Margaret Tregurtha, Acting Director-General of IP Australia, explains why closing the loop with practitioners matters more than any single meeting on its own.
In the first half of this FICPI Focus 45 conversation, Rohan Wallace described what it felt like to push a frustrated profession's case against an Office that seemed unmoved. In Part II, host Ronelle Geldenhuys puts the same question to the other side of the table: Margaret Tregurtha, on what stakeholder engagement looks like from inside the Office.
Margaret's answer starts somewhere broader than examination. IP Australia, she says, thinks of its role as stewardship of the IP system, which means weighing attorneys' and applicants' interests against government policy, the wider economy, and citizens who may never file a single application but still feel the effects of a system that helps businesses grow. That framing matters for practitioners because it explains why an Office can agree with an attorney's reading of a case and still land somewhere different, not because it has ignored the input, but because it is balancing a wider set of obligations.
Formal channels, and the ones that matter more
Margaret gives an overview of the machinery IP Australia has built for engagement: the Patent Consultation Group, the Trademark and Design Consultation Group, quality workshops, a public policy register, targeted consultations. She is just as quick to point to what happens outside that machinery, at conferences, in emails, in conversations that happen to come up around a session. Both matter, in her account, because formal processes surface systemic issues while informal ones catch things early, sometimes before they need a formal process at all.
The principle she keeps returning to is closing the loop. Every piece of feedback, she says, should get an answer, even when the answer is no.
"You build trust by being open to having the conversation, by being transparent, by being accountable to feedback," Margaret says.
For attorneys used to raising a concern and hearing nothing back, that is a specific, workable standard to hold any IP Office to, not only Australia's. Margaret herself notes that any feedback, whichever channel it arrives through, is meant to be "collated and sent to the right area for a response", and that if that isn't happening for someone, the Office wants to know.
The CII episode, from the other side
Margaret confirms what Part I of this article described from the profession's side: the Computer Implemented Invention (CII) Task Force's submissions were welcomed, and its input fed into the Office's revision of the patent manual, which she describes as a living document still being tested through further consultation. She is candid that the Office and the profession will not always land in the same place, given their different roles, but treats disagreement itself as a normal part of a relationship that is working, not evidence that it has failed.
She also points to regular contact with counterparts in Canada and the UK, Offices of comparable size and legal tradition, as one way IP Australia checks its own practice against others. She is honest, though, that she cannot say how much of the Office's approach is genuinely distinctive rather than simply what a well-run Office does anywhere. That kind of cross-border comparison, whether gathered through an Office's own contacts or a member's own network of peers, is exactly the sort of perspective that is harder to build alone. For many practitioners, those perspectives are built through communities like FICPI, where peers share how Offices approach the same question in practice.
Looking ahead, Margaret names the impact of artificial intelligence on the patent system as the next test of the same model.
"[Dealing with AI] isn't something for the IP Office to do in isolation," she says. "This is a joined up conversation with our community, including the profession, innovators, other policy areas in government and our international collaborators."
What this means in practice
Margaret's account is a useful corrective for any attorney who assumes a quiet patent Office is a closed one. The message underneath the detail is that engagement is a habit rather than an event, one that survives disagreement as long as both sides keep the conversation open when it gets hard. For independent attorneys, that is worth remembering the next time a submission seems to disappear into a policy register: raise it again, raise it through a colleague or a representative body, and give the Office the chance to close the loop.
Next steps
- Read Part I, where Rohan Wallace describes how the profession organised to bring about the CII changes Margaret discusses here.
- Listen to the full FICPI Focus 45 conversation with Margaret Tregurtha for her complete account of how IP Australia engages with the profession.. FICPI members may view the recording of this episode from 28 May 2026: https://ficpi.org/on-demand/videos/2582
- Audio-only versions of the episodes are available to any interested parties across major podcast platforms – search for ‘FICPI Focus 45’.
- FICPI webinars are open to any interested party. Find out what’s upcoming at: https://ficpi.org/eventstraining/upcoming-webinars
- Find out more about FICPI Australia: https://au.ficpi.org
This article was generated by AI using careful prompts from our Communications Committee, review from our IP attorney Editorial Board, and editing from our expert editor.