Parker David: Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 09 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8818. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I rise on behalf of the Labour Party to take a call in the first reading of the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. As other members have usefully described the bill I will not do that all again. I will though just recount for the House that we always need to keep in mind the balance that we are trying to strike with patent law.On the one hand we want to encourage innovation in society. To do that we have got to give commercial advantage in some situations where people invest time and effort in making a new discovery. Why do we do that? We do that for two main reasons: one we want to encourage the world to become a better place through encouraging that sort of endeavour that makes new discoveries for the benefit of humanity over time. On the other hand we also want to encourage the long-term publication of those inventions so that other people can leverage off that knowledge and either take that invention further in the future or produce that same new invention more cheaply to the benefit of more people. We try to achieve that by giving people a time-limited monopoly right to exploit for their commercial gain the commercial opportunities that arise from their invention. Obviously if someone does not have that monopoly right it is less likely that they will invest in the first place.There are other models of investment. There are some people who think that drug discovery would be more efficient worldwide if the countries that effectively fund the cost of those drugs cooperated decided what were the drug targets and actually put Government funding into pursuing those directly rather than letting the private sector do it or at least some of it. A lot of the research that is relied upon by the private sector is already publicly funded. There are some who think that it would be more efficient for countries to move beyond a patent route for drug discovery and more cost effective given that in the end it is Governments that by and large fund the patented drugs through their health systems anyway. Nevertheless we are where we are in that international paradigm and we should make sure that it works appropriately.We also must always be aware that if you are giving someone a monopoly right they exploit it to maximum advantage and they are not constrained as much in their conduct. They price it for the maximum price they can sell it for rather than competing down to a price that relates to the cost of producing the good or the service mainly goods that have been patented. So we have got to be really careful that we do not inappropriately extend the terms of patent right. If we do that we actually do not end up with any more patented goods; we actually just extend the period of patent royalty and the monopoly rent that can be extracted from exploitation of it. So if this legislation was coming to the House suggesting an extension to the term of patents I for one would be standing up and asking the Government to prove that this would actually meet the social purpose of patents which would be to encourage more innovative discovery on the part of people and society. I do not think it would. Therefore I am one of those people who do not think we should extend patent rights beyond the current terms that we have.Having said that we have also got to be aware that we have rules that are pretty consistent with what the rules are internationally otherwise it is a bit unwieldy internationally. Perhaps we could also suffer the disadvantage that overseas patented innovations would not become available in New Zealand because those who had those patented rights would not be willing to bring them to New Zealand and New Zealand would suffer a disadvantage in that regard. For that reason I think that the Government is probably right to be correcting this anomaly which seems to have been introduced in 2013 that allows a patent to be challenged on the ground that more than one area of invention that has been patented lacks unity. As I read the explanatory note—and I do not pretend great expertise in this area—it suggests that the lack of unity as a ground of opposition which was introduced in the Patents Act in 2013 is out of whack with the rest of the world and can lead to unfairness in that patents that ought to be approved are either not approved or are struck down later.