Browning Steffan: Advanced Technology Institute Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Browning Steffan: Advanced Technology Institute Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 13 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5244. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
STEFFAN BROWNING (Green) 
: 
 The Greens are supporting this Advanced Technology Institute Bill. They are supporting the potential of this concept because it is good to see something that will work as a facilitator and conduit between science and business in a way to ensure that the gaps that Trevor Mallard was alluding to can be filled. 
I believe that the current Crown research institutes the universities and business can actually already achieve the progress that we would want as well. However this facility may do that in a better way. But that comes with some reservations as well. I am hoping that we learn a lot more through the select committee process because exactly to whom to what and to where funding is going and the direction this is going is a little bit unclear at the moment. Potentially this will have some of the best of the old Department of Scientific and Industrial Research collaboration. 
However I am a little concerned it may be force-fed to the science community with business and science coming together in a rather uncomfortable situational process as well because we do not have a clear idea of how much the Crown research institutes will be coerced into what might be nothing more than a subsidy for some of National’s big-business and venture capitalist friends. 
Hon Member 
: Oh please! 
STEFFAN BROWNING 
: Let us see. Let us hear the examples—the real genuine examples—of what this is going to be. Who are the targets of this? We are supporting it in good faith at this point. Let us hope that it is the best of facilitating and collaboration a bringing together of science and innovation and marketers and that it is there for the small and medium enterprises which are so often starved of access to what is made available to the big players. Let us watch and let us see and let us get some more clarity from the Government on this. 
This institute needs to be aligned with the clean green “100% Pure Aotearoa New Zealand” brand—a smart green economy not just any technology and not the science that so often can discredit a good brand. 
I was fortunate enough in the adjournment to attend a biotechnology conference at Rotorua for the week and the field trip that went with that on the Thursday. It was fascinating and encouraging to see the science that would fit with this sort of institute—it is already happening mind you at Scion—bioplastics great products great innovation engineering for new products waste-water processes and other things that were just a snapshot of some of the things that happened there. 
I was possibly fortunate as well that we did not waste time looking at their genetic engineering processes there which is some of what I would consider to be the dirty science that can wreck New Zealand’s brand and the way that we market ourselves through the world. We have got a real problem with that in New Zealand in that some of the science in this institute is meant to be following that direction too. Biotechnology is in there but what biotechnology is it? Is it biotechnology of the best form that we could be proud of and stand tall with or is it something that is unfair to the rest of the productive community in New Zealand and that will discredit us? 
Another concern I have is that the science may be misused in that it goes to businesses that end up getting sold offshore so the benefit actually disappears from New Zealand—a bit like the scientists who are leaving who were alluded to before. Today we hear that Fisher and Paykel Appliances might be being sold to China. Fisher and Paykel Appliances albeit it is unnecessarily large and should not be needing this sort of institute to help it is the sort of business that logically would use it and it is disappointing to think that that benefit may go offshore. Thank you; we look forward to supporting this bill and hearing its progress.