DA welcomes recommendations made in the Report of the Independent Panel Assessment of Parliament

The Democratic Alliance (DA) welcomes the release today of a report by an independent panel which was commissioned to conduct an assessment of how Parliament is fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities.

The DA has repeatedly voiced its concern over the fact that Parliament has increasingly failed to fulfil its constitutional obligations, namely, to ensure oversight over the Executive, to hold the Executive collectively and individually accountable at all times, to ensure that issues of a national significance are debated and considered, and that the public is properly consulted and their views taken into account before every piece of legislation is passed.

The DA therefore welcomes the release of the report, as well as a number of recommendations contained therein about how the institution can strengthen its legislative and oversight role in the future, the most important being:

• That Parliament gives consideration to the impact of the current party list electoral system and the possibility of electoral reform;
• That, in light of the Travelgate issue, the conditions under which Members of Parliament become ineligible to hold office be reviewed;
• That Parliament take steps to improve the quality and substance of debate within the institution, and strive timeously to debate current matters of public concern. This includes revisiting the arms deal and holding a debate on the adoption of a resolution calling for the establishment of a judicial commission of enquiry into the arms deal;
• That the current mechanisms through which unanswered parliamentary questions are followed up on be assessed and revised, so that the Executive is held to account for failing to reply to parliamentary questions;
• That Parliament gives serious consideration to the issue of whether Presiding Officers should resign form senior political party positions for the duration of their appointment.

These recommendations largely mirror the recommendations made by the DA in its Parliamentary Review which was released in October 2008. The DA has taken a number of steps in Parliament in the past with regard to these recommendations which include:

• Calling for a debate in the National Assembly (NA) on the problems surrounding South Africa's current electoral system and the merits of initiating a process of electoral reform;
• Proposing a number of subjects of discussion during 2008 on politically significant issues including setting up an independent commission of enquiry into the Arms deal;
• A number of changes to the parliamentary rules, which have been placed on the NA Rules Committee agenda, and which would hold the Executive accountable for failing to reply to parliamentary questions properly and timeously;
• Proposing that a clause to be added to the NA rules that stipulates that the Presiding Officers may not hold senior positions in any political party during their time in office which has also been placed on the NA Rules Committee agenda.

 It is imperative that the recommendations contained in the assessment report be properly considered by the relevant structures in Parliament, so that they can be adopted in the future. If this does not occur, this assessment will be rendered nothing more than a fruitless, ineffectual exercise and a waste of taxpayers' money.

The DA will use the parliamentary mechanisms available to its Members to ensure that these recommendations are properly considered and acted upon in the future. We will continue to call for debates on issues of national significance, including the Arms deal, and we will use our memberships of the NA and NCOP Rules Committee and the Parliamentary Oversight Authority to ensure that a number of changes to the current parliamentary rules are put into effect, so that Parliament is empowered to become a robust, independent institution that is able to carry out its constitutional obligations unhindered at all times.

The DA calls on the Presiding Officers as well as on other political parties to commit themselves to ensuring that the recommendations contained in the assessment report will be properly considered and adopted by the fourth democratically-elected Parliament.

Statement issued by Democratic Alliance chief whip, Ian Davidson MP, January 13 2009