Clark DavidDr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): This is indeed an interesting debate to be having here in the House. We do on this side of the House support what is left of this bill. It became very evident through the process that the homework of the Government had not been done and that the Minister unfortunately had failed to instruct his officials clearly to question the motion put forward by the Prime Minister that we should unite these markets in this way. This as I recall the history of it was about something that the Prime Minister promised after a backslapping episode I think with Kevin Rudd in Australia. This is where it came from. It was a great idea Let's do this. It seems logical on paper. Let's give it a whirl." and away they went. I do not know whether they were kayaking at the time or quite what they were doing but there was no real outcome. I do not know—was it a pyjama party? One of the members on the other side will be able to tell me what happened and what preceded this bright idea. On paper it does sound like a very simple and bright idea: the reduction of time and resources spent by businesses applying for and obtaining patents in both countries; regimes that sit slightly at odds with each other that require correction in duplication and so on. Why would you not address that? Why would you not get stuck in and make it a single regime across the countries? It seems pretty sensible and as Melissa Lee has just said New Zealanders fancy themselves as being able to do some of these things more efficiently and better than our cousins across the Tasman—and we often do in these common market things. So the idea looked good on paper and somehow that was the end of it. A bill was drafted up. It went through—"Tickety-boo tickety-boo. Send it off to the parliamentary Chamber. We will rip this one through we will put a big tick next to it and we will claim that we made business easier. That is what we do as a Government." But there was no homework done. What became evident in the process as this went through the select committee was that there had been no homework done. The Government had not even talked to the industry itself. The Government had not talked to the industry that would be affected by the legislation. It is almost beyond belief. I have never seen anything quite like it in this Parliament. And of course as Mr Cosgrove said in his contribution the dexterity required for the Government to reverse its original position in this particular bill was admirable—Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Awe inspiring.Dr DAVID CLARK: It was awe inspiring. It turned on the head of a pin and then eviscerated the bill sending it through the Parliament. How much does each bill that goes through Parliament cost in terms of the time of all the members sitting here? It would be hundreds of thousands of dollars I dare say by the time you add in the staff time to get one bill through this Parliament. It is important that this Parliament debates issues that make sense not ones that have not been homeworked first; not ones where the Minister is trying to do the Prime Minister's bidding without checking out whether it is a good idea in the first place. This is because it then leads to this kind of embarrassment where we stand here in the House and have to reverse out in quite an elegant way for the Government to put it through. Believe you me it would have been delightful for us to oppose this bill but we realised on this side of the House—and we certainly hope—that we will inherit this legislation before too long. This Government is now so out of touch so arrogant that it does not want to consult industry on anything and it is digging its own grave right now with this kind of legislation. We hope ultimately when we are in Government to manage this kind of legislation and make it good and better for business but across there they are making an absolute bugger's muddle of this and that is why we are standing here today supporting a bill that started out doing one thing and now does almost nothing. It now does almost nothing. It is because that was the save that we could make that actually got a bill through that did one or two little tiny things that needed to be done anyway and it somehow went some way towards justifying the hundreds of thousands of dollars of parliamentary time that it cost to put a bill through. We did not want to just oppose it and have an absolute shambles go through because they had the numbers. We had to find a way through in the select committee process that somehow made sense and that somehow satisfied the industry. The industry of course put up the argument that when you are looking at doing patents and so on it is advantageous to have a local industry that knows how this stuff is done—one that is close to business in your own country. As people deal with intellectual property naturally enough they reach out to those who are closest to them—the people whom they have dealt with before the businesses that help them with their intellectual property development. If you were to gut the industry in New Zealand by completely changing the requirements overnight you would end up with a situation where New Zealand businesses were required to get in contact with a Sydney office they had never had anything to do with or a Melbourne office they had never had anything to do with and you would have the world turned upside down. You would have effectively a loss of intellectual property to New Zealand where the whole object should be that you set up a regime that looked to gain intellectual property for New Zealand in the longer term. The whole thing was an absolute shambles. It was a sloppy unedifying process of drafting as the report notes. I congratulate members opposite—I really genuinely do—who could also see how bad it was and who had the courage over there to challenge the Minister and say: "Look this is just so bad that we are going to recommend to the Minister that we take out the key parts of the bill." There you have it in the combined report from both sides of the select committee which says: "We therefore recommend that clause 5 be deleted to remove the empowering provisions." It does not get much plainer than that. They gutted the bill and they agreed to gut the bill because it just did not make sense. Those on the select committee did their job and I congratulate them on that side of the House. Sometimes they require a little bit of pushing a little bit of guidance to challenge the Minister and I can understand that—the backbenchers want to be Ministers themselves one day and do not want to criticise colleagues—but in this case those members opposite should stand up and take a bow. Mr Brett Hudson and our chair Melissa Lee should stand up and take a bow because they were prepared to challenge the Minister and they were right—they were absolutely right. The thing is a shambles and members on that side on the backbenches were prepared to stand up to a Minister who had not done his homework who was too quick to say yes to the Prime Minister to try to do bidding for something that was completely indefensible.It would not have got this far down the track if the Minister himself had spotted it if he had asked officials to do their homework if he had asked officials to talk to the industry properly and if he had asked officials to talk to their Australian counterparts—who incidentally stopped work on it when they saw that it was an absolute shambles too. The Australian counterparts stopped work on this. They have no intention of bringing this into place. Everybody could see that the bill as it was proposed was not good for New Zealand and was unlikely to proceed because of that. Thank goodness again for Mr Brett Hudson and Ms Melissa Lee who stood up along with other members of the committee and said: "Enough. Enough Minister. This is a shambles. We will have nothing to do with it and we will be glad to eviscerate it for you so you don't have to face the ignominy of going out to the industry with a bill that has just made a mess of that whole field."I think we do have to look at the bigger picture and see that this bill is a sign—one of those signs one of those symptoms—of a Government that has lost its way. It is a Government that had once upon a time a claim to represent business—small business in particular—but here in this bill the very group affected by this bugger's muddle would have been small business and the Government is so out of touch that it does not think it needs to consult the very industry that is affected by the bill. You have got to ask yourself what the Minister was doing when he waved this bill through to Parliament. It is half-baked but we are seeing that across Government. We are seeing that in housing policy—the Government has come forward with a half-baked housing policy when we have got people out there who are living in cars. We have got people living in cars—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! That is not part of the bill.Dr DAVID CLARK: —and their half-baked solutions will not solve that. I challenge members opposite to continue to challenge the Ministers who are out of touch—those backbenchers across there who I again say should take a bow for agreeing to make these changes in the bill to save it from its own fate. They should stand and take a bow but they should also challenge the Government as more bills come through this House that achieve precisely unedifying outcomes for industry for New Zealand and for business. Good on those members of the committee who stood up and said they would not stand for this. Well done those members of the committee across the House who said the Minister needs to do his homework. The Minister has been put on notice and I hope that the bills we receive in future will be better for New Zealand better for business and better overall. Thank you."