Prosser RichardRICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): I am pleased to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take a final call in this third reading of the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill. New Zealand First supports this bill.There has been and there continues to be a degree of misunderstanding about what this bill actually is and what it does. What this bill does not deal with is patents or trademarks. It does not address the ownership of patented compounds or indeed the nature of those compounds. What this bill deals with is the data that is generated in the pursuit of the development of those compounds not with the compounds themselves. It is not about patents; it is about the research that goes into creating patentable products. Products themselves can still be protected via the legislation providing that the researcher or the developer—whoever it is who has created the compound or discovered the use for it—has the wherewithal to fund that patenting and trademarking process on an international scale.Nothing in this bill actually stands in the way of a third party doing their own research and recreating a particular compound. It does however prevent that third party from gaining access to the data that was used or generated in the development of the compound or in the development of the innovative use for the compound by the original inventor. Or more to the point it extends the protections that already exist from 5 years to 10 years against the original change that the officials proposed which was to go to 8 years.People have talked about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and how this bill will be affected by it. The way that this bill is structured falls short of what the TPP would require if in fact the TPP was going to happen—which as we now know it probably is not certainly in its current form or time frame depending on the outcome of the United States election. The bill's proposed 10-year protection is still conditional on new and innovative uses being registered for any given compound rather than it being a blanket protection as applies in Australia and some other parts of the world and indeed as the TPP would require. So the advantage to New Zealand in extending the research protection is that it provides an additional incentive for companies to do their high-tech R & D here rather than anywhere else.My colleague Steffan Browning from the Greens raised the concern—well he has raised it tonight but he also raised it in the Primary Production Committee—that by passing this bill we are helping the likes of Monsanto and other evil empires to tighten their grip on the free peoples of the world and really that is not the case. My point in response—and I will reiterate it here—is that there is a large and growing thrust in the world's wealthy and discerning markets towards organics and other foods that are produced without GE without GM and without the excessive use of kinds of agrichemicals as we have come to consider them. Producing those foods which is something that New Zealand does particularly well and which we are developing a reputation for—if we are going to do that on a large commercial scale it will still require specialty compounds in order to maximise safe and efficient production. This bill will in fact make it easier for companies to develop such compounds so you will have the likes of better compost-starter enzymes better fatty acid herbicides better Bacillus thuringiensis - carrier solutions better soap-based fungicides and all those sorts of things. It is not just a bill that protects chemical companies as we know them; it is a bill that gives additional protection to all manner of further ongoing agrichemical research including into organics and GE-free.In extending the protections it gives companies that are doing that sort of work an additional incentive to build their research labs here and carry out that work here—the research and the manufacturing—rather than doing it in California or Switzerland or somewhere else. I do not think it is going to be a bill that will enable evil corporations to give us three-eyed sheep two-headed chickens asparagus that glows in the dark or anything else that we do not want.Hon Michael Woodhouse: I love asparagus that glows in the dark.RICHARD PROSSER: Ha ha! I have never seen asparagus that glows in the dark Mr Woodhouse. I have seen a report about some pigs that glow in the dark—they were created in Japan. But that is a whole different story.When those companies do elect to do that research and manufacturing here in New Zealand it is this country and our economy that benefit. We benefit through job creation and that is everything from the construction sector—as it builds new labs and new factories—to attracting more of our best and brightest to universities to study the biological and physical sciences that are involved in the manufacture the research and the development of agricultural compounds and veterinary medicines. We keep more of those people here in New Zealand because they can get the good well-paying career-advancing jobs that their qualifications then call for here in New Zealand rather than having to go overseas to find that work.Small companies are also advantaged by these sorts of additional protections because they are the ones that are least able to gain additional protections through other means—they do not necessarily have the funding and the wherewithal behind them to go into international legal processes to get trademarks patents and so forth. This legislation is another mechanism by which we can extend those protections to them. It is a shot in the arm for the Kiwi inventor the innovator Kiwi ingenuity—No. 8 fencing wire—the guy working away quietly in his shed and the independent researcher working away quietly in a lab somewhere who comes up with a brilliant idea. It is all part of the New Zealand story. It is those smaller operators who will benefit most from this kind of legislation.As things stand when existing protections expire—we do have existing protections and this bill is about extending them rather than creating them—all the information that was discovered and the data that was created that went along with the application to register it becomes available to all and sundry. That means that say the XYZ Company" from the United States or Germany or China or wherever has then got access to that data and can then use it to essentially duplicate the work that the original inventor did. They might come up with a slight change and come up with a different product. They themselves then have the wherewithal in terms of scale to manufacture larger quantities to market globally and essentially to pull the rug out from under the person in New Zealand who had the bright idea to start with.If somebody is in a position where they are doing that sort of research be they an independent operator or a small company they are much less likely to put that kind of time effort money and resource into developing a new compound or into researching a new use for it if they know that 5 years down the track all the protection for that research that they have done—the blood sweat and tears that they have put into their hard toil; perhaps they mortgaged their house to fund it—can potentially be pulled away from them by some large corporation that has just been sitting and waiting for the protections to expire.At the same time as other members have mentioned—I think Mr McKelvie mentioned it—companies based in other countries that have in a similar manner created new compounds or developed new uses for them will be able to bring their products to New Zealand knowing that they will have a similar comparable degree of protection for that data here as they would have anywhere else. It means that by passing this bill we give some surety to New Zealand farmers—to livestock farmers to growers and so forth—that they will be able to get access to the newest latest most cutting-edge innovative products that are available overseas because there is no disincentive for the foreign-based companies that create and manufacture these compounds to bring them here as they know that they will have the same degree of protection.In closing I would like to reiterate that in some ways we do not believe this bill goes far enough. It could have gone further but it went at least as far as the majority of submitters from the industry asked for. That aside we agree with the intentions of the bill. We believe that it is necessary and that it will bring advantages to this country. New Zealand First supports it and I commend it to the House. Thank you."