Curran ClareCLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): We the Opposition on the Commerce Committee actually did the Government a huge favour with this piece of legislation. Minister Goldsmith should actually be getting up and thanking us because what could have come back to the House was the bill in its original form. If it had come back to the House in its original form then that Minister would have had to introduce embarrassingly a major Supplementary Order Paper to remove the substance of the bill because it was shown to be so woeful. In our minority report on this bill we described the whole process as unedifying and sloppy and that is being kind. As my colleague David Clark has pointed out what we were given was a piece of legislation that was somebody's bright idea which had not been tested and in fact was acknowledged during the select committee process as being—and this is the single patent examination process (SEP) and the single patent application process (SAP) for patent registration—a pilot. As my colleague Clayton Cosgrove has pointed out there was no cost-benefit analysis and in fact nobody wanted it. The reason nobody wanted it was that it was going to cost the industry more. When I went and talked to the innovators—because they are actually the ones wanting to register patents—about the impact of this none of them had been consulted. Secondly all they wanted to know was whether this was going to take more time and whether it was going to cost more. The answer essentially was yes. The problem was that this Minister had not done his work. He had not done the due diligence before this bill came to the House for its first reading. There had been no testing of the principles behind it. I do not even know whether he had read it. That become patently obvious—see what I did there—as we went through the select committee process because the officials had to go back to the Minister not once not twice not three times not four times not even five times but six times during the select committee process—six times. Do you know how we know that? Because we had to drag it out of them as to what was going on and how on earth we had got ourselves into this situation. We had to write to the Australians. We had to find out what process had been gone through.Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Don't forget the confidential documents.CLARE CURRAN: Oh yes. There were confidential documents but we cannot talk about them. Mr Chair this is so relevant because this is why the SAP and the SEP—which are major substances of this piece of legislation that none of the submitters wanted and that the industry affected had not even been consulted on—was not effective. We discovered that there already was an international process being developed that superseded this and really it was not going to work at all and that is why it had to be dumped. So we did the Government a favour by doing the responsible thing behaving like a select committee should working together and actually saying that this really should go. That Minister really should get up and thank us and next time he puts a piece of legislation to the House for a first reading could he please read it and could he test with officials whether or not it has got sound principles so that we do not waste everybody's time and probably a lot of money and end up with what really is a pretty minimal and pretty embarrassing piece of law.