Cunliffe DavidHon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): Look it is a pleasure to take a quick call in this Committee stage on the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill. Labour supports the bill and I would like to make a couple of comments from my perspective having the innovation portfolio. New Zealand is a primary sector - based economy. About 57 percent of all research and development (R and D) undertaken in New Zealand is linked to the primary sector or takes place within the primary sector. This bill is germane to that process because it extends patent life for non-innovative new products by up to 3 years which is in addition to the 5 years' additional data protection for innovative products that they have access to on top of their 20-year patents. So this bill puts us right in the middle of a well-understood continuum between ease of access to intellectual property on the one hand and the ability to generate a long-term sustainable return from the investment that is made in that property. This is a bipartisan or largely bipartisan approach in this House to the bill—[Interruption]—reflecting as it does the fact that you should always have your mobile phone turned off when in the House or at least on silent. Caught! I think that is probably a shout at the next caucus meeting—Carmel Sepuloni: Morning tea.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: —or morning tea or something like that and I think all caucuses have their rules. Certainly we do in select committees. But anyway back to the conundrum—the well-known and well-tried conundrum of patent life versus innovation. In most sectors New Zealand's economic structure is characterised by large numbers of small companies—small and medium sized enterprises. That is relevant because small companies typically do not have lots of capital to invest in R and D. They have shallow pockets. They need quick access to innovation but they do not have the resources to earn hard intellectual property rights like patents for a long term. So a patent regime that was entirely composed of long-term long-life hard-to-get patents probably would not serve New Zealand well because our economy is overwhelmingly driven by small and medium sized enterprises. However in the primary sector we have more of a mix. Obviously we have the world's largest single trader of dairy products we have a number of large meat companies we have some very substantial wool enterprises and in the forestry sector—albeit too few—we have a number of forestry processes and some significant growing and cutting right operations. So we have mixed interests and that is reflected in the mixed approach that is taken to this bill. If you take a golfing analogy for the folks out there the chip shots on to the green—there is a slope on the green so it is aimed just uphill of the hole. It is probably about right and that is why we are supporting it. But we are going to watch we are going to monitor this space and we are going to see how the patent performance in New Zealand goes around agricultural compounds and chemicals—how the price to the farmer changes with the patent life. We do not want to see companies gouging and we do want to see improved patent performance in our primary sector. There are a number of things that I probably just need to touch on around the consultation that went into this bill. There was a working group established in 2008 to review the data-protection regime. It commissioned Covec Ltd. Covec is a pretty good outfit—copies of the reports here. It has done a lot of work in the ICT sector that when I was Minister I had quite a high regard for and at first glance the report seems to be a pretty sound one. That was picked up by officials—the Covec report published in 2009. The Government showed its usual alacrity. In fact people outside who might be concerned about things like—I do not know—the housing crisis might say: Gosh look how fast the National Government has moved on agricultural compounds. It's in the process of legislating for this report which was published only in 2009. Why can't they do the same with our housing markets?". Well that would be a fair comment. In the middle of a rampant housing crisis that is completely beggaring the family budgets of half of New Zealand here we are taking nearly a decade to pass something about agricultural compounds. However let us not get too overburdened by the bigger picture. What counts is that we are doing something here that is right. As I say it is a chip shot into an uphill green halfway between long-life patents which are hard to get and expensive and that companies cannot afford but that do earn a sustainable return and the green that is small and medium sized enterprises having access enough to the process—"