Delahunty Catherine: Patents Bill — In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Patents Bill — In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 27 August 2013. Volume:693;Page:12971. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koutou katoa. I would like to take just a short call on a similar point to that of the previous speaker Rino Tirikatene and give some background as to why we put up Supplementary Order Paper 348. We did that because we actually went outside the walls of this Whare and talked to some people who had been involved in these issues for many years. What they said was that aMāori advisory committee is very 1980s as a concept. We are working towards a different world where we actually honour the Treaty in our legislative programme and when we want to consult on vital issues like this we actually create entities that reflect the Treaty and this Patents Bill is not it. So although we support the Patents Bill we raised this Supplementary Order Paper in the hope that the House would be ready to move towards more of a co-governance approach as we do with Treaty legislation. This is not co-governance. This is actually about allowing two different world views where one gets to make all the calls.Receiving advice has got nothing to do with following advice. In fact if you look at the law it does not require the Commissioner of Patents to take the advice. It requires the commissioner to hear the advice but not to take it and it allows the commissioner to appoint. That is why we have suggested in the Supplementary Order Paper that it should be the Minister of Commerce rather than the commissioner who does this and that the people on the committee should have power over their advice not on all matters but on critical matters to do with taongaMāori and themātaurangaMāori world view and that advice would be binding. It is very interesting that when we talk about this process we want people to be able to be heard but not listened to. We want them to be able to speak but we do not want to have to abide by what they say. So one world view is fine it is going to dominate and it is going to be accepted but the other world view will not be. It might be if it is lucky and the commissioner decides that they will listen to it.This is very old-school and it is very inappropriate in the 21st century in terms of both the findings of Wai 262 and the people who put up Wai 262. We spoke to people like Aroha Mead who is an internationally recognised expert on intellectual property issues and other people from around the motu who actually had huge concerns about what this bill entrenches in this bit—not the whole bill which has got many manymerits. It takes us right back in time to the good old era when the commissioner could tell the tangata whenua: “Thanks for the advice but we’ve decided to continue with our approach anyway.” Let us hope that that will not happen because what we hear is that theMāori Trade Marks Advisory Committee in many ways has actually worked pretty respectfully with the tangata whenua advice but we cannot assume that that will happen. When we write law we should do the right thing and that law should be robust.That is why we are also supporting Steffan Browning’s Supplementary Order Paper 124. There is something very fundamental about what he has put forward in the Committee today—something very fundamental about what it is to be alive what it is to be patented and what it is to be protected by the law. What Steffan has done will also have the support of many of our colleagues in the tangata whenua world whom we have spoken to about this. They supportSteffan’s Supplementary Order Paper as well because basically it is talking about recognising that life cannot becommodified and therefore the Supplementary Order Paper should be supported. Life cannot becommodified and Te Tiriti should not be watered down to be about advice. So support our Supplementary Order Papers. There is the opportunity to do so on all sides of the House so that we actually get both these issues into what is a piece of legislation that we are encouraged by and that we believe the Minister of Commerce has made great progress on.There is no excuse in the 21st century for treatingMāori advice as token. There is always a risk when the commissioner has all the power as they do. I support the member Rino Tirikatene in saying that often these committees become entrenched. They become about certain people receiving a position that they become comfortable in and others are not heard. It is very important that we take this seriously and do not stay in the old mind-set of consultation.As my dad once said—[Bell rung] I am about to finish but I do want to say one more thing about what my dad always said about consultation: it is a cross between a con and an insult. I think that is an important point when the law does not require us to act around the responsibilities of article 2 in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Kia oratātou katoa.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 120 in the name of the Hon Craig Foss to Part 2 be agreed to.