Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): It is a pleasure to take the final call on this bill the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Amendment Bill. I want to weave in some of the themes that some of the colleagues before me have spoken about. I want to talk about three things. I want to talk around a general theme of protections. I want to talk about Māori engagement and protections general protections and pharmaceutical protections. You heard our colleague Nuk Korako speak about the benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to the Māori economy. I want to talk to some of the protections that are there for Māori. First of all Māori had multiple opportunities to engage in this process going all the way back to 2008. If we look at some of those contributors they are significant players in the Māori economy: Sealord Aotearoa Fisheries Ltd Te Ohu Kaimoana Tainui and Ngāi Tahu have all been engaged for many years over this process. I think protections for Māori are also very clear under the Treaty of Waitangi carve-out which I believe does provide protections and I support what Nuk Korako was saying in this area as well.I want to then talk to general domestic protections. What is the effect of this on the general New Zealand domestic market? Well we know that there are particular protections for them as well. They are protected by amendments that we are making to the Tariff Act through two prime mechanisms. First of all there are transitional safeguard measures. These are measures for domestic industries that might feel they are harmed by aspects of the TPP and their remedy in response to that following appropriate process and discussion is that any further relief or reduction in tariffs can be halted immediately and customs duty can be imposed on those imports thought to be harming our domestic market. Textiles and clothing have something extra. They can use emergency measures which effectively do the same: they put a halt to any further tariff reductions but they can also raise tariff duties on the offending product and that can last for many years. These protection measures can last for several years.Finally I want to talk about pharmaceutical protections and I want to talk first of all about the patent term extension. This is the period from application to marketing approval and it covers delayed marketing approval. I want to talk to several points. First of all New Zealand does not have a patent term extension beyond the general patent term of 20 years. Most OECD countries do. Up until 1994 we actually did have patent term extensions. You could extend them up to 10 years and on average the extension was about 7.5 years. This was revoked in 1994 and what we did instead was increase the general patent protection from 16 years to 20 years. We have heard about the impact for New Zealand of this patent term extension which is proposed as 5 years—that it is to be small. It is likely to be small because—if we imagine again that the reason for this is delays in marketing approval—we are very efficient at that. Medsafe the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand—they are very efficient at getting market approval and so the advice to us is that the impact of this aspect of pharmaceutical protections will be small.The final protection I want to then talk about is biologic protection which goes on from the marketing approval period onward. It is also known as data protection or data exclusivity. The principle here is that innovation of very expensive medicines especially biologics needs to be encouraged. They need some protection from generics. We need to imagine that 40 percent of new pharmaceuticals are in fact biologics. Many are especially used for inflammatory conditions such as psoriasis inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis. New Zealand already has a 5-year biologic exclusivity period and we join Australia in that sort of time frame—and Chile Malaysia Peru Singapore and Vietnam. Canada and Japan have 8 years and of course the US has 12 years. There was clearly a desire and an intention to try to drag our 5 years more towards the 12 years. Where we settled was mostly still around the 5 years as a 5-year plus other framework.These are three sets of protections that I think provide a lot of surety to our domestic market and to the whole trade environment here. There are definitely benefits and protections for Māori general domestic protections and pharmaceutical protections as well. With that it is my absolute pleasure to commend this bill to the House.