Thank you, Chairperson, Minister Radebe, friends, colleagues and comrades. The airlines operating within South Africa, our civil aviation regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority and our air traffic navigational services all have an excellent international safety reputation.
It is true that in recent weeks there has once more been a spate of accidents on the light and leisure side of aviation - what is known as general aviation. Most of these appear to have been related to human error. Notwithstanding these unfortunate incidents, it is simply a fact that it is infinitesimally safer to travel in our skies than, unfortunately, it is to travel on our roads. However, the tragedy of 9/11 in the United States and concerns about the safety of air travel in some parts of the world, including in parts of our continent, underline just how important it is not to become complacent about aviation standards and about safety and security. It is against this general global background that the South African Civil Aviation Authority, the CAA, is regularly audited by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, ICAO. In recent years the US Federal Aviation Authority has also been auditing other national regulators, particularly in countries like our own, into which US airlines are flying, or whose airlines are flying into the US. I would like to be anti-imperialist, but given the FAA's enormous experience and expertise, I think, as South Africans, we should welcome these audits that they have been conducting.
The present legislation, in fact, flows directly out of some of these recent audits, which raised questions on the structuring of our civil aviation regulatory regime, in particular in regard to the lines of reporting, command and answerability around aviation safety and security.
The problems in this area arose from the fact that there were three separate Acts that had been passed at separate times - going back to the Aviation Act of 1962; the Civil Aviation Offences Act of 1972; and the more recent South African Civil Aviation Authority Act of 1998. These Acts did not properly align with each other and this Bill now seeks to repeal all of those Acts and introduce a more aligned dispensation for aviation regulation.
Among the challenges that were raised in these international audits of our system was the fact that we had an Aviation Commissioner sitting in the Department of Transport and reporting directly to the Minister on the one hand, and then on the other hand a CEO of the CAA reporting to a board, with the board reporting to the Minister. The lines of authority and responsibility were open to potential confusion. Fortunately I don't think that ever happened in practice, but if there had been a serious or major national security threat, for instance, these confusing lines of command, authority and responsibility might have provoked problems.
In the past several months we've tried to produce a patch-up solution to this - we've made the commissioner and the CEO of the CAA one and the same person. Clearly that was a temporary solution, so in this current legislation we have sought to clean up this whole area. We have done away with a separate commissioner and CEO and created a Director of Civil Aviation. That director will head the CAA and on critical matters of aviation safety and security the director will report directly to the Minister.
What then is the role of the CAA board? This became a critical area of debate and dispute and discussion in our public hearings. Some stakeholders favoured a board with full responsibility for all of the CAA's functions. That is, they favoured a model in which the director would report to the board on all matters and the board would then report to the Minister. On the other hand, some of us wondered why we needed a board at all. The CAA is, after all, a safety regulator and not a publicly owned entity operating as a commercial enterprise like Transnet, SAA or Eskom. In those latter cases, like Transnet or SAA, a board focusing on the complex corporate market interests of the entity makes eminent sense.
In the end, the committee settled for a hybrid arrangement for the CAA, as was proposed in the original Bill tabled before Parliament. The director, as I said, reports directly to the Minister on the key regulatory functions of safety and security. The board, however, is responsible for corporate governance matters such as financial management, human resource policies, etc.
In the committee stage we added a further functional responsibility for the board, because among its tasks, the CAA is also a service provider to the private sector. It licences pilots, for instance. We've now added that the board should be required to monitor the service standards and customer satisfaction levels and report to the Minister on any matters concerning such issues.
So we didn't take the more radical step, which some of us favoured, of entirely dispensing with the CAA board. The committee, however, in its report to Parliament on this Bill, has recommended that the new Parliament - and presumably therefore the new executive - should do a more comprehensive review of the broad spectrum of corporate and governance models that are in place for a range of public entities.
We have SOEs, public utilities, agencies of all kinds, economic regulators, safety regulators, etc. Over the past three Parliaments, we have surely begun to develop a more grounded experience. I think in the mid-1990s we might have made the assumption that a one-size-fits-all institutional arrangement for this vast array of entities made sense - a kind of corporate entity with a board of directors, etc.
In our experience, certainly over these last four years, as this portfolio committee, I think we've run into a number of problems in this whole governance because we are dealing with different entities and they're not the same kind of entity. Whether the same corporate structure is appropriate is something that we would like to see reviewed by the next government and the next Parliament.
The committee is recommending that next year some kind of White Paper policy process, perhaps led by the Department of Public Enterprises and by the corresponding portfolio committee here in Parliament, should review our experience across the spectrum of parastatal entities.
In this legislation we have chosen to strike a more cautious middle road. In addition to these matters, this rather long and technically complicated Bill also establishes an independent Aviation Safety Investigation Board in compliance with Annex 13 of the Chicago Convention. The Bill also gives effect to provisions of the international Convention on Offences and Certain Other Acts Committed on Board Aircraft.
I would like to thank our hardworking colleagues from the Department of Transport, including Anwar and the team that he led. Given its technical complexities, this was not an easy piece of legislation, and so our special thanks go to the drafters and also to the state law advisers. I know, as a chairperson, that my own preferred, rather open-ended workshop style of tackling legislation like this does not make it easy for the drafters or the lawyers, but hopefully it results in a better product at the end of the day. Thanks also to our colleagues from the CAA and its board, and to the civil aviation sector, that kept us on our toes as a committee and helped us tremendously with their professional and technical knowledge. Finally, thank you to all the members of the portfolio committee. The ANC supports the Bill. Thank you. [Applause.]