Mallard Trevor: Advanced Technology Institute Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Mallard Trevor: Advanced Technology Institute Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 13 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5243. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 I am a person who knows a little bit about this area. I have been the local member for Industrial Research Ltd for a number of years now and have watched quite a lot of innovation come out of its work. It works closely with Victoria University chambers of commerce and Business New Zealand in this general area. 
I just want to ask a pretty fundamental question for the Education and Science Committee to consider and that is whether this legislation is all puff or whether it is actually necessary. The question that I want to ask is whether there is anything in this bill that we are being asked to consider the Advanced Technology Institute Bill that could not be done without this bill. If that is the case I would be interested to know what it is and we should talk about that because frankly everything that is being done in this bill should be able to be done across the Crown research institutes and across the universities anyway. There is nothing that is special about the arrangements here. It seems to me that much of what is being done here is administrative arrangement all of which can be done within the general organisation of government at the whims of Ministers anyway so there is not a good reason for the bill. 
I just get the feeling that what we have here is a bit of paper that is going to take up hours and hours and hours of parliamentary time in order to make Steven Joyce look slightly better—in order to make Steven Joyce look slightly better. What I want to know from the next Government speaker is one thing or if they are really innovative two things that can be done under this legislation that cannot already be done today. 
Of course we support science. Of course we support innovation. We will have a few battles with people down in Christchurch with some of their stuff and I am told there is a university in Auckland that thinks it is pretty innovative but you can wander along Jackson Street in Petone and find 20 or 30 upstairs software companies employing between one and 50 people and all of them are doing interesting stuff. Most of them are exporting. Just about all of them are really anxious about a bill that we discussed yesterday—the Patents Bill—and may be discussing again next week. 
If you go on to the Industrial Research Ltd campus you find about 20 different companies that are doing exciting stuff things that are spin-offs. I want to acknowledge the work that Sir Stephen Tindall and others have done. I want to say that if there is one thing that is pretty important here it is not this bill; it is capital. And getting the capitalisation systems right in order to hold ownership of these companies in New Zealand is important. 
I mean there is one little company called Mesynthes which has developed—you know people will find this relatively hard to believe—a product that comes out of sheep’s wool. Colin King knows a bit about this. This product goes into wounds. These might be wounds that have been caused by war. The US military is really interested in this. They might be wounds that are caused by operations where people have had major sections of their body or a disease taken out. This gunk goes into their body their skin goes around it and the body absorbs it and converts it back into flesh. It is sort of like the reverse of flesh eating. The flesh eats it and creates new flesh. It is a New Zealand invention you know with the work on it done in Lower Hutt. 
You can go 50 yards away from there to a little place next to CRL Energy and you can find people who have the next metal product. It is stuff that goes into titanium and into aluminium to make them stronger and more flexible. It takes the weight of aluminium down to maybe about 40 percent of its current weight and stretches titanium out. Do you know what it is made of? It is made of coal and sand. It is made of coal and sand from New Zealand beaches. 
Hon Damien O’Connor 
: Good coalmining. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: It is. The second-biggest coalminer in New Zealand actually owns it. The second-biggest coalminer actually owns this product and this process. 
The point I am making is that we need more support to get the innovations to get the science to get them commercialised and to hold on to them in New Zealand. There is nothing in this bill that will do that.