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I'm Leigh Tristram.
I'm a Supervising Examiner of Patents
at IP Australia.
We give inventors the protection
that they need in order to get their inventions into the marketplace.
Our business needs to run
in an efficient fashion
such that our fees can cover
the cost of our operation.
Over the years, I've seen a lot of different people doing telework.
People who work from home
are generally more productive than people who work in the office.
My name is Marie-Luise Huber.
I'm a Patent Examiner for IP Australia.
I moved back to Melbourne at the end of 2008
and was able to continue with my work.
LEIGH: Marie-Louise has been
a teleworking outposted worker for some years now.
I love the flexibility that telework affords me.
I think working as a teleworker allows me to work without distraction.
So, one of the positives has been the ability to be flexible
with my time and the time I can do my work.
Having a link to a team meeting or a group meeting
that was reliable and stable as a video link -
that would make a huge difference to the meeting.
I find that I can be more productive at home,
because I can work at the times when I'm most effective for certain tasks,
and that's early in the morning for me.
Our staff are all qualified chemists and engineers.
However, when they join the office, they generally have very little, if any,
experience in relation to patents or law.
To get a return on investment of staff
you'd be talking approximately three to five years.
We needed to be able to retain staff
who had reasons for wanting to leave the geographical area.
Or we wanted to attract staff
who, for a variety of reasons, couldn't come to Canberra.
MARIE-LUISE: IP Australia have the ability to retain me as an examiner.
I would otherwise have gone back into the profession here.