Seymour David; Salesa JennyDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in support of the Plant Variety Rights Bill. I have to say tonight I've heard it all. I heard the Minister speak saying that this bill was a divider amongst people who would be on the right or the wrong side of history—to support this bill was to be on the right side of history. I sat there and I thought Here's a guy who went mountain biking and moved home in the middle of a global pandemic in contradiction of the rules that he had made because he was the Minister of Health at the time talking about being on the right side of history." I had to laugh. But it does show that politics can be very forgiving. He's still a Minister under the Jacinda Ardern Government and still helping pass laws such as this very important Plant Variety Rights Bill.It's very important that this bill is passed because we need a framework for people to do business and in New Zealand a lot of business is agribusiness. We need to be able to trade what we produce; so it's absolutely critical that we have an arrangement with other countries and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) or the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) as it's now called in the form that the Labour Party finds acceptable—it's amazing what a difference two letters can make—is one of those frameworks that allows us to trade with our friends around the world. Having a set of rules say if a person develops a variety of plant and uses a specific variety that they can keep the rights in that that they can extract the value for their work. That's really important. So it's important that we have plant variety rights (PVR) and it's important that they're consistent with the agreements we have such as the CPTPP with our partners around the world. That is all well and good and that is worth supporting. I think it would be a huge mistake not to support it.But what's curious about this piece of legislation is that it's sort of confected or concatenated. It doesn't only align New Zealand's plant variety rights legislation with the CPTPP so people can develop new forms of plants and use those rights to make money and trade with our friends around the world; it also says it makes the plant variety rights regime consistent with the Treaty of Waitangi. What it does is it says it does this by incentivising plant breeders to engage early with kaitiaki if the new variety they wish to seek a plant variety right for may involve a taonga species establishing a Māori Plant Varieties Committee to assess the effect of the grant of a PVR on kaitiaki relationships and make decisions on whether the PVR application should proceed.Now let's just spell out what this actually means. It means if you're one of those people who's involved in developing new plant varieties to export and trade with our friends around the world to generate wealth to provide for your farms and your firms for you friends and your family if you're one of those people engaging in that sort of productive entrepreneurial activity then good on you but first you may have to check in with the Māori Plant Varieties Committee and see if you can get permissions see if you can proceed. A lot of people might ask "Why?" Why has the Government chosen to concatenate this very noble piece of legislation that allows New Zealanders to trade with others around the world with this new obligation—this new tax one might say—on the ability to innovate and create new plant varieties and become wealthier as a country? Why have they done that?Well we can only assume that it is due to this world view that we see out of this Government that as someone put it to me recently democracy is different in New Zealand. Democracy in New Zealand doesn't mean that we have elected representative bodies where one person has one vote where political power is proportionate to the number of people—oh no no; that's old fashioned thinking! No forget the fact that most of this country's history is a long march towards that kind of democratic institution! Forget that we used to celebrate democracy as the best system of government for protecting people's rights and allowing people to live their lives—oh forget all of that! What we now believe or what this Government now believes is that actually democracy in New Zealand means democracy for most people and special institutions that give people decision-making rights and power and perhaps ownership based on birth—the exact set of ideas that for hundreds of years people have been campaigning against. So much of the long march for a free and liberal society has been demolishing caste and class expanding the range of liberties that an individual has as a person and then making sure that they're universal and people can access those liberties regardless of creed or race.This legislation says actually there are now two sets of rights. If you want to go about developing plant varieties first you've got to check in with the Māori Plant Varieties Committee. I can't think of something more likely to create division and frustration where people start to see each other for their racial background not because they themselves prefer to racialise people but because actually that's the official Government policy—that people should be treated differently before the law based on ancestry the exact thing people have been trying to get rid of get out of our society for hundreds of years so that each person could be free and equal.So it's going to lead to divisiveness but it's also just going to make it harder to get stuff done. Instead of being able to go ahead and succeed with an idea on its merits—does it use resources well does it satisfy customers does it lower the environmental footprint; all those sorts of questions that people in modern business around the world might ask and you have to ask those questions of course to be commercially viable—you have to ask the Māori Plant Varieties Committee to assess the effect of the grant of a plant variety on kaitiaki relationships and make decisions on whether the plant variety right application should proceed. It's that extra hurdle.And here's the next thing. People doing business in New Zealand are often globally connected. In fact remember at the start of this this whole piece of legislation is about the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). So people are going to have to explain to people around the world that "Yes New Zealand is a free and democratic society but there's this special panel we have to ask because you see the Government thinks that some people based on ancestry have a special connection to the plant rights. So we have to ask them and then hopefully they'll say yes and we'll be able to develop our business venture and keep our intellectual property but you know you never quite know how it goes."It starts to sound like doing business in a country with quite a different set of values and institutions than what we would like to think of New Zealand as—a First World open free society that wants to do business with the world. And unfortunately increasingly New Zealanders are becoming very disenfranchised with this kind of thing when this Government is going about business as usual but also changing the constitutional arrangements of this country in such a way that after hundreds of years of progress for everyone to be free and equal—to look at the content of people's character not the colour of their skin to take each person as you find them; that's something Helen Clark said that I'll always remember actually—all of a sudden we are starting to say "Well actually you know if you have one set of ancestry you have these rights; if you've got another set of ancestry you have another set of rights." That is wrong.So where does that leave us with the Plant Variety Rights Bill? Well ACT has to support it at least to first reading at least to have the discussion at select committee on how this legislation should work. We couldn't oppose it because it's so essential to have a system of property rights compatible with our trading relationships. But we have to be clear that the reservations about the route that this Government is taking us down with these Treaty obligations as they call them is very destructive to the future of our country.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): This debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day.The House adjourned at 9.56 p.m."