Deputy Speaker, Speaker, Deputy President and hon members, I rise in support of the Parliament Budget Vote on behalf of the ANC. As this is likely to be the last parliamentary Budget Vote before the elections next year, it is not surprising that there has been quite a lot of politicking.
I want at this point to respond in particular to some of the issues that the hon Watson of the DA raised. He said that the President was waging a war against Parliament. He never substantiated that, so I don't quite know what he meant. However, he did speak about the fact that the executive do not answer written questions. He said that 218 written questions were not answered last year.
Hon Watson unfortunately has his facts wrong again. The real figure, hon Watson, is 31 in the National Assembly and 14 in the NCOP - a huge difference from last year. Here is the internal question paper for yourself and the hon Kohler-Barnard, who is moaning in the corner. I wonder if an orderly could take it to them. Please get your facts right. Hon Watson, unfortunately, is not too good with his facts and jumping the gun. Earlier this year, he issued a statement attacking the ANC, "DA Chief Whip questions why President Zuma is not answering questions in Parliament this term", and he said:
This is just the latest account of an increasing trend to abuse Parliament rules in order to shield the President from accountability. Now, hon Watson unfortunately jumped the gun. He was looking at an earlier programme; the President did answer the questions in that term. So, Hon Watson, please get your facts right. [Laughter.] [Applause.]
I will come back to those points, more points, but it has become fashionable at times such as these to try and paint things as negatively as possible in order to try and win support by claiming that another party can do better. It always astounds me how easily people can forget the past. This is the theme I want to deal with in my speech.
In an article - it is like the untold story about your past, Mrs Kalyan - entitled Democracy - the fine print, in a recent edition of First National Bank's Private Life, I found this quotation from Karl Beck, the project director of the American organisation Freedom House Southern Africa. He said with regard to our Parliament:
The Parliament was almost more democratic under the apartheid government. Why? Because then at least part of the people could hold their elected Members of Parliament to account. Not anymore. And that's a huge disappointment.
It reminds me a little bit of what hon Kilian, who is no longer in the House, was speaking about. He is arguing that Members of Parliament are not accountable to the people. The first response is: Has he not read our Constitution? The National Assembly is elected for a five-year term and its members are given a mandate in terms of voter support every five years. This Parliament's term ends next year. At the end of that term, we are gone. We can only come back if we get a new mandate. How then can it be argued that we are not accountable to the electorate?
What he is probably talking about when he speaks of the people not being able to hold their elected Members of Parliament to account is the electoral system. The Constitutional Assembly, effectively the first democratically elected Parliament, opted for a proportional representation system, where parties draw up lists, and Members of Parliament, MPs, are elected according to the support the party gets from their electorate. The parties then allocate members to constituencies, and the size of the constituency will depend on the number of members, from hon Godi of the APC, who is the only member in the House presumably representing the whole country, to the ANC, which allocates at least one Member of Parliament, MP, or member of the provincial legislature, MPL, to a constituency.
This is the most representative system in term of the numbers of parties. We have 13 and it can also ensure that parties like the ANC can make provision for 50/50 representation for men and women, disabled people, and people of different races, cultures and religions. [Applause.] But, we are told that we are accountable to our parties and not the people. So, the argument goes we should be elected by constituencies. Now, if you had single-member constituencies as you had before the advent of democracy in 1994, and as you currently have in Britain, the winner takes all and the losing votes in the constituency are discarded. In Britain, for example, no government in this century or the past was ever elected by a majority of voters. On some occasion, the majority of voters voted for the party that did not get the most seats. That happened in South Africa in 1948 with the National Party's first election. They got the most seats and the United Party got the votes.
The other argument is for a mixed system, something similar to what we have in local government, where half or more of the members come from constituencies and the other half from proportional representation lists. The constituencies could either be single or multi-member constituencies.
In March 2002 Cabinet appointed an Electoral Task Team chaired by Dr Frederick van Zyl Slabbert. The majority of eight of the members of the task team proposed multi-member constituencies, with district municipalities and metros being the geographical constituency. The minority of four felt the system was fine as we currently have it.
The report makes interesting reading for anyone who wants to engage in the argument of accountability. The majority - those are the people who wanted change, said the first-past-the-post system -
... would lead to considerable disproportionality, with the larger parties dominating the scene and the biggest of all ...
That's us.
... Probably winning more than 80% of the seats.
They noted that -
... when it comes to individual accountability, the matter is less clear. Candidates are elected in their own right, but it is mainly as a result of their association with a political party ...
... as the DA has learnt in Umzimkhulu Local Municipality.
