Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, where do I start? That was a fairly off-the-subject sort of way of working out what is discovery and what is invention. Can I say that this bill does not address the core problem. There is a lot of gutless rhetoric that has been given by government bureaucrats and people who have spoken on this which does not address the question: why are we allowing the patenting of discoverable material to be included in inventive patents? So as to highlight the fundamental flaw, which is not addressed by this bill, Senator Boyce talked about a can-opener being patented, the point being that the steel that the can-opener was made of is not itself patented; the inventive use of the steel is. The problem we have in the patent world—and Australia is a soft entry point for patents globally—is that we have included in the patents, which have now been challenged in Australian and American courts, the discoverable material. No-one was allowed to discover and patent the moon and, Senator Scullion, you cannot patent the wood in a tree—but you, being a clever bushie, might be able to patent a use of the wood. You might have been able to make a smart boomerang, but you could not actually patent the wood that the boomerang was made out of. This argument is as simple as that, and there is a lot of gutless political cover given to that. Politicians have been intimidated by the commercial world, and I have to say they are winning the argument.

When the minister last rose to speak in support of this bill last June, he described it as 'a major reform of the intellectual property system'. He also said it would 'ensure that Australia maintains a world-class intellectual property system'. But, at the same time, he did not have the courage politically to define the line between discovery and invention, so who is he kidding? The legislation does absolutely nothing of the kind. It really only feathers the nest of patent lawyers—and we have had plenty of them through the inquiry—patent attorneys and their mostly foreign owned clients. Australia is a soft entry point. The legislation ignores the opportunity to make real and lasting reforms. Why wouldn't you allow the freeing up of access to the discoverable material—that is, the gene? This bureaucratic—I will not say BS argument, but it is—