Heard this programme on ABC yesterday:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/patents-are-only-inventive-sometimes/4902102
A lady actually looked at the 75 patents filed in a particular field over four years in Australia. Every single one of them was trivial. Every single one of them was knocked back by the patent office. Every one was granted on appeal because the lawyers could argue that there was a trivial (but 'necessary') difference between that and the previous work which made it 'novel'. So the "substantially new contribution" idea so often put forward as the reason for patents is actually shown in practice to be the "lawyer's scintilla of difference" idea.
Not only that, but she showed examples of the same patents being used to lock other companies out of the field - even when the defendant proved that they had independently come up with the idea. So much for licensing new technology being the way to improve - these were simply used to crush and exclude competitors, even when trivial.
How much research is being done into whether or not the patent system is actually working as intended? How much does the Government know about how the patent system actually works, as opposed to how it's theoretically supposed to work?