Curran ClareCLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I am pleased to take a call in the Committee stage of this bill. It has really been a very troublesome period in New Zealand history. Much of that is actually down to the awful process that has led to the bill's gestation and coming to this House and the awful process that was driven by this Government.I would like to start though by giving the Minister in the chair the Hon Todd McClay a bit of a tick for—it is a bit late—his acknowledgment of the importance of engaging with the New Zealand community and actually listening to them. The problem is that it is a bit of an after the horse has bolted" situation but at least he does seem to have a different approach as the trade Minister and hopefully that will lead to a less divisive situation in our country in future. But that is about all of the tick that I would give to the Government on this.I have a couple of points to make first and they will be made over and over again on this side of the Chamber by the Labour Party. The Labour Party is the party of free trade. We have always sought to deliver the benefits of free trade to New Zealand and to reduce the barriers to growth for our firms and for the workforce but this deal is an example of how a Government did not trust the New Zealand people did not talk to the New Zealand people and instead chose to negotiate the deal in secret and to exclude the New Zealand people. That lack of trust and that I guess ultimate approach of being out of touch has helped contribute to where we are at now.We are also in a situation of great farce because we are debating a bill in the Committee that gives effect to something that we have already signed. The second reason it is a farce is that we have a US election and we have two candidates who do not support the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPPA) and so who knows what is going to happen next. This is likely to all be a complete waste of time. It is also a farce because we traded away things that we should not have traded away for very little gain. I think pretty much everyone in New Zealand acknowledges that. There remains a lot of distrust in the community with 39 percent of exporting small businesses supporting the TPPA says Mind Your Own Business in its 2016 survey of a thousand small businesses. That is very disappointing for the Government.The Minister of Trade in his contribution before in the Committee talked about how this is about services. Yes it is about services and a lot of the services and the future of this country lie in its ability to innovate and in its ability to protect its own intellectual property. A lot of that is in software development in the tech industry and it feels as if this agreement got negotiated on a wavelength that was very much rooted in the past. I hope that this is what the Minister is learning as he is going around the country talking to the likes of NZRise that represent some of the innovation companies that are New Zealand - based. We need to protect them and ensure that we are enabling them to have the best possible start so that they can build our economic development but unfortunately that is not what happened.The Labour Party supports Gareth Hughes' Supplementary Order Paper 240 which is the insertion of the "fair use" amendment which he also has as a member's bill. I want to say that this is not only sensible; it is actually playing catch up with the major partner that we are trading with and negotiating this TPPA with which is the US—which already actually includes fair use in its copyright law. In the explanatory note of his amendment it says that this bill "extends and introduces United States-styled copyright terms without the corresponding United States-styled fair use copyright protections." Just so people know what the definition of "fair use" is—the basis of which is in US copyright law—it is "the doctrine that brief excerpts of copyright material may under certain circumstances be quoted verbatim for purposes such as criticism news reporting teaching and research without the need for permission for or payment from the copyright holder." This is not something that we should be arguing about. It is something that should just be sensibly included.I want to refer to a report that came out of the University of Auckland written by Louise Longdin just over a decade ago which talked about the Statute of Ann—and I am sure everyone in this Committee knows what the Statute of Ann is—and said: "Ever since copyright was conferred on authors by the Statute of Ann in 1709 for 'the encouragement of learning' one issue in particular has troubled and divided the world's trading nations. This is the problem of how to fairly balance the interests of creators and owners of copyright material against the needs of those who wish to use and build on that material (or maybe even just parody or criticise it)."Another quote from this report—and this goes to the importance of supporting the innovation economy in New Zealand—and this is a quote from Justice H Laddie says: "The whole of human development is derivative. We stand on the shoulders of the scientists artists and craftsmen who precede us. We borrow and develop what they have done: not necessarily as parasites but simply as the next generation. It is at the heart of what we know as progress. [B]orrowing and developing have always been acceptable." But one of the things this bill does is that it extends the term of copyright from 50 years to 70 years without any corresponding fairness and balance that acknowledges the digital environment on which our future economy needs to be based and it trades away something of which we do not get anything back. We are poorer as a nation for that and my concern is that when this deal was negotiated there were people who did the negotiating who did not seem to get that. I hope that as the Minister is going around the country talking to people—and I hope that he is talking genuinely to communities of interest in all parts of New Zealand and in all industries in our universities and talking with our researchers with our librarians and with our teachers—he understands just what the importance of that is.Although this amendment by Gareth Hughes is not the most major thing that has come before the Committee it actually would be a step forward. It would be an acknowledgment to the people of New Zealand that there has been a shift in thinking and that there is the ability for the Government to acknowledge that perhaps it could have done things a bit differently. And perhaps it would rebuild some trust between the communities that were so upset and anti about the lack of acknowledgment of their views and it might rebuild some trust back in that direction."