Waste to Energy inquiry

Parliament of Victoria | Legislative Council | Motion 1002 by Ms Payne
27 August, 2025

David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan Region):

Can I thank Mrs Hermans for the most compelling argument for why we should have an inquiry. So I was a little discombobulated with the ending there, but I feel almost as though I am redundant as a result.

Anyway, putting that aside, I rise to speak in support of motion 1002, moved by my colleague Ms Payne. At this point in time I would like to move amendments 1 to 8 standing in my name, and I ask that they be distributed, please. I move:

1. In paragraph (1)(a), omit ‘proximity of WTE projects to’ and replace it with ‘impact of WTE projects on’.
2. After paragraph (1)(b), insert the following new paragraph: ‘(c) the regulatory framework to establish and manage WTE facilities;’.
3. In paragraph (2), omit ‘economic, social, and environmental consequences’ and replace it with ‘the impact’.
4. Omit paragraph (2)(a).
5. In paragraph (2)(c), omit ‘toxic’.
6. In paragraph (3), omit ‘better’ and replace it with ‘also’.
7. In paragraph (3), after ‘circular economy plan’ insert ‘, including Victoria’s landfill management, capacity and strategy’.
8. In paragraph (4), omit ‘and social licensing’.

My preference is that the amendments be put as a single question when we get to that.

Just to speak briefly to the amendments, these are a product of discussion with a range of stakeholders. The major changes are the addition after paragraph (1)(b) to include in the terms of reference the regulatory framework to establish and manage waste-to-energy facilities, and the rest are largely grammatical in nature. I commend those to the house.

This debate could not be more timely given the news that Recycling Victoria has just approved seven more licences for waste-to-energy facilities in Victoria. This means that soon Victoria will potentially have 11 waste-to-energy incinerators, and that is not only more than in any one state, it is more than all of the states in Australia combined, by a comfortable margin.

The unseemly haste to install these incinerators is perplexing to me given the government’s commitment to transitioning to renewable energy, because while these facilities do produce energy, they also produce exactly the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions per energy unit as coal-fired power. Yet waste-to-energy is being sold to Victorians by the corporations that have got their money backing it as some form of benign technology.

If you read the propaganda coming from those companies awarded the licences to support these giant incinerators, you would think that it is a boon for the environment. It says ‘Decreasing waste generation’ and ‘Increasing investment in recycling and resource recovery’ and that they are necessary steps in our transition to a circular economy and that they are lowering costs and improving efficiencies while reducing environmental impacts.

Quite simply, it is all just gaslighting and spin. These incinerators are locking the state into eternal waste generation, with caps now of 2.3 million tonnes of waste being incinerated annually. We will all have to produce a lot more waste to feed these beasts, and we will need to import more waste from other states.

Let us look at the maths, for example, in my electorate of Western Metropolitan Region. HiQ has won the contract to service the Hume catchment, and that catchment has an annual cap of 740,000 tonnes of garbage headed for their so-called Eco-Hub incinerator. The problem is that if we take all of the landfill in Hume, it totals a mere 14,000 tonnes a year. So where are the additional 726,000 tonnes coming from? These things are perpetual operations; they run 24/7. They cannot just be turned on and off on low-rubbish days.

And how is burning rubbish increasing our investment in recycling and resource recovery? One great way of increasing our investment in recycling and resource recovery is to increase our investment in recycling and resource recovery, which we are not doing. This was highlighted by the Victorian Auditor-General’s report Recycling Resources from Waste. The report concluded that the government was only on track to deliver on one of its circular economy goals, and that is enabling household access to an organics waste service by 2030 – good on them for that. The other economy goals have stalled, including diversion from landfill.

It is a pity that the government appears to be putting its eggs into the waste-to-energy basket. The 2020 Legislative Council Environment and Planning Committee inquiry into waste management and recycling in Victoria heard from organisations working to create a circular economy. They just needed a bit of help in scaling up their operations. Why didn’t the government fund some of those instead of saying, ‘It’s all too hard. Let’s just burn it’?

How is this technology a necessary step in transitioning the state into a circular economy if we are not investing in a circular economy? Do we believe that waste-to-energy companies will somehow create a circular economy and then just quietly recede into obsolescence?

If waste-to-energy is an interim measure until Victoria miraculously reaches a circular economy nirvana, we will find when that moment apparently comes that those companies have long-term contracts locked in for their continued operation. That has been the experience in countries abroad, and there is no reason why we would not be facing the same thing now.

What damage to the environment, to our health and to the liveability of our state will be wrought before these incinerators are decommissioned? We have heard a lot about the safety of these cutting-edge, world-leading waste-to-energy facilities. Why, there is an incinerator right in the middle of London – they must be safe! If they are so safe, let us build them in Brighton. Or let us build them in Malvern, shall we?

In the local context, apart from the greenhouse gases and toxic pollutants generated by these incinerators, we need to consider the huge carbon footprint produced in just getting the waste to the facilities. Again, let us go back to my electorate, where there will be, to feed the beast at the Sunbury Eco-Hub, an extra 700 trucks a week clogging up local roads and releasing a staggering amount of noxious vehicle emissions in their own right. And those will be 24/7. That is how these incinerators work.

In a further bit of planning mismanagement, no-one seems to have noticed that HiQ, the Sunbury operator, will be immediately adjoining proposed housing and a future town centre, according to the Hume council integrated growth area plans. But this is perhaps not so surprising. There appears to be a blind faith in the market to address our waste problem without much oversight. For example, there are no minimum environmental standards set for tenderers. This laissez-faire approach is deeply troubling. Communities do not want them in their suburbs, and who can blame them?

Certainly, affected government members are alive to the safety and environmental concerns. Community opposition to the Wollert incinerator proposal has been openly supported by its local members. Likewise, state and federal members have been very vocal in opposing the Lara incinerator. Then there is this, and I invite members to guess the author of this quote:

… so many people think they can use Western Sydney as a dumping ground, whether it was the proposal a few years ago to dump radioactive waste at Kemps Creek in my electorate or now these two disgusting proposals for incinerators at Eastern Creek. They claim they are clean energy. They are not clean energy. It is burning garbage. It is literally a dumpster fire …

If you guessed that was Chris Bowen, now the federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy, you get a gold star and a Mars Bar – come and see Ms Payne after the debate. It was great to see him so proudly defending the western suburbs, and if you change ‘western Sydney’ to ‘western Melbourne’, ‘Eastern Creek’ to ‘Sunbury’ and ‘nuclear waste’ to ‘PFAS’, the similarities are striking.

So why are our western suburbs colleagues not doing the same? Perhaps they have not been paying attention, otherwise they might have noticed what a bad actor HiQ really is. Only last year the EPA laid a series of charges on them, including improper disposal of asbestos waste, failure to implement a rehabilitation plan, failure to establish a risk-based monitoring program et cetera – I will not go on; there are a lot of them. They received a small fine and a rap over the knuckles, and in the spirit of forgive and forget they got a licence to operate a waste-to-energy facility in Sunbury, processing almost three-quarters of a million tonnes of waste a year.

Some crazy idealists might think that flagrant breaches of our environmental regulations might put a kibosh on a licence to burn that garbage, but no. Welcome to the brave new world of privatised garbage.

There may well be a role for incineration in dealing with waste, but it is not the silver bullet we are being sold, and that is why we need an inquiry. We need to reassess the largely unqualified embrace of this technology. These facilities are expensive, carbon intensive and lock us into continual production of waste. I urge members to support our motion, as amended.

[Council divided on motion]

[Motion passed 18 votes to 10]