Delahunty Catherine: Trade Marks Amendment Bill Copyright Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Readings 
Delahunty Catherine: Trade Marks Amendment Bill Copyright Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Readings 
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CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 I was not going to take a call on these bills—the Trade Marks Amendment Bill and the Copyright Amendment Bill (No 2)—because they are being handled by David Clendon who is not able to take a call. But I have been inspired by a number of the comments that people have made. 
The Greens are voting for the legislation. We think it is interesting legislation because the issue of trademarks has a lot of underlying issues. One issue as the previous speaker just touched on is intellectual property and I would like to acknowledge the Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples which was from a landmark leading hui held in Mataatua in that part of the country where a lot of very important kaupapa were laid down. That had a huge influence and it was then picked up through Wai 262. Those are landmark if you like really fundamental issues that I hope this legislation will be able to take account of appropriately. This country’s unique contribution to the global trademark issue is that this is Aotearoa New Zealand and we have the Mataatua Declaration and the Wai 262 recommendation. I support the leadership of tangata whenua on intellectual property; it has been a profound leadership. 
However I will address the issue of counterfeit because it is an interesting word and I think we have had examples of counterfeit and unfair trade. In many ways the Green Party would say that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is another example of unfair trade and another example of how we are not robust enough in our attitudes towards trade. Although the trademarks legislation will assist with this there are some fundamental issues it cannot address. However the legislation does raise this issue in a good way and it does make us talk about what is a good trademark. We can take something like Te Waka Toi which has been very very powerful and which has assisted Maori artists to export around the world. It is a robust trademark and that is what this legislation is trying to support—the robustness of any trademark available. 
But I will talk about counterfeit goods that are less easy to pick up and goods that customs officers at the moment do not have the tools to pick up which may not be covered by this legislation. I hope that I am wrong about that. I guess my experience has been particularly with regard to illegal logging products and those can be paper products illegal timber or all kinds of products containing unsustainable and illegally logged rainforests. I brought a member’s bill before this House 2 years ago—which was immediately voted down—that attempted to give tools to customs officers so that they could actually prevent illegally and unsustainably logged products from coming into New Zealand. The Government voted the bill down in less than 20 minutes and did not even bother to talk about it properly so I am pleased that trademarks are now being taken seriously. But I am still disappointed that at a time when rainforests and the climate are a crucial issue in the International Year of Forests we have not made much progress on that issue. 
The reason it is important is that counterfeit sandshoes and counterfeit helicopter blades are one thing but there are a lot of issues that are even more basic. I will use the example of toilet paper. At the moment toilet paper from rainforests is being imported into New Zealand and even if it is not counterfeit I am sure that New Zealanders would feel it was counterfeit if they knew that the Cottonsoft brand of toilet paper has been proven to be connected to the illegal and unsustainable destruction of rainforests. As somebody said—I think it was Iain Lees-Galloway—most New Zealanders have a growing consciousness about where things come from. But if something is called Cottonsoft and it is sold in a Kiwi supermarket then until the work is done by the Green Party Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature New Zealand very few people will realise that that particular brand is not a trademark that can be trusted. The issue of trademarks and trusts is quite profound. We know that that toilet paper is not to be trusted because Greenpeace has tested the fibres. 
It comes back to what is behind the trademarks which is: what is the chain of custody? What is the certification that can give us the right to believe that that trademark is actually robust? We have a long way to go with chain of custody and certification around timber products in particular. There is only one certification in the world—and I do agree with comments from other members that we need a global approach to many of these issues because the global market means that goods move freely between borders. That is why this legislation is important too. It is important because forest stewardship certification is the only robust trademark in terms of forestry products that New Zealanders can rely on. We have organisations like Asian Pulp and Paper that are cutting down rainforests to make toilet paper and selling it to New Zealanders who do not know about it. We have that happening because we do not yet have a regulatory framework to stop that from happening. 
I will be persisting in this issue as well as the trademark legislation because I believe that while importers of things like toilet paper are using fake certification it is not always being defined as counterfeit and I am not sure that it will be picked up by this bill. That is the problem—a lot of counterfeit things are given what I call “greenwash” certification or bogus certification. There are all kinds of palm plantation products and all kinds of certification names and acronyms that people use—sometimes invented by the companies themselves sometimes with some degree of global scrutiny but often not at all robust—to claim that these products are actually genuine. They get these lovely trademarks with pictures of animals on them they are all called natural and they have got this so-called certification. But if one goes into the timber stores of this country or the retailers and tries to find out where these products have actually come from one will see a trademark but it is often bogus. Some stores have made huge progress; we have worked with Greenpeace for a long time and we have seen many stores step up to the plate. 
This is an issue that the New Zealand Imported Tropical Timber Group and New Zealand Forest Owners Association have been working on with the Green Party for some time because we are passionate that any trademark is a real trademark—that people cannot make claims that they are producing products that have been logged sustainably from the rainforests of South-east Asia and the Pacific when they are not. I asked a question in the House today about the very issue of West Papua where rainforests are being cut down and their products supposedly certified but the products are actually counterfeit in terms of labelling. We need to close the gap. We need to stop the cowboy traders who are using a bloodthirsty trade—because people die as a result of the counterfeit trading in illegal logging products; people in West Papua die as a result of standing up to protect those rainforests—and we need a robust regulatory framework such as the Lacey Act which has been brought in in the United States and which makes the producers of timber and the people who retail timber products within countries accountable not just at the border. 
It is good that this bill addresses the issues of customs but I am not sure that the issues I have just talked about will be addressed because this issue is about so much more than just a trademark. People can so easily manipulate other people into believing that something is sustainable and legal. Within this country we can have a certain amount of control and jurisdiction but when we go outside our borders we find that it is an absolutely wild scene out there particularly in relation to paper products and illegal logging. I was shocked to find that people in New Zealand in the 21st century are buying toilet paper made out of rainforests when we know that without rainforests this planet will not survive and when we know that people and 132 species a day are being lost because of this. 
We will be supporting the trademark and copyright legislation but we ask for a deeper debate and a more robust definition of what is counterfeit. We must go below the surface; we must stand up for fair trade dealings. This is not about supporting free-trade deals; it is about saying we need to go through a chain of custody. We need to be able to work right back from the retailer of products in Aotearoa New Zealand to the land where those products come from. The day will come when we will be able to pick up an item and trace on it exactly who produced it but we will need legislation in the meantime and we will have to make those changes very robust because otherwise people will lie and people will die. That is the most important point I will make about the illegal and bloodthirsty trades that counterfeit as being genuine on this planet at this time. But we do support the bill and we do see it as progress.