Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): Can I begin my contribution by pointing out that the conduct of this bill shows the importance of our select committee processes because the bill as it went to the Commerce Committee was a poor piece of legislation. I think it reflects well on the chair of the committee Melissa Lee and Minister Goldsmith who was responsive to the concerns that had been raised by the select committee that the bill has largely been sorted out and is in a form that Labour can now support at this third reading.I would contrast that with some other bills that I have been involved with notably the Resource Legislation Amendment Bill which is an absolutely atrocious piece of legislation. It is obvious to everyone on the Local Government and Environment Committee that it needs significant modification and yet for 5 months the select committee has made no progress on that legislation while things have gone on in the background. The select committee's skills have not been brought to bear and unlike the process that has been used in this patents bill the dire state of the Resource Legislation Amendment Bill does not benefit from the same input from the members of the select committee. Therefore we are left more in the hands of the Minister and the officials notwithstanding that it is obvious from submissions that there are fundamental problems with that bill.So for those reasons I actually want to compliment Melissa Lee and the Hon Paul Goldsmith on the way in which they have actually been willing to listen to the issues that came up through the select committee and have placed trust in the members of select committee to actually bring forward the suggestions that were needed to cure the fundamental problems in the bill. I do think that when you get a bill that is as fundamentally wrong as this one was both in terms of the cost-benefit analysis that accompanied it to the House and the substantive provisions in the bill it is actually incumbent upon us as parliamentarians to say to the officials who were behind this: Really not good enough."It was a pretty poor effort and it was going to increase the complexity and the cost for New Zealand patent attorneys in a way that was not going to be reciprocated by their Australian comparatives and was not going to save costs through the single patent application process and the single patent examination processes that were proposed. That was not going to work because the underlying law for patents in each country was still going to be different and therefore there would have to be examinations for many patents as to whether those differences in the underlying law in Australia and the underlying law in New Zealand meant that something should either be approved or not approved in Australia or approved or not approved in New Zealand. So the idea that you could have some single patent examination process that was somehow going to save significant cost was wrong. That said the bill as amended does have the support of Labour and we thank the Government for its willingness to be accommodating of the concerns that were noted by Labour as well as by submitters on this occasion.Patent law is very important. It is important that as a society we encourage innovation. Those who are innovating and investing in innovation cannot afford to do so if their innovation can be stolen and replicated by someone else after they have spent that money and investment on that new knowledge or that new invention. That is the philosophical basis for patents. As a society we are better off if we encourage innovation because we benefit from the new discoveries that are made and the new inventions that flow from that innovation.The return for the patent holder is that for a period following their discovery they have a monopoly right to the commercial benefits that arise from their discovery. That should not go on for ever. Monopolies do as monopolies are reputed to do and a monopoly faces much less constraint on its ability to charge or overcharge than if it faces competition and it is for that reason that there are rules surrounding patents that are quite strict both as to the length of the patent and as to what is patentable. There has to be a degree of novelty about the invention that is not obvious and that adds to the sum of knowledge that would not have occurred but for the discovery that is published through the patent.If it was not for patent protection there would be an incentive for people to keep things secret for ever as a way to protect their invention but that would mean that invention would not during the period it is secret be as widely utilised. Therefore the benefit to humanity of that invention would be less.The quid pro quo is that if you make public and then have controlled use of that patented venture—once the patent pops out of its black period during the application phase—the patent itself which describes the invention is public so the world learns of it. If it is a great thing people can beat a path and knock on the door of the inventor to try to get rights to the commercial use of it and through that mechanism can bring that innovation to the world and the inventor gets a monetary reward for that during the period of their monopoly control. At the end of the period it drops off patent and the world is free to use that innovation subject to there not being other patents that are still current and that could prevent its utilisation of the patented invention. That is the balance that we try to get right. We want to encourage innovation and we want to give a reward to the innovator but we do not want to extend their monopoly rights for too long because that goes the other way and suppresses the use of that invention to the detriment of humanity. So those are the principles that underlie patent law. There are some differences between New Zealand and Australian patent law that mean that the idea that we could have had a single examination process was not practical. I hope that the Minister is having a look at what went wrong in the background both in respect of the cost-benefit analysis and the substantive provisions as they were in the original bill."