Curran Clare: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Curran Clare: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Sitting date: 30 January 2013. Volume:687;Page:7665. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) 
: 
 Mr Deputy Speaker happy New Year. And happy New Year to everybody across the House. It is my view that we should be relentlessly positive and creative about our economy but the hands-off leave-it-to-the-market approach of this Government has failed all over the world and it is clearly failing in New Zealand. We are on the cusp of a new era and it is an era when new jobs and new wealth can be created in ways that we have not thought of in ways that will not harm our environment and in ways in which New Zealand—despite its size and its geographical isolation—can punch above its weight. That is because this is the era of digital ambition when our ability to innovate and to use technology to drive new business growth to create the new manufacturers of the future should be in place. Our intellectual property our intellectual know-how and our ability to be innovative are some of the great strengths of our nation but you would not know it given the pedestrian nature of this Government’s attitude to an environment in which innovation can flourish and new intellectual property can be born. 
 We are falling short and let me tell you how. Late last year in December at the Commerce Committee I asked the chief executive of the “Ministry for Everything” the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment two questions which I thought were pretty important. I asked what work the ministry which is responsible for economic development was doing on reviewing its sectors to identify the number of jobs that can be created and in particular the 170000 jobs that this Government said 2 years ago it would create by 2015. Is that right? 
Sue Moroney 
: Yes. 
CLARE CURRAN 
: None was the answer. There is no work being done on where these jobs might come from. This was from the chief executive officer of the ministry that advises the Government on economic development. He said: “We don’t do forecasts on job creation on a sector by sector basis.” So what does its staff do? Do they cross their fingers and hope that these jobs will miraculously appear somewhere in the economy? This was despite the fact that John Key and Bill English both said that this would happen. 
The other extraordinary revelation in that select committee was that our ministry for economic development does not have a clue as to the worth to New Zealand of our intellectual property. The committee was told that we are indeed supposed to be fostering an innovation economy. That meant an economy that has a strong knowledge base to it. But then he went on to say that the ministry’s job was to focus more on the legal regime because we are an “importer” of knowledge. In other words the focus is to provide an environment that protects the legal rights of those companies that export their knowledge to us not the companies in New Zealand that are creating knowledge that would then be exported and provide a return back home. 
Here is how the US values its intellectual property. It has done a lot of work to quantify and describe intellectual property as a sector. There are 75 industries associated with intellectual property $5 trillion in value-added products and services etc. and 40 million jobs 27.1 million of which are direct jobs equating to 35 percent of GDP. And that is a recent report. The US is fiercely protecting as we know its knowledge-based economy and I ask why we are not. 
In Australia in a report released just a few weeks ago it has been identified that the education and research institutions libraries and cultural institutions digital internet and web-hosting providers contribute 14 percent to Australia’s GDP or an amount of $182 billion. They employ 21 percent of the paid workforce or almost 2.4 million people and pay wages and salaries of $116 billion. These figures have all grown significantly faster than the rest of the economy between 2007 and 2010. It is estimated that a more flexible and technology-neutral copyright regime that meets the digital reality of the 21st century and the evolving needs of society would add additional value to the Australian economy of $600 million a year. 
And that is not all. Boston Consulting Group released a report in October last year which stated that the internet economy in the developed markets of the G20 is forecast to grow at an annual rate of 8 percent over the next 5 years and that in developing markets annual growth is expected to be 18 percent. These rates far outpace just about every traditional economic sector. So not only is growth delivering new jobs across the employment spectrum from app developers to smartphone manufacturers from internet marketers to what they call big data analysts but the jobs this growth creates are more valuable than others. Estimates show that in the US the multiplier effect for high-tech positions is three times that of jobs in traditional manufacturing. 
Where is the analysis in our country? Where is the analysis? In New Zealand we have none and our ministry is not doing any. Why is that? I think it is a pretty important question. We are not interested in pursuing it. We are not driving economic growth based on digital ambition. Instead as Steven Joyce said in an extraordinary interview on 7 January our future lies in wood processing. 
Today I attended lunch in Parliament with Sir Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the World Wide Web along with a number of my colleagues across the House. After he had spoken to that cross-parliamentary group of politicians he said to me and to others that one of the most important things that our country could do is abolish patents for software and that our country would then become a place where innovators want to be. More than 2 years ago the Commerce Committee unanimously decided to exclude software patents as part of its review of the Patents Act of 1953. That decision was supported by our local IT industry. 
Mid last year after fierce lobbying from multinationals the new Minister of Commerce Craig Foss in his wisdom—that is sarcasm—bowed to pressure and inserted an amendment to the bill that will completely change the intent. That amendment is opposed utterly by New Zealand’s IT industry including the Institute of IT Professionals NZRise New Zealand’s Open Source Society and over 1200 signatories to an industry petition. But it is supported by the multinational IT companies. It introduces unnecessary ambiguity into the legislation and it undermines its stated purpose the intentions of the select committee and his own stated objective. It is complete madness and it is anti Kiwi innovation and digital ambition. Kowtowing to the multinationals may be National’s way but it is not Labour’s way. We have got to have digital ambition and our future prosperity will be carved out by backing the talent of businesses working in high-tech Kiwi businesses. 
A thriving manufacturing sector is at the heart of Labour’s vision. A weightless economy is integral to that. Where is the analysis? Where is the plan around that? I do not see it. I do not hear it. It is not there from this Government. The manufacturing inquiry that is occurring at the moment as a result of a cross-party initiative between Labour the Greens New Zealand First and Mana is integral. So is getting our patent laws right. Quantifying the strength of our intellectual property sector might kick-start us to realise our own worth.