Groser Tim: Geographical Indications (Wine and Spirits)  Registration Bill — In Committee 
Groser Tim: Geographical Indications (Wine and Spirits)  Registration Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:635;Page:6238] 
TIM GROSER (National) 
: 
 Like my colleague John Hayes I rise to support the Geographical Indications (Wine and Spirits) Registration Bill but also to raise the question that my colleague has just introduced. I will talk a little bit about Part 1 and the ultimate purpose of the bill in the first instance. 
I appreciate in the unlikely event that a large number of New Zealanders are listening to this debate that the term “geographical indications” must seem almost incomprehensible. But this bill is quite an important part of the policy infrastructure that this country needs in order to advance an objective that is probably held in common by all the parties in this Chamber. That objective is to move away from commoditisation to move up the value-added chain to apply the knowledge of New Zealand entrepreneurs and to secure it through intellectual property rights that are modern up to date and in keeping with our long-term strategic interests. 
In the more distant past many of us have struggled to come to grips with this issue but it has suddenly come to the top of the agenda as the years have ticked by. Although many people would have been familiar with intellectual property law such as copyright in respect of our creative industries and would have understood the concept of patents in respect of our industrial intellectual property rights few people until a few years ago would have quite understood the significance of adequate intellectual property law around the fabulous products that come out of New Zealand’s extraordinary resource base including in this case the wine industry. If members want to look at the growing evolution of understanding in New Zealand they have merely to look at another agricultural industry and the difference in the history of the Hayward variety of kiwifruit compared with the Gold variety. New Zealand scientists and farmers and the industries that support them developed this fruit originally from China into the Hayward and did not take adequate intellectual property protection. The rest is history and members know what happened and how that diminished our resource base as a consequence. 
But we learnt a lesson. The industry has found a very novel way of protecting its intellectual property rights in this new variety of Gold kiwifruit. We can see the difference particularly in the Japanese market when we ensure that we protect our intellectual property rights and protect the commitment of our New Zealand people who put their hard work into these resource-based industries. This is an area of considerable importance to this country’s future. It is very important as we move up the value-added chain and it is entirely appropriate that we should be looking to strengthen our intellectual property law in this way. 
This initiative originated in the Uruguay round in the context of negotiations over intellectual property law that lasted 7 years. Those negotiations became a very very large part of the overall deal. This was not foreseen at the start of the negotiations; it was something that sprang up on negotiators as the years ticked by. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs agreement) which is part of the body of World Trade Organization law emerged from these negotiations. It is an incorporation of almost ancient intellectual property laws going back over a century but it also contains some more novel provisions. 
This bill actually implements the obligations and principles behind negotiations that were completed 12 years ago. One might ask why the negotiations took so long. The answer is that a negotiation was foreshadowed in the context of article 24 of the TRIPs agreement; it foreshadowed further negotiation on the establishment of a registrar for geographical indications for wines and spirits. Wines and spirits were picked out by the European Union partly for political reasons as requiring what was called a higher order of protection. The negotiation of that registrar which I spent hundreds of hours in Geneva on in another capacity has gone absolutely nowhere. It is locked in a very obscure and complex procedural wrangle. 
Frankly it is right for this Parliament given the ambiguity over the future of that negotiation to get on and do the right thing. So yes this legislation to put in place our obligations and the principles of an agreement made in 1994 has been a long time in coming but we might as well do it.