Chen NaisiNAISI CHEN (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise today not only as a member of the Labour Party but also a proud member of the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee. Just for the benefit of the member Mark Cameron who has just resumed his seat I'd like to relay back to the House of all the process—the painstaking process—that we have gone through during the select committee process to actually consider all of the details that the member has just mentioned and has just questioned. I just wanted to start off by thanking not only my colleagues on the select committee and our chair Jamie Strange but also every single submitter. My relationship with this bill started at Fieldays last year. For the very first time I had people come up to me—I might say it's in the member Angie Warren-Clark's electorate right? Yeah your people in your electorate came up to us during Fieldays and really passionately expressed their opinions on this bill. So I still remember that that started way before it had even gotten to the select committee process. But I thank every single submitter to the select committee. We had lawyers and people who are very very experienced in dealing with the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) and the Plant Variety Rights Bill—sorry the Act the one that we had previously. We had obviously growers we had investors we had exporters and we had different types of farmers as well. All these people came to our select committee to give us their opinions from the ground grassroot-based and reality-based and their suggestions on how we could improve this bill and improve this bill we did. I think the legislative process for this bill was one of the ones that I remember most vividly because for the very first time there were submitters who actually brought packets of seeds into the select committee room to make sure that we knew what we were talking about. We were actually legislating for plant varieties and we actually got to see the things that we were impacting—they were bags of seeds. But actually bags of seeds were probably the least of our—I think we all kind of knew. But I just want to turn the House's attention to the topic of potatoes. Now do members in this House know that potatoes don't grow from seeds? That was probably something that I didn't think about before I had started on this legislative process for this bill. Potatoes grow from potatoes so when we had mentioned the word seed" in the Plant Variety Rights Bill there were submitters—potato growers—who had come into the select committee room to remind us or to make sure that we had not only legislated for seeds but also potatoes because obviously seeds don't actually cover potatoes and gosh potatoes are so important to the New Zealand diet aren't they? We have all these different types of varieties of potatoes—Tangi Utikere: Hot chips potato chips.NAISI CHEN: Hot chips that's right—for roast for mash and all the different consistencies the taste the colour. So we have to make sure that we have a robust enough bill to make sure that we protect all of that intellectual property to make sure that in our economy whatever we're exporting or importing into New Zealand we uphold the vigorous protection of our intellectual property of all these different types of plants.Also one submitter that I remember very fondly told us the process the love and the labour that they have to go through in terms of actually getting a plant variety right registered. We heard from them that understanding a development of any new variety could take up to decades and that new technology actually would accelerate the development. Also the level of investment now in modern-day New Zealand is actually really high. So the reason why we're supporting this bill is because this bill will actually protect the hard-earned money of all of the investors in terms of what they've put into our industry to support not only the domestic market in terms of our food supply but also our exporting market which we've seen has stayed so strong in these COVID days. We have really seen that being a real pillar of strength in our economy. The reason why we're able to recover so much better from COVID is because of that strong export number. So this bill will make sure that we have a good enough system for us to protect the money of our investors in the industries to ensure that our exporters stay strong and also for us to meet our international obligations under the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants to make sure that we have aligned ourselves with our international partners so that if they have registered their plant variety right here in New Zealand they will be afforded the similar levels of protections across the world.During the select committee process we had also thought very very deeply about whether we should be following the Australian model or the European model knowing that there is a bit of difference currently. But we had a tip-off from one of our experts actually that the Australians would be changing their approach as well so that's something that I do look forward to a bit more progress in this space as we go through our legislative process as well. We also as a select committee looked at the appeals process for the Māori side—for our commitment to the Treaty as well. So I'm very happy as a member of the select committee that we were able to implement the new Māori Appellate Court to be able to have their rights of appeal through this process. So through and through I thank my colleagues on that select committee for the thorough work that we've done in terms of our part of this process and I do look forward to seeing this bill go through the House. So I commend this bill to the House."