Warren-Clark AngieANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Kia ora Madam Speaker thank you. I take the opportunity to rise and talk about the Plant Variety Rights Bill. I wasn't in the House last night when this bill started to be discussed and so I did when I realised I was speaking tonight think Gosh what am I going to talk about?" and took an opportunity to have a look at the previous speeches which I can only comment to—some of them are somewhat distressing to listen to. Nevertheless I'm actually going to focus tonight on what this bill actually does.I went through some of the definitions in the legislation because I was kind of looking at it and it said "UPOV convention" and I wasn't sure what that meant. So the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants was signed in 1961 revised in '72 '78 and '91. Our piece of legislation that we're bringing through tonight is adding a modern focus which also includes the Treaty of Waitangi in that aspect. So it is simply clearly something that has been left alone for a long time and needs to be modernised.I thought to myself: "Well why is this important?" And then I realised the connection that we as people from this country have with our plants particularly our indigenous plants. I would hate to think that someone out there was able to take a taonga species—say the silver fern which we have here in Aotearoa—and take it overseas and use it. So I was kind of thinking "OK what's our connection?" And certainly for me—Hon Michael Woodhouse: Talk us through the kiwifruit story!ANGIE WARREN-CLARK: I'm going to bring my kiwifruit story to the fore in a second but first of all I wanted to talk about a personal connection to a plant that I have and a story about that.I'm a Zontian. I belong to a group called Zonta and we have what is called the Zonta rose. Now that was bred in 1983 by the—and I'll just read this out—Harkness Roses of England. They cultivated and gifted a rose to Zonta International. Now Zonta International this beautiful yellow rose was an idea that New Zealand came up with. Val Webster who's sadly passed away created this concept and it became a worldwide symbol and it was gifted to us. It's important to me to talk about this because this rose is—the Zontian day is 8 March which is International Women's Day. So I think when we talk about the sort of esoteric intellectual property rights of plants we also talk about the connection that we as people from Aotearoa people from this country have with different plants. So I just wanted to raise that and then here is my kiwifruit story.Of course you may know that I am from the Bay of Plenty based in the Bay of Plenty and we have this fabulous kiwifruit industry where 80 percent of all kiwifruit that is grown in this country comes from the Bay of Plenty. We have 2792 grower/producers. We have 150 million trays and our trade is worth $2.967 billion per annum gross. So this is something that both has emotional connection from my own community but it also has that hugely important financial benefit. So thinking about plant variety rights this is about the protection of the exploitation of our rights with plants.It is important to remember that people can still experiment home growers can do the things that they want to do but this is about the intellectual property that protects and maintains some of our trade industries but it is also particularly important to remember that we also look at taonga species. We also look at the rights under the Treaty of Waitangi around the kaitiaki rights. So where we have particularly some of our plants that are what we call our taonga species—an example of that may be the kauri tree—where we have that someone might take some seeds create a kauri tree and then take that genetic detail that genetic breed overseas and claim it as their own. That is something that we in this country do not want to have happen.So the bill itself is quite detailed. It's quite thorough in its exploration of these terms—what a breeder means; all sorts of things like that. I think it is going to be a particularly interesting time in the select committee one of which I won't be sitting on unfortunately. But I do think that we are particularly going to have a good and useful conversation and I think when we talk about taonga species the rights of kaitiaki when we talk about the way that we as a group of New Zealanders come to understand our ownership of plants or our protection of and our connection with plants I think it's a conversation well worth having.Like I say 1991 when this was last looked at—I'm really pleased to see that in fact we will be having a good conversation a conversation that hopefully people can take the politics out of and talk about how we as a nation need to protect our rights for business our rights for breeding and our indigenous rights to our own genomes in terms of our plant species. I commend this bill to the House."