Woods Megan: Patents Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Patents Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 27 August 2013. Volume:693;Page:12930. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is always my pleasure to take a call when I can give a speech that talks about the innovative economy and job creation—[Interruption]; thank you Mr Mallard—because this is New Zealand’s natural advantage. This is about our raw material which is the talent that underpins New Zealand’s future and underpinning that is our intellectual property law. Specifically it is our patent law and how we are going to protect our economy in the 21st century and protect what that economy is based on as colleagues have talked about. I want to acknowledge the work of members right across this House. I want to acknowledge the hard work of my colleague Clare Curran next to me who I am sure will be taking a call on this in the very near future to finish the story she started telling about what this law means to New Zealand.I want to acknowledge the work that has gone on around the House because this bill the Patents Bill does balance the two interests that need to be balanced within any considerations of intellectual property. First it allows innovators to profit from their inventions. It allows the people who put in the work and their talent and their ideas to commercialise their ideas and to make businesses out of them. In Labour this is something that we celebrate and it was one of the reasons why we thought that having a research and development tax credit was a reasonably good idea. These are the kinds of measures we need to have to celebrate innovation. But what we also need to be very careful about as legislators in this country—and I think this bill does this very well—is that we balance out the monopoly rights that accompany patents and make sure that they are not unduly exploited. That is really important.About 3 weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending the launch of Shaun Hendy’s excellent new bookGet Off the Grass which talks about innovation in New Zealand. This was a book that Shaun started with Sir Paul Callaghan before Sir Paul’s death and Shaun finished it off. One of the things that Shaun talks about extensively in this book is the innovation networks that exist in New Zealand and one of the ways that he explores these innovation networks is through our patenting system. Who is collaborating with whom? Who is it? It is this ability for people to work together and to commercialise these ideas that underpins this. I really encourage people to go and look at this because it is the culture of innovation and these innovation networks that underpin this. We see universities sitting at the centre of this. They are committed to research-based excellence and flowing out from this are all kinds of opportunities that can be commercialised. But in order to do that—to have New Zealand businesses that can make successful companies out of these ideas—we need the ability to protect our intellectual property. In New Zealand much of our expertise does lie in our ability in theagritech sector and we do need to realise that much of our intellectual property is in the form of living organisms. It is our plant variety rights and our ability to utilise these.The ability for us to protect plant variety rights in this country is the basis of the business model under which Zespri operates. Hort16A or golden kiwifruit which is the other name by which it is known is a plant variety right that was developed by what wasHortResearch and it is the very basis of why Zespri is able to make its way in the world. It has the proprietary rights on this fruit and it is the way in which it can survive. Not only are things like Hort16A incredibly important to us and our need to be able to protect those technologies but also we need to understand New Zealand’s technologicalfuture in a very complicated way. It is not just about factories pumping things out although these are important. It is not just about software although that is undoubtedly important. But the technological basis of what our agricultural sector will be and how we will transform ourselves as an agricultural nation from being a mere commodity producer is something that we need to think about in a sophisticated way and we need to think about what will underpin that.Not only do we have the example of Hort16A the plant variety right that is crucial to the commercial success of Zespri but when we think about our apple imports and what that is worth to our economy we have over $1 billion a year in apple exports alone and 70 percent of those exports is premised on four varieties. One of those varieties is the Jazz apple. Again that is a plant variety right that was developed by some excellent talent in this country atHortResearch. It is something that can be protected under plant variety rights and it is really important that we have the ability to do this.Another example where we do actually have to think about what a 21st century economy is—one that is sustainable and has absolutely at its heart our ability to protect our intellectual property in terms of our pasture in New Zealand—is how New Zealand is going to radically reduce its greenhouse emissions. It is through the development of new pastures. When our dairy sector is one of the largest emitters in our country we need the ability to protect some of the excellent work that the Grassland Association is doing around various pasture types. I am going to talk more about some of these examples and what the ability to protect this kind of intellectual property means when we get to Part 3 of the bill.I would like to congratulate colleagues across the House. I think this is a timely piece of legislation. It has had a long time in gestation and a lot of hard work has been put into it. Thank you.