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[Music] [Applause] this presentation is also really about a field of public health the topic of access to essential medicines and um really i've been thinking about with the present covert crisis some of the enduring issues and problems and challenges with australia's framework for access to essential medicines so my argument is that our patent system has not been very well designed to deal with public health and pandemics and there's a certain kind of sense of these battles recurring over the ages so when i started off as an academic back in 2001 the front page news was uh nelson mandela's government being sued by 39 of the world's largest pharmaceutical drug companies over the provision of generic medicines sourced from india to try to deal with hiv aids and that kind of crisis at that particular time led to various international efforts to try to enable better mechanisms to provide for access to essential medicines 20 years on we are having very similar sorts of controversies in the context of the covert crisis in relation to access to central medicines including in relation to vaccines tests rat tests in particular at the moment in australia and other diagnostics and kind of future treatments as well so i i think that kind of suggests that there are kind of problems with the international structure dealing with intellectual property access to essential medicines but there's also i think some inherent issues and problems in the way in which australia has been approaching some of these issues so i just want to quickly go through some various different institutions looking at the high court of australia the australian parliament and law firm bodies and some of the issues around international trade law and how that has diminished some of our regulatory autonomy and flexibilities in terms of the choices that we can have so in relation to battles in the high court of australia so the high court of australia is at the apex of our judicial system uh normally cases dealing with matters of intellectual property come first through the federal court of australia and then the full court of the federal court of australia and then the high court in certain matters will take on certain cases there's often been kind of tensions within the hierarchy within australia so i p australia has the paid office and that's the administrative body historically it's kind of taken quite a positive view towards patent applications in relation to the life sciences and healthcare and the medicines the federal court of australia and the fourth federal court of australia have also been quite interested in a proprietary approach to intellectual property particularly around patent rights the high court of australia though has been a little bit more complicated it's been often very much dependent upon the dominant personalities within the seven judge court for a long while the dominant personality was justice gummer who had a very proprietarian approach to patent rights he was often in kind of conflict with his kind of con colleague justice kirby justice kirby uh has always been very conscious of the impacts of patents upon public health he was concerned particularly in the alpha farm case about the dangers of evergreening extending the life of a patent beyond its set term whether through direct or indirect means beyond the step monopoly so that kind of conflict for many years kind of animated the approach of the high court of australia to matters around patent and public health once chief justice french joined the high court of australia the approach became a little bit more unsettled in certain matters french who's a scientist a physicist by training was willing to allow a very broad approach to paintable subject matter particularly in a case dealing with methods of human treatment but on other occasions um was kind of concerned about there being an exorbitant monopoly in relation to patents so in the myriad case which dealt with patents for genetic testing for breast cancer and ovarian cancer here is the view that the patent claims by utah biotech firm were really an effort to claim information and therefore were not permissible um paintable subject matter more recently we've had chief justice keefel in charge of the high court of australia uh on certain iep matters like the plain packaging case and the myriad case i guess she's demonstrated kind of an interesting kind of public health concerns but that's why we haven't really had any kind of test cases in relation to patents relating to vaccines or tests in the covert era so some judicial progress here and there but nothing necessarily systematic in the australian parliament the kind of the topic of access to medicines has periodically popped up i can't remember lobbying julia gillard when she was a shadow health minister and you know she was launching a campaign against the howard government at the time over the australian united states free trade agreement and was kind of complaining about the dangers of evergreening of patents so on occasion interest in the topic has spiked but often the topic is so complex and technical that they have spun off inquiries to specialist law reform bodies so the australian law reform commission was asked to investigate gene patents made various recommendations in relation to experimental use and compulsory licensing and crown use the gruen report was a specialist inquiry set up by the gillard government to have a look at the impacts of farm circle patents really interesting empirical research suggesting that patent-term extensions and evergreening of patents was being very costly in terms of the australian economy the coalition then came to power and that report kind of uh was not acted upon the productivity commission who has been very concerned about policy-based work around intellectual property looked at the totality of intellectual property but they are kind of particularly kind of concerned about some of the imbalances within the patent system and they recommended that the thresholds for pain validity should be set higher and that there should be a broader array of exceptions and defenses some of those recommendations have been implemented by the coalition government particularly around patents the hlcc has been interested in some of the competition impacts of patents but has not necessarily taken much in the way of uh test cases the buyer administration has uh appointed lena khan as the chair of the federal trade commission who's a hipster anti-trust buster and there's a new enthusiasm within the united states for investigating some of the competition impacts of intellectual property just to wrap up i just want to kind of really note that in in many ways australia's policy flexibilities have been increasingly limited by various international agreements so the chips agreement in 904 laid down a multilateral framework with minimum standards and norms in relation to intellectual property australia then adopted trips plus standards as part of the united states free trade agreements we nearly adopted the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement which would have some border restrictions on the distribution of medicines but the european parliament successfully led a rebellion against that australia has then kind of adopted trips double plus standards particularly in the trans-pacific partnership which has kind of gone ahead without the united states and we've also kind of agreed to the regional comprehensive economic partnership another kind of regional agreement it has more cuff trips measures some of the more radical measures within that agreement were removed uh just to wrap up at the moment there's been a raging debate over the trip's waiver for the last couple of years so south africa and india argue that there should be a waiver of some of the requirements in relation to the trips agreement the australian government has eventually agreed to a trip's waiver for vaccines but the united kingdom and the european union and switzerland have been busy obstructing and blocking consensus at the moment on a trip's waiver so this is a really interesting moment and hopefully we can have some much more transformative changes to intellectual property access to essential medicines in australia and globally [Music] you