They felt that the current system was already a multi-member constituency system as half the members of this House are elected on provincial lists, with the provinces, to all intents and purposes, being multi-member constituencies. Their proposal, though, was for district municipalities and metros to be the constituencies, but this would create new problems as these would either be very large geographically, as in the case of the Northern Cape or large population-wise as in the case of a metro. Whether MPs elected to these multi-member constituencies are elected as individuals or off party lists, the ties between the MPs and the party would still be extremely strong. For example, in local government, is it not the parties that determine the ward councillor candidates?
These are issues that we need to debate, but I think our current system has a lot going for it and those who claim that it does not ensure accountability fail to see the drawbacks in other systems. Freedom House believes that the apartheid Parliament was almost more democratic than our current Parliament. How quickly the past is forgotten.
One of our principal tasks in terms of the Constitution is scrutinising and overseeing executive action. This is primarily done through portfolio committees, basically one committee for each Ministry. I am informed that before 1994 there were no portfolio committees, that the only permanent parliamentary committee was the Public Accounts committee. Committees were established to deal with Bills and they did not perform oversight the way our committees do.
In addition, there was a blanket of secrecy; information was not easily available; there was no right of access to information; no independent courts to deal with disputes; and, to top it all, parliamentary committee meetings were routinely closed. Now some people have the gall to say that the pre-1994 Parliament may have been more democratic. [Interjections.] I think that the problem, hon Watson and hon Mulder, is that you come as former National Party members. You are used to that system where Parliament was just a talk shop. There was not any work done in committees. That is why you are arguing for having everything debated in this House.
As Members of Parliament we need to work harder and better. Is it fair to say this Parliament is not effective? According to statistics, since 2009, to date this Parliament has passed 91 Bills; of these, 61 were amended by Parliament and some of the Bills were rewritten. So, it is a lie to say that we are just a rubber stamp. Look at the committee reports on the oversight performed in the form of engagements with the officials here or on oversight visits, the number of questions asked, etc.
When it comes to amnesia, the untold story of the DA takes the cake. I am interested in the hon Kalyan saying that the ANC should stop calling back the past because they have produced a video entitled "Know your DA", the story they don't want you to know. [Interjections.] Yes, I have watched it. I am not sure who "they" are. I don't know if it is the ANC, but according to the video, which I watched, the DA said:
We fought against apartheid. We opposed Group Areas pass laws and detention without trial.
Considerable time is spent on Helen Suzman as the lone voice of the Progressive Party and Helen Zille as a reporter who wrote about Steve Biko's murder and hid UDF activists in her house during the state of emergency. The latter action made her so fearful that she had to go into hiding herself, according to the video.
In order to understand the campaign, you need to look at where it is coming from. The National Party was kept in power by white voters. These voters voted for the National Party because basically they did not believe in equality of human beings and they were afraid of losing their positions of privilege, which had been obtained at the expense of the majority. Change was forced upon them by the struggle of the majority of South Africans. The last whites-only election was in 1989, 24 years ago. Over one million white voters voted for the National Party. What happened to them? Who are they voting for now? [Interjections.] Some of them may have passed on, but who are the rest voting for?
Hon members here are saying that some of the members of the National Party have joined the ANC, and that is correct. When I counted, I estimated that nearly 30 members of the DA caucus were from the National Party. [Applause.] That is almost half the members of your caucus. Hon Watson, you joined the National Party at the time of Dr Verwoerd in the 1960s. [Interjections.] Now these people are voting for the DA, and most of the unreformed members of the National Party are in the DA. The DA gets its primary support from minorities - whites, coloureds and Indians - because they believe it will protect their interests, people who think they are superior to African people.
However, the DA wants power and to get power they need to pretend they will represent the black people, hence this campaign of the untold story that they opposed apartheid. [Interjections.] I am not disputing that Mrs Suzman did do important work in visiting prisoners on Robben Island and taking up issues, asking parliamentary questions of Ministers, and reading information into the parliamentary record so it could be disseminated in the media, but other Progressive Federal Party, PFP, members such as Pierre Cronj and Jan van Eck, who later joined the ANC, did that as well. I didn't notice reference to them in the DA's untold story. [Interjections.] Maybe I missed it.
What did the PFP, as a party, do? The DA video refers to speaking out against the government with harsh penalties and great risks suffered. What were they? Was it the risk of banning, imprisonment, loss of livelihood, assassination or having to go into exile, as was faced by members on this side of the House? [Interjections.] Remember, in asking that question, if one looks at parliaments and repressive regimes across the world, it is not uncommon for opposition members to be arrested. Were any members of the PFP arrested? No! Even the Liberal Party of South Africa had members executed, arrested, banned, etc, but not the PFP. What did the PFP do in opposition to the illegal occupation of Namibia and Angola? [Interjections.] The two- year conscription of all white male youth, troops in the township - did they protest? Did they support ...