Curran ClareCLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Every time there is a disaster in our country the community involved pulls together and is of course supported by the rest of us. But those of us who are not affected or who are less affected can offer only support and aroha and in some cases practical support and it can be quite difficult to stand on the sidelines and watch the pain of people in those communities. Sunday night affected almost all of us but as we know the people of Kaikōura North Canterbury and Wellington were most affected and the recovery will be tough for those people and businesses. Our thoughts are all with you today.We know that most people in New Zealand probably will not be watching the debate on the third reading of this particular bill. Having sat through many long hours on the Commerce Committee and been quite astonished—and appalled really—by the process that unfolded there I think it is very important to have recorded in the Hansard of this House the impact of poor process and poor governance on a piece of law that goes through our House. It should not go unremarked. It really annoys me that a member can get up in the House and—to be honest—disingenuously try to minimise what was actually a catastrophe of a bill that came before a select committee and ended up coming back to the House gutted by a large percentage. The fact that members who also sat on that select committee can diminish the importance of that—it is no wonder that people are disillusioned with politics and politicians when that honesty cannot actually be there. I think it is important that we do dissect it and I know that colleagues on this side of the House particularly those who sat on the select committee have done that today. It was unusual and it was disappointing—and it was time-wasting and money-wasting—to have a piece of legislation that had been so poorly prepared and poorly thought through before it came to the House. I think I said in the Committee stage that the Labour Party did the Government a favour by agreeing to and voting for the amendments to this bill at select committee. This is because if we had not and if we had been joined in that by the other Opposition parties the bill coming back to this House would have been the bill that we had discovered was actually being recommended against by the officials who had put it in there in the first place. This of course related to the significant part of the bill on the inclusion of a single patent application process and a single patent examination process for a new way of creating patents that was not only out of date because there was already a new international process being developed through the World Intellectual Property Organization but would also have been much more costly. When we forensically required the officials to go back and tell us what the cost-benefit analysis was whether one had been done and on what basis it had been done we discovered that those costings described as guesstimates and back-of-the-envelope costings were going to be in the order of around $500000 for an application process. When we considered that it seemed to be somewhat exorbitant and inefficient and it went against the original intent of the bill which was to streamline a process. I suppose the point to make is that this is not a major piece of law so what we are arguing about and what we are pointing out is not the biggest booboo that the Government has made but it is enough of a booboo—and I guess it is an indication of a trend in legislation that comes before select committee that has not been properly looked at and thought through and tested before it actually gets to select committee—for us to be severely concerned. I agree with my colleague David Clark who said it really does reflect back on the ministerial leadership. Yes you can blame some of the officials and hold them to account—I think we have done that and I think we have done that enough—but ultimately the buck stops with the Minister. If he had not read it properly and did not understand the implications of it if he had not asked the proper questions about the basis on which this new patent process was being put into the bill then perhaps it should not have come before the committee in the state that it did. I mean it never even went through a proper pre-legislation process. From the process it went through the clear indication was that it was not going to work but it still got pushed through and it ended up getting dumped. Luckily for the Government the Opposition actually agreed to amending it—to taking out that large piece of the legislation at the select committee—which means that it has come back to the House like this. This piece of legislation almost does nothing which is why I say it is not a major piece of legislation. It really is a bit of a non-piece of legislation now. It does streamline the way that patent attorneys are trained and the way that they operate in a trans-Tasman context—we have done that with other industries; we have done that with accounting—but this really is not groundbreaking or earth-shattering. It could have been an innovative piece of legislation if the Government had actually done the work properly. There was a piece of legislation in 2013 that reformed the Patents Act 1953. The Patents Act 2013 did go through a very lengthy robust controversial process over a number of years. That was a major reform of a piece of legislation from the 1950s about whether our whole patent law needed to be reformed—and yes it did. It needed to be reformed and modernised and updated. The most controversial part of that was what it ended up not doing which we thought was in the best interests of our innovators and that was to make software patentable. There was in effect an exclusion given for software which still had copyright protection and it still has protections for intellectual property. If we had made software developments patentable that would have resulted in the major tech companies that are based offshore coming in with big patent suits locking up innovation for our small innovators and also unleashing the force of the patent trolls which is a hideous industry that feeds off the ideas of others and holds up innovation. We did a good thing with that and that ended up being a unified approach across the House that had the innovation industry very engaged. I think that was one of the best decisions made in this kind of legislation for a long time. This piece of legislation is really a joke. It is embarrassing. It was described as sloppy" and "unedifying" in Labour's minority view. Minister Paul Goldsmith really should learn a lesson. We hope that he will learn a lesson and that next time a piece of legislation from him comes before the select committee he will have done the homework required before it gets to the House for first reading and comes before the scrutiny of the select committee.I do acknowledge the work done by the chair of the Commerce Committee Melissa Lee and other members of the committee. The heavy lifting to be honest was done by the Opposition side but I do acknowledge the chairmanship of Melissa Lee in this bill. I am looking forward to the next piece of legislation from Paul Goldsmith because I do not think the bar could be much lower."