Dalziel Lianne: Patents Bill — In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDalziel Lianne: Patents Bill — In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 27 August 2013. Volume:693;Page:12952. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East): This bill the Patents Bill as my colleague Chris Hipkins has said was introduced into this Parliament quite some time ago—on 9 July 2008 in fact when the Hon JudithTizard’s name was on the bill as Associate Minister of Commerce.Hon Ruth Dyson: Who was the Minister?Hon LIANNE DALZIEL: Of course I was the Minister of Commerce at the time. When the bill was referred to the Commerce Committee though I was no longer the Minister of Commerce. I was in fact the chair of the select committee. I will take all of those encouraging words that I just heard from the Hon Trevor Mallard to be an endorsement of my chairmanship of that particular committee and I want in turn to acknowledge Clare Curran who actually acted as a very strong liaison person for a range of interests that were needing to be heard.I think that when the original set of submissions was heard on the bill we were left with the position—and we had a very good meeting with Simon Power who was the Minister at the time which basically gave us comfort that the position that we would ultimately adopt would be one that would be acceptable to the Government. He was very accepting of the fact that we were engaging quite appropriately with the wide range of interests that were expressing quite strong views on both sides of the argument. I think we came to a very good position and we did so in a very robust way.It was of great disappointment I think to both Clare and me that we ended up in a situation where a new Minister a fresh Minister having another look at the legislation decided to overturn all of that good work and thereby create exactly the same environment that we had confronted when we heard the submissions.I want to comment on this because I am not going to be here for very much longer so it is an opportunity just to say that when I was a Minister I found that allowing the select committee to have the leeway to work closely with officials and to even meet off-line with people who had very strong interests actually enabled people to reach sensible conclusions. Sometimes there is no need to stick to a formatted process just because that is the way things are always done. Sometimes things get missed in the to-ing and fro-ing and sometimes it is actually better to get people to go off-line and have these conversations and to show a bit of trust.I think that trust was certainly experienced with Simon Power as the Minister. I felt as the Minister that I had that relationship with him and then afterwards as the select committee chair again there very much was flexibility from that particular Minister to enable the officials to also go off-line and to have conversations with the people who were making submissions.I really want to kind of endorse the process and invite Parliament to think very carefully because I notice that we have had a letter for an update of our Standing Orders. In fact it may be worthwhile having a look at that because at a select committee hearing during the select committee process you cannot provide briefings to people who are not members of the committee. Well you can to other MPs but you cannot provide briefings outside unless there is a report to the House and then that enables information to be made publicly available.I think that some of those rules could actually be looked at if it was done by agreement. It seems to me that the Standing Orders of Parliament would be improved if in fact our select committees were able to facilitate that level of engagement with the officials and the protagonists. This is in relation to this one clause that is in Part 1. It is absolutely related to that because Supplementary Order Paper 120 which brings in the definition of a computer program amends clause 10 which is in Part 1. That is why Ithink that it is absolutely critical because what we ended up seeing was that the Minister himself obviously went off-line in a process as a new Minister and then came back with what was in fact an unacceptable option without discussing it with the members of the select committee who had—Hon Ruth Dyson: Which Minister was this?Hon LIANNE DALZIEL: Well it was the Minister of Commerce who is in the chair now. I do not know why that happened but putting that particular clause out into the public arena on a Supplementary Order Paper caused a furore because there really had been an acceptance that we had reached a good decision we had used a good process to get there and the select committee had actually contributed I think very positively to this bill.I think what the Minister has unfortunately done by going down this pathway—and it actually picks up on what Trevor Mallard was saying before about the timetable and about how he had not seen this particular piece of legislation since it first had Simon Power’s name on it. In actual fact this could have been dealt with a lot sooner and the legislation could have been passed and in place prior to the 2011 general election. I think it would have been incredibly helpful to have had that matter resolved although admittedly he did not take over that role until after the 2011 election. But here we are in 2013 and we have wasted literally 2 years of our time generally to update patent law.The legislation itself obviously has lots of different provisions within it but because this particular provision is so important for where we get to in terms of the IT sector and the definition that the legislation will now contain—and I have got so many Supplementary Order Papers here that I am just trying to find exactly the correct one that has the new wording in it which is that “(1) A computer program is not an invention for the purposes of this Act. (2) Subsection (1) prevents anything from being an invention for the purposes of this Act only to the extent that a patent or an application relates to a computer program as such.”The wording “as such” is still there which is not as helpful as it could have been but it is better than the previous wording. The one example that we kept coming back to at the Commerce Committee was what we called the “Fisher and Paykel example” where the particular embedded software within the machine itself is not a computer program in its own—Jonathan Young: Yes it is.Hon LIANNE DALZIEL: Well it is not a computer program but the purpose of patenting it is for the type of washing machine that it is rather than the software process per se. I suppose that means “as such” does it not? What it does mean is that the mere execution of a method within a computer does not allow the method to be patented and I think that is the core difference in respect of the wording that has finally been agreed.So I think that we are all on the same page. This is essentially what the select committee agreed to do with slightly different wording and we could have avoided the significant level of delay that has been incurred if we had been able to get together and probably resolve these issues before it came out the way that it did.I think it is kind of a warning to others who are in this situation: when there are competing interests then I think trusting the select committee to play a role in terms of seeking to broker a compromise is actually not a bad thing to do. But then when you have trusted it to do that please let that continue and do not try to overrule it without going back to the people who brokered that compromise. Sometimes legislation will be compromised if you have really strong competing views. Sometimes there is a way through the issue as I think we found in this particular case. We were all on the same page and it would have been helpful if the Minister had decided to join us there much earlier.