Hudson Brett: Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHudson Brett: Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 09 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8811. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]BRETT HUDSON (National): I rise in support of the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. As has been canvassed across both sides of the House today this bill will do three things in the main: an amendment to the grounds on which a person can oppose the grant of a patent under the Patents Act 2013; a single patent application process and a single patent examination process with Australia which not only will be hugely beneficial for those who apply for patents in terms of time and cost savings but will actually save time and cost for the regulatory bodies also; and a joint registration regime with Australia for patent attorneys—something that is manifestly to the benefit of patent attorneys in New Zealand. It is quite a small highly specialised profession over here one that is quite considerably larger in Australia and it makes a great deal of sense where it is possible—and it was determined some time ago that it should be—to adopt a single registration regime. In fact it is a bit broader than just a registration regime; it will also adopt a single code of conduct and a single disciplinary code and approach also.I just want to turn for a moment to the part about the grounds of opposition to the grant of a patent. Ms Curran kindly read to us from the Commerce Committee report on that 2013 legislation when it was investigated. I note that what she read was the point that people wanted to enable opposition to patents if there might be a situation where the granting of such could be deemed unreasonable or in fact not worthy. But in all that she read out to us it did not actually address the point that this amendment addresses which is specific to one and only one condition which is that that is known as the unity of invention. If we go back to the Patents Act of 1953 there was nothing in that Act that prevented someone making a single patent application for perhaps a new product or a new method that might in fact have more than a single invention within it. There was nothing as read out in that report for the 2013 patents legislation that actually gave any indication that the committee or in fact the Minister who introduced it or the officials were deeply concerned about lack of unity.I think this probably falls into an unintended consequences thing because what we are at risk of with the current provisions—where anything that can be shown to have a lack of unity of invention cannot have a patent approved—is that where someone has created has innovated and has this new product that has more than a single invention they can file an application for only one of them. In the meantime they lose any rights to any second or subsequent innovation that might exist within that product. It does not seem to me to be a very sound way of helping to bolster and foster innovation in our economy today by basically saying: “If you do innovate don’t innovate too much because you can have a little bit but not all of it.” So I think it is a very sensible thing that we are actually going to address what is clearly by looking at the historical Act an anomaly. As I reiterate there was nothing in the select committee report for the 2013 patent legislation that indicated that lack of unity of invention was actually an issue.The other part I want to touch on is the single patent application process and the single patent examination process with Australia because one of the things that I think is quite telling in this is that about 95 percent of the patent applications that are filed in New Zealand have a corresponding application in Australia but at the moment they are filed separately they are assessed separately and they are examined separately—for something that ultimately is intended to have protection across both countries—so bringing them together is a sensible part of a single market patents programme. The approach that is planned seems to me very pragmatic. You file one application in a portal in either country and that creates a separate application in the other but you have a single fee. You can submit for a single examination which quite frankly not only is going to reduce time and costs for the applicant whom we should be most concerned about but it holds also will save time and costs for those who assess the applications. So I think this is a very sound bill. I think it will go some way to providing sound regulation but regulation that is also both time and cost-effective. I commend the bill to the House.