Well, perhaps apart from the Productivity Commission's report on Waste Management which says that his proposed legislation would have little benefit as the major issue with plastic bags is littering and that strategies against littering would be more effective.

Still, even though I have my doubts about the logic of the ban on plastic bags, I know Peter's heart is in the right place, being such a committed environmentalist. And I guess the reason he might not have had time to report the Productivity Commission's report was because the great environmentalist was rushing to catch a plane to the Antarctic, one of the world's great unspoilt wildernesses. Like the local 4WDs, a 737 has plenty of luggage space for reusable bags (and a enormous number of buckets) and I am sure Peter took along quite a lot of them with him in order to ensure that his flight was completely carbon neutral. It's rare for politicians to be so willing to provide resources for Antarctic scientists, so it is nice to see that so many of them are rushing to fly to Antartica to see the fantastic research our scientists are doing there on global warming.

And no doubt when he returns to Australia and discovers he is now the Minister for the Environment Minus Water Minus Climate Change And Minus Plastic Bags, he will explain that he never really meant to ban plastic bags and that what we heard was just a short and jocular conversation. Whereupon he'll settle down and get into some environmental legislation that is about substance rather than symbols.