“The sector employs more than 15,000 Queenslanders, and its investments and contribution to the state exceed $2.5 billion,” WRIQ’s Queensland election platform said. However, it wants local councils to lose their “monopoly” on waste business, fines to be massively increased and for waste management to be shifted from an “environmental” focus to a “business” focus. The two Queensland conservation groups said a waste levy must be debated by all parties during the 2017 Queensland election campaign. Both groups said the public outrage triggered by the ABC's Four Corners program in August, which showed one million tonnes of waste being trucked from NSW to Queensland – mainly Swanbank – and being dumped, showed the public was genuinely shocked. The program returned to public attention for the first time in four years the problem where waste companies in New South Wales – which has a $138-per-tonne waste levy – stopped recycling and instead simply stockpiled and then trucked their waste to Queensland to avoid paying the 138 per tonne waste levy.

Queensland’s LNP government axed the $35-per-tonne waste levy in 2012, arguing it was “anti-business.” Toby Hutcheon, the former convenor of the Queensland Conservation Council and now working for Boomerang Alliance, said Queensland was missing new recycling jobs, missing new revenue streams and simply no longer recycling effectively. He said an estimate of $350 million of waste that should have been recycled in 2007-08 would have reached about $500 million in 2017. “Queensland is effectively the only state in Australia that doesn’t have one (a waste levy),” Mr Hutcheon said. “And as the recent exposé from Four Corners revealed we are receiving extensive amounts of waste from New South Wales because we don’t have a price for waste at the landfill.”

Mr Hutcheon, who recently successfully lobbied all major parties for a plastic container rebate, said both Labor and the LNP would have received advice showing other states would continue to use Queensland as a dumping ground. “This trade in taking waste from Sydney and dumping it in south-east Queensland will continue because it just makes economic sense,” he said. Mr Hutcheon said Queensland must modernise its waste strategy, increase recycling and discourage business from simply dumping waste into landfill. “We are probably wasting around $500 million worth of resources in landfill every year,” he said. “So you can see if you put a price on that waste – and changed the nature of things so a higher proportion is recycled – rather than ‘wasted’, you can create all this industry.”

Some experts say food and organic waste in landfill that could be composted has reached up to 40 per cent. Credit:Jason South These views were supported by Dr Tim Seelig, the current convenor of the Queensland Conservation Council. “Our position is ‘Yes’; there should be a reinstatement of the Queensland waste levy,” Dr Seelig said. “I was actually quite disappointed we didn’t see a much stronger response after that Four Corners program,” he said. “I mean, the most obvious thing to do is put the waste levy back in place.

“We would be saying whomever forms the next government should be putting a waste levy in place.” The Queensland Conservation Council wants to have companies “licensed” to collect waste, to help extend the existing plastic container levy finally put in place in September 2017. Where do Queensland’s political parties stand on the waste levy issue? Labor: Introduced a $35-per-tonne levy in 2010. Axed by the LNP in 2012. Now waiting on a report from former Supreme Court justice Peter Lyon into ways to stop interstate waste being dumped in Queensland, before making a decision on a waste levy.

The report was due in mid-November, but government is in caretaker mode. Liberal National Party: No. Does not support a waste levy being reintroduced. Greens: Yes. Supports a waste levy being re-introduced at $78.20 per tonne. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation: No. Does not support a waste levy being reintroduced.