Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): It is a pleasure to speak to this the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Amendment Bill in its second reading. We had 85 submissions over the month of July and when those were analysed there were four themes for the submitters collectively. The first was around patents the second was around copyright the third was intellectual property and the fourth was not-intellectual property. This bill itself makes changes to 11 Acts and I am going to briefly mention them because I want to come back and pivot and focus on one particularly which will address some of the concerns we heard just a moment ago.The Tariff Act 1988 is what I want to actually focus on but just so we can see the breadth of this bill I want to mention the others as well. There is the Dairy Industry Restructuring Act 2001—these all deal with the goods parts of the bill: the Customs and Excise Act 1996; the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act again 1996; and the Wine Regulations 2006. Under the investment umbrella: the Overseas Investment Act 2005 is amended by this bill. For intellectual property: the Patents Act—we received a lot of submissions around patents; the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Act—we did not receive so many on that; the Copyright Act again maybe 30 or 40 percent of our time was around copyright; and the Trade Marks Act 2002. Transparency: this bill also deals to the Legislation Act 2012.I want to come back and focus particularly on the amendments this bill makes to the Tariff Act and I want to do that for several things because I think this part of the bill does a lot of the heavy lifting in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). First of all it sets the tariff rates which I think are clearly very important. I think what is also important for the Tariff Act is that it attends to some of the protection concerns that we have just heard from across the House.More specifically it talks to the safeguard measures. There are two safeguard measures that the TPP amendment bill looks to enact. The first is called the transitional safeguard measure. This is a measure that applies in the transitional period which is the period from when the agreement comes into force for those goods that do not have an elimination schedule. It lasts for 3 years from when the goods come into effect. For those that do have an elimination schedule the transitional period lasts for the whole period of that transition. Over that time if there is a threat of serious injury to the domestic market then there is the ability for the transitional safeguard measure to kick in.If I can just talk to that measure a bit further here. The transitional safeguard measure is for when individually goods are imported into a party's territory in such increased quantities in absolute terms or relative to domestic production and under such conditions as to cause or threaten to cause serious injury to the domestic industry that produces a like or directly competitive good. So there is a safeguard measure right there that we can bring in during this transitional period. What is the nature of that measure? What it lets us do for a period of 2 years with an extension of 1 year is it lets us penalise those importers who may be bringing goods in that as we can see under this clause here may unfairly compromise the domestic market. What we can do is we can increase the customs rate as a penalty for those importers who may be harming our domestic market.It also talks to whether it is a threat to the domestic market and that threat is detailed as a serious injury that on the basis of facts—not merely on allegation conjecture or remote possibility—is clearly imminent. So the amendments to the Tariff Act give us the ability to talk to the transitional safeguard measures. If our domestic market is being compromised by goods we can bring in this measure which is a 2-year compromise plus one.The second safeguard measure that the amendment bill applies to the Tariff Act is the emergency safeguard measure. The emergency safeguard measure has similar wording to what the transitional safeguard measure has—it only applies to textiles I would add. It applies if a good is imported in increased quantities in absolute terms or relative to domestic production and under such conditions as to cause or threaten to cause serious injury to the domestic industry. The emergency safeguard measure also has other clauses that fine-tune the eligibility for the safeguard measure to apply. It is these measures here that are new. This is what the transitional safeguard measure does not have. What must be taken into account are changes in such relevant economic variables as output productivity utilisation of capacity inventories market share export wages employment domestic prices profits and investment.So when I am hearing about protections from across the other side of the House here we are specifically talking to that. Here are some of the protections that this amendment bill will bring into play. The emergency safeguard measure has a different time frame from the transitional safeguard measure. Again I would mention that it applies to textiles and apparel. The transitional period is from entry into force until 5 years after the elimination of tariffs. So that is quite a long period where we can bring in this emergency safeguard measure. The nature of the measure? Well what we can do here is we can raise the tariff level to disincentivise people who may be harming our domestic industry. What level can we raise it to? Well we can actually raise it to the tariff levels that we have with most favoured nations.There are very clear protection measures here and these are what this bill actually brings into play; it enacts them through the Tariff Act. That is why I think this part of the 12 parts is the one that is actually doing the heavy lifting. I think this is the one that gives us a lot of protections. If we were to apply the emergency safeguard measure it is a measure that lasts for 2 years. There are very strict protocols as to how we approach the importer that we think is harming our domestic market: they have got 60 days to respond; the nature in which they respond the allegations that are being made and the nature of the harm to the domestic industry are all discussed all laid out; then the local market can bring these safeguard measures into effect.I think this bill is very important even though we are not certain as to when the TPP will be enacted. I take that on board from our colleagues. It is useful for when it is enacted to have this ready to go. It has also been useful as it always is at the select committee—and I want to commend the chair Mark Mitchell and my other colleagues for bringing this bill through and for doing such good work on it—to have the advice from those who are out in the external industries because they give us the lens that we do not see. We did not see some of these things certainly some of the details around technology protection measures. We really needed it explained. They are really very complex. They were explained in great detail by several submitters and we were eventually able to get our heads around what we are looking to do here.As I mentioned there were four large areas that submitters talked to. They talked around patents and we had a number of people from the performing industry. We had a number of authors. We had those from either side of the fence who argued both sides and again that is what the select committee does. They argued both sides of that and we were able to form the view that we are bringing forward to this House today. Similarly with the Copyright Act—we had a lot of impassioned pleas from people saying reduce it" "expand it" and "we are sort of being consistent with the Americans but we have a different view". There were a lot of arguments around that. Again we were able to crystallise that and bring that forward in a view that I think is well reasoned. Joining both of those—the Patents Act and the Copyright Act—is intellectual property and that sort of wove its way between both of those key themes.There were a number of parts of this bill that were not discussed; in fact everyone was quite happy with the Tariff Act which I have just talked about. There were not any specific recommendations to that. In fact probably two-thirds of the Acts that we are looking to amend were not actually spoken to by submitters. They were quite happy with them.I think this amendment bill is very important. I think it does address the protections that the Opposition has raised here. The two I have particularly spoken to under the Tariff Act today are the transitional safeguard measure and the emergency safeguard measure. I believe they do give us the protections that we are looking for. I think this bill should proceed. Thank you."