The Queensland Government is dead set on banning single use plastic shopping bags from 2018, and they’re telling other states that they won’t wait on them to make it happen.
The state’s Labor government has been contemplating a ban for more than a year, and they’ve ben doing their best to lobby New South Wales and Victoria to join them in a kind of east-coast alliance against plastic bags.
“It’s the best way for it to happen. What we don’t want is for people who live on the southern Gold Coast to drive to New South Wales if they forget their re-useable shopping bags,” said Environment Minister Steven Miles. “It would be better if we could get a solution that would deal with those kind of cross-border issues.”
South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory have already banned the bags, but with the highly-populated eastern states not onboard Australia still has a fair way to go.
This is basically a bipartisan consensus on sunny Queensland – the Liberal-National Party promised earlier this week that they would ban plastic bags if they won the next election.
Source: ABC.
Photo: American Beauty.
