Cunliffe David: Patents Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Cunliffe David: Patents Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 12 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5171. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn) 
: 
 It is a pleasure to take a short call on the Patents Bill. Labour supports this bill but importantly at this stage only pending clarification of the Government’s willingness to accept our own Supplementary Order Paper 123 in Clare Curran’s name which of course is backed by the vast majority of New Zealand’s innovators. It stipulates that a computer program “does not prevent an invention that makes use of an embedded computer program from being patentable.” It leaves the boundaries of embedded software to be determined by the Government on a case by case basis as is appropriate. It would be a nonsense frankly to make any computer program patentable because subprograms could be used to block the development of innovation. So we are putting that matter on the floor of the House for the Government to listen to. We are signalling very clearly that our support for the rest of the bill is contingent and conditional on the Government’s willingness to accept what has the almost universal support of the industry—perhaps Microsoft and a couple of others excepted—but the list of names of New Zealand’s finest innovative young companies is I think incontrovertible— 
Clare Curran 
: The patent attorneys support it. 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE 
: —and of course the Institute of Patent Attorneys as my colleague Clare Curran reminds me supports that amendment. 
You know sometimes something like the Patents Bill is seen as a technical boring piece of legislation but it is hugely important to understand the importance of patenting to our economy and to our economic development future. If we do not want to be just exporting raw logs or exporting raw milk and if we want to have a high-value high-income high-export economy we absolutely survive by our brains not just by our brawn. Our brains have to produce something that is novel and new and that can then be defended against others who want to copy that. The way we do that is through the patent law. This law makes it clear that you have to be really new really novel in order to get a patent and that is probably appropriate. 
The bill has had bipartisan support from its outset. It was originally introduced by Labour; it has been worked on by National. These are complex issues and it is good to see MPs cooperating across the House to try to get the best possible result for New Zealand businesses because we all as Kiwis share a common interest in our exporters being able to do as well as possible in international markets. For that reason the bill does not cave in to the big pharmaceutical industry which wanted to extend the 20-year terms of pharmaceutical patents. It does not allow people to patent medical procedures because that is not in the interests of public health. 
One thing that I still have a lingering concern about—and I want to put it on the floor of the House for the record—is that I do have some concerns about requiring patents to be novel after a global search of international precedents rather than on the basis of New Zealand novelty. The reason for that is that it becomes an impediment to small emerging companies which may not have the resources to pay a patent attorney to do a complete global search. The counterargument is of course we live in a global market; if you are going to defend globally you have to be prepared to accept that. What I would warn and I think it is a multipartisan issue is that most New Zealand companies by world standards are small companies so we have to have a law that is relatively user-friendly if we want our small stars to take on the big guys and hold their own. 
Most innovators even the Googles and the Facebooks and the Apples started in a garage somewhere off in Palo Alto. We have got lot of garages in New Zealand—[ 
Bell rung 
]—1 minute—with incredibly innovative Kiwis coming up with the Googles of tomorrow. This bill is really important because it has to get the balance right between making it easy to innovate and secure enough when you get a patent to be able to defend it against the world. 
An interesting thing: I have a relation—I will not name him—who is a very good patent attorney and he tells me that 90 percent of the patents patented in New Zealand are defensive patents by major international corporations. Less than 10 percent of the patents in New Zealand are done by New Zealanders. We need to shift that over time. 
Mr Speaker is giving me the signal so I will close now. Labour supports the bill this far but only if my colleague Ms Curran’s Supplementary Order Paper is adopted in a bipartisan fashion by the Government—