McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): It is a pleasure to speak on the Geographical Indications (Wine and Spirits) Registration Amendment Bill—hence the reason why we are dealing with wines and spirits here and not sheepmeat and all sorts of other things. But I will get on to that a little later.Is it not nice to be talking about some positive legislation—legislation that adds value for an industry on the move an industry that last year produced $1.6 billion worth of income for the New Zealand economy. The industry is growing at a rate of about 10 percent a year which is pretty significant. It is also a really interesting example of how regional fortunes change around New Zealand. Some members will remember the Marlborough Plains of 30 years ago. They were pretty rocky and if they did not have water on them they were brown—the same colour as this House—at all times. Now when you fly over the Marlborough Plains they are completely different and are producing a good deal of the $1.6 billion worth of wine that leaves New Zealand every year. It is a pretty amazing performance really and you can see that the same thing is happening in Gisborne Hawke's Bay Central Otago and other parts of New Zealand.This bill is a result of an obligation under the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. These oblige New Zealand effectively to provide protection for geographical indicators. A geographical indicator indicates that a wine or spirit comes from a particular region and I guess two that come to mind very readily internationally are Scotch whisky and champagne. Of course in New Zealand we have as the previous speaker alluded to many other geographical indicators that will be picked up as a result of the development of this legislation.Although I have three wine growers in the Rangitīkei electorate I find it highly unlikely that we will have a Rangitīkei wine registered. Of course the other thing about it is that speaking about wine at this time of the day is quite dangerous for us laymen because they always say that if you are thinking about it at 9 o'clock in the morning you are in trouble by 6.I want to speak very briefly about a topic that the last speaker Damien O'Connor touched on because I think it is equally important. If you think about the Rangitīkei for example maybe one day we will see Rangitīkei land registered as a geographical indicator. I think it raises a very good point which was part of a quite lengthy discussion we had in the select committee on this very topic. Of course this piece of legislation is specific to wines and spirits and it is an amendment of an Act that was put in place in 2006 but never implemented. That is why we have not dealt with the other points around geographical indicators in the course of this discussion. I am sure that as the last speaker Damien O'Connor said this will be an issue that comes back before a select committee in the future—and I hope reasonably quickly because I think again if you refer to the Pamu brand which Damien O'Connor spoke about and which we visited last night that type of branding is changing the world very quickly. Lewis Road Creamery is a good example of that type of branding. I think it is going to be hugely—Hon Damien O'Connor: This member should be a Minister.IAN McKELVIE: Ha ha! Certainly not! It is going to be hugely important for the future of New Zealand exports. The days of us exporting bulk commodities are long gone and although we still rely on that type of export to some extent it certainly needs to change. This is a way that it will change.We received some 38 submissions on this bill pretty much all of them agreeing with the bill. I just want to touch on a couple of other things the bill deals with because they did engender some interesting discussion. It contains what are called opposition procedures". I would have thought that anyone can protest a thing if they do not like it but "opposition procedures"—which clearly is a legal term we use to describe how you oppose something—allow an interested person to protest or oppose the registration of geographical indicators. An "interested person" is defined in the principal Act so there is no issue with that. The bill also allows for objection on cultural lines and we can be confident that this cannot be abused as it did create quite some considerable discussion around the select committee table from one particular member. These conditions mirror a provision in the Trade Marks Act which has long been enforced and has never really been challenged. I think that we can be sure that those types of provisions from our perspective are going to create the right impact—they are not going to cause any problems I think.I want to thank the select committee for some quite interesting discussion. With a bit of luck we will have got most of this morning's select committee discussion out of the way here in the House before we get to the select committee meeting so we will have a much quicker select committee process than usual. The discussion that the Opposition has already raised this morning is one that we have every time we have a select committee meeting and no doubt it will come back again.I want to thank the committee members for the great bit of work they have done on this piece of legislation. I also want to congratulate Minister Goldsmith on getting this legislation to the post and on choosing the Primary Production Committee to deal with it. He was so enthusiastic about this bill that he was even seen last night wearing a geographical indicator of his own on his shirt. I have got a great deal of pleasure in commending this bill to the House for further discussion in the Committee stage. Thank you."