Williams Poto: Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7180. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): It has been an interesting exercise in discovering what the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill is about. It is not an area that I am generally familiar with so I have valued the opportunity to broaden my understanding and experience. From what I understand in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of 1995 the regime for data protection was first set up—so the implementation of the 5-year protection around the registration of innovative agricultural compounds. As I understand innovative ones are the ones with active ingredients that are new to the market as opposed to non-innovative ones where you may use those compounds in formulations that may be for a species for which they were not originally intended. I note that a lot of the information that came out at the time noted that the industry was saying there was a potential for inhibiting the supply of products to the market around this protection issue. I think it is kind of central to where this bill is wanting to head.The Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Act currently provides for innovative compounds and medicines but there is a balance I guess that it is trying to achieve between encouraging competition but weighting that against what may be discouraging the registration of those compounds. I think in terms of intellectual property and what is noted here as “data protection” it is a useful correlation to think about protecting the rights of owners of this data or this innovation or this information if you look at the wider context of intellectual property and extending the period of in effect having a monopoly in the market. So the arguments may be that it is possible that that may cause higher costs. Also effectively you could potentially be taking away competition which may naturally force costs down and it could potentially even remove the incentive for innovation. Those are the arguments that I think need to be further explored and this is why we are supporting the bill to the select committee because there are some questions that need to be asked of it.I think one of the criticisms about intellectual property and about the length of protection and the extension of that protection period is one of the arguments that has come up in the Trans-Pacific Partnership discussions. It is one of the things that people critical of the Trans-Pacific Partnership discussion particularly around the pharmaceuticals are concerned about. It is that lengthening the time for patents for example to be in place potentially drives out people who are wanting to innovate it drives out competition and it potentially could add cost to the end consumer. Just around the uses for non-innovative compounds as I have said where we are looking at increasing protection there is a possibility to use those non-innovative compounds in new ways for new species.Finally I just want to make some comments about what I read that the Federated Farmers and those manufacturers of generic products were saying around seeking shorter production periods. I think that is a really interesting thing to look at and I am hoping at the select committee that submissions will be made on behalf of those groups to really tease out what would be the appropriate length of time to have a data protection period in place. Just in conclusion I just want to say we are supporting this to the select committee and there are one or two issues that we believe do need to be thrashed out. Thank you very much.