Mike Hosking: Banning plastic bags dabbling in faux answers

I am a little bit surprised that the hands of an irate Australian shopper ended up around the neck of a supermarket checkout operator last week in Western Australia over the new rules around plastic bags.

They, like us, have got on board the current environmental bandwagon and started spinning like a top on saving the planet.

The Australians, who are a little more overt in their emotions than us, aren't handling it all that well.

Not only are they throttling operators but they've forced one supermarket to back down on the 15 cent charge for the "emergency" bags.

Now the fact they're "emergency" bags shows you how absurd this whole thing is.

There is no emergency, it's just shopping and it's just a bag.

It also says, I think, something a bit sad about us.

Now while I obviously don't endorse taking your fury out on a poor unsuspecting operator, I do support a bit of push back over what really is corporate greenwashing if not a good dose of corporate bullshit.

While the Australians got angry and got their "emergency" bags for free we, like a sad grouping of compliant saps, simply put up with it or at worst, rang talkback and moaned.

Mind you as I said last week, those bags you do pay for, and this is where the con starts to play out, those bags are magnificent. I love those bags.

They are big and useful and robust, almost as though the supermarkets wanted them to be, so they could sell them to you instead of simply giving them away.

But here's the irony.

The Australians shouldn't be remotely upset because they have been here before.

They had a plan to ban bags by 2008. The fact they're still throttling checkout operators is perhaps the major clue that they didn't quite get there … and nor were they ever going to.

Further, the Australian Productivity Commission did some work on whether it was a good idea and basically found out it wasn't.

The bags are not single use, they're multi use. Recycling is only useful to a point because recycling actually costs money and uses resources, plastic bags aren't actually that big an issue in terms of environmental trouble, and the whole plastic bag idea is a bit of a green religion and jiggery pokery.

And they came up with all of that more than decade ago.

But, and here's why we are where we are, we are a country of piecemeal attempts. Of half-baked headline-grabbing do-gooder pretending.

From the sugar tax on soft drinks to plastic bags to cycle lanes. We dabble in faux answers.

Getting rid of plastic bags will not save the planet, what will help save the planet more, is us not putting plastic in the water.

Has no one thought of that. They show the pictures of the poor birds eating the stuff, of the babies dying, of the fish filled with it and the answer is for Countdown to sell you a big bag for 15 cents.

Why not stop throwing it in the ocean?

They claimed, and I have no idea if it's true - but then not a lot of this debate is based on real facts so who cares - but they claim if you blocked the Yangtze, 55 per cent of the world's river plastic would never hit the sea.

There is a lot we can do to help if we want, but we don't.

We launch into a bunch of buzz word bandwagoning and inconveniencing the punter that's more show than any sort of tangible result.