Williams PotoPOTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): I rise to take a relatively crisp call on the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill. While researching this—I am not a member of the Primary Production Committee so I have spent a little bit of time reading about the contents of the bill—I found it quite interesting to do a bit of a comparison on the bill as it was introduced and what came back to the House after the select committee made its deliberations. I guess the first point to make is really about the difference between an innovative and a non-innovative product. Of course the innovative product is one where the active ingredient has not previously been registered in New Zealand and the non-innovative product is one where reformulations or other uses are found for active ingredients that have already been registered in New Zealand. The bill seeks to look at defining the data-protection period for these particular products and the departmental briefing to the committee made the distinction between data protection and patent. A patent confers certain market exclusivity whereas data protection is really about how the original applicant can take time to recover the costs of developing the supporting data before suppliers of competing generic products can use that data to enter the market. But it does not stop other parties from generating their own data and registering competing products. So the bill as introduced extends the data-protection period by up to 3 years under certain circumstances. The departmental briefing made reference to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. What it made specific reference to was the requirement for 10 years of data protection under that agreement and that officials discussed the policy decisions that may align the timing issues of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and what may come out of this legislation. I had a look at a couple of submissions firstly from Federated Farmers of New Zealand. They were supportive of the default periods for data protection for the innovative trade name products moving from 5 years to 10 years and for data protection of the non-innovative trade products being moved from 3 years to 5 years. They also suggested that the select committee amend the bill to increase protection of data for innovative trade applications by 1 year for each new use subsequently approved up to a maximum of 5 years. The other submitter that I had a look at was Zoetis—I think it is called Zoetis—which was formerly Pfizer Animal Health. It was interested in looking at intellectual property and the distinction between patent protection and data protection. I just want to quote from its submission. It talks about a significant period of time and money being spent on further development generating data from clinical activities which must be completed before the product can be made available for use. It is this data that requires protection under the local legislation. In many cases the patent protection for an innovative product will be significantly eroded by the time a trade name product is registered thereby putting the data at significant risk. It must therefore be adequately protected by local legislation." So what did the committee make of this report and the submissions and what came back to the House? The committee recommended that the provisions in clause 6 be amended and a new section 74B be included to extend the base level of data protection from 5 years to 10 years but it did not recommend any extension beyond 10 years. It recommended in clause 6 a new section 74D which has a data protection period remaining at 10 years or 5 years after new use applications—whichever was longer. So it was looking at data protection remaining at 10 years or 5 years if there were new use applications. Also it recommended in clause 6 the inclusion of new section 74E which looked at data protection for 5 years after the application is decided. The committee did consider that 5 years would promote registration and encourage competition and that any extension beyond the 5 years would adversely affect competition. In summary looking at the departmental briefing the submissions and what the committee recommended with regard to the data protection periods I look forward to the Committee stage discussions. Labour will support the passage of the bill."