I move—

I second.

Agreed to.

Mr. Speaker, when the debate was adjourned last night I was drawing the attention of the House to the necessity for examining markets of South Africa with a view to their better development, and I was stressing the importance of those markets, particularly in the settled African townships. I was drawing the attention of the hon. the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development, particularly, to the importance of allowing organized commerce and industry to conduct market surveys in those areas and to canvas, if necessary with African canvassers in those areas, and not to put any obstacles in the way of commerce and industry in the development of those markets. I also pointed out to the hon. the Minister of Economic Affairs that there were two methods of developing the local markets, one in the European market and the other in the African, or Bantu market, as the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development prefers to call them.

Unfortunately restrictions are put in the way of those persons who want to develop the Bantu market. If the hon. the Minister of Economic Affairs would compare the facilities available to commerce and industry in the African townships in this country with those available in the Rhodesian townships he would see a striking contract. He would realize why many industrialists are so frustrated when they try to develop the African market in these townships. I think we are all agreed that if we raised the standard of living in our African townships, encouraged them to buy our primary products and the products of industry, not only will we increase our industrial potential but we will reduce our costs and, at the same time, raise the standard of living of all our African peoples. If we are going to pay them better wages and give them the opportunity of enjoying the products of our factories, then better facilities should be provided for them to see what the factories have to offer them.

On this, the first day of decimalization, I want to take this opportunity of drawing the attention of the hon. the Minister of Economic Affairs and of the hon. the Minister of Finance to the actions of some of the more irresponsible members of commerce. This does not apply to all, but only to some of the less responsible members of commerce who are taking advantage of fractions. If the hon. the Minister will go through some of the smaller shops in Cape Town to-day, he will already see many examples of where the lower income groups have to pay higher prices under cloak of the excuse that this is due to decimalization. I would like to know from the hon. the Minister whether he is going to allow that state of affairs to continue, or what precautions are going to be taken to ensure that the lower income groups are not going to be exploited as a result of the introduction of decimalization. I think it is most essential that at this early stage these people who have to be trained as to the meaning of the change-over, should not relate the change-over to a higher cost of living. It is going to be difficult enough, in all conscience, for the uneducated lower income groups, for our Natives and Coloured peoples, to master all the intricacies of decimalization and what the change-over means. But, if added to that there is going to be exploitation by irresponsible people it is going to be very much more difficult. I should like to know what the hon. the Minister is going to do in order to protect these people.

I want to move on to the question of another market which calls for development, and that is the market in the African countries to the north of us. My time is very limited and I cannot develop this theme to the fullest extent. The hon. the Minister has just returned from an overseas trip and he has referred to the Common Market. I would, however, remind the hon. Minister of a very interesting speech he made in this House at a time before he assumed ministerial status. On 16 March 1956 the hon. the Minister was referring to the African market and he said this—

Then the hon. the Minister went on to compare the representation by our trade representatives on the African Continent as against those of the rest of the world. I would now like to know from the hon. the Minister of Economic Affairs what steps he has taken since assuming his portfolio to improve that condition. On his return from overseas the hon. the Minister made no reference to the development of the African markets in the countries to the north. I get the impression, particularly when we find virtually no reference to it in recent months, that there are some members of the Government who have abandoned the African markets. I should like to know if that is in fact the position.

If the hon. the Minister of Economic Affairs were to go to Blantyre and see the trading area there, he would find that most of the trade is in the hands of Asiatics. If he goes to Tanganyika, to Arusha or Dar-es-Salaam, he would find the same position there. Down Kilindini Road in Mombasa he will find the same position, and the same throughout Kenya. Practically the whole of that trade is in the hands of Asiatics. It is therefore very important how we treat the Asiatics in South Africa. It vitally affects the possibilities of trade with those countries to the north of us. The hon. the Minister must surely realize that the harshness of the administration of the Group Areas Act must have its effect on our trade relations with the Asiatic traders to the north. The unsympathetic attitude of the hon. the Minister of Labour towards the numbers of Asiatic unemployed in this country will have its effect to the north. I should like to know from this hon. Minister whether he has any intention of encouraging commercial circles in the African countries to the north of us to take our goods, or is he prepared to abandon those markets? Because I can assure him of this, that in those countries to-day we find sales representatives from Germany, from Holland, from Belgium, from Japan and from China; aggressive sales representatives enjoining the traders in those areas to support the wares from their countries because of the danger of a boycott against South Africa. So not only do we find the trade interests themselves turning unfriendly eyes to South Africa but we find trade representatives from other countries endeavouring to get preferential treatment for their own goods and pointing out the inadvisability of dealing with South Africa. The African market is on our very doorstep, and we already find the position that many of our South African companies are establishing branches in Rhodesia as a jumping-off point to get that trade. And so trade which legitimately belongs to South Africa is being transferred over our borders and subsidiary companies of South African firms are being used as a springboard to retain or to capture markets which, in ordinary circumstances, had the policies of this Government been acceptable, would have been enjoyed by factories and companies of South African origin.

When we go overseas we find that the Minister, after his visit to the Common Market, talks about establishing markets overseas. I hope he can establish them. His Department has published the names of members of the public, members of commerce and industry who are going overseas on this trip. But it was only in 1957 that an Export Trade Advisory Committee was formed, following representations to the Minister’s predecessor. For several years this Committee has been established. The Federated Chamber of Industries, Assocom, the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, the South African Export Association and certain Government Departments formed this Committee. The Committee was not satisfied with the way in which affairs were being conducted, and subsequently it was reconstituted under the Chairmanship of the Secretary for Commerce and Industry, with the object of establishing an Export Advisory Council, to increase the status of the Director of Exports in order to enable him to make direct contact at ministerial level, and it provided that a chairman be appointed from outside the department and that such a chairman be an industrialist of high repute. Finally it provided that the Department of Commerce and Industries consult with the Export Trade Advisory Council. I should now like to ask the hon. the Minister whether he has consulted this Committee before making these appointments, or did he slight that Committee and make his own appointments of the representatives for overseas? However good those representatives may be, will the hon. the Minister not concede that it would be far better to bring people from overseas to this country so that they could see for themselves? We have already had the recent example of members of stock exchanges from overseas who have learned far more by coming here than they would ever have learned from Government pamphlets. Has not the time arrived when we should invite not only people from overseas but people from the common market, people who are in serious competition with us, and also people from the African territories who, whatever their colour or whatever their creed, are would-be purchasers of the products of this country. I hope that during the course of this debate the hon. the Minister of Economic Affairs will give us some indication as to how he proposes to see that these three markets that I have dealt with, namely, the internal market, the market in the countries to the north, and the market overseas can be developed under his guidance and his leadership.

Mr. Speaker, before dealing with the general criticisms advanced by hon. members opposite, I want to reply briefly to a question by the hon. member for Johannesburg (North) (Mr. Plewman) with reference to the negotiations which are at present taking place between the I.D.C. and other organizations with a view to taking over the well-known shoe company, Cuthberts. I want to make my reply very brief, in the first place because we are dealing with a matter on which the I.D.C. board of directors must decide, and it is not my policy or the policy of the Government to interfere in the strictly business affairs of that responsible organization. In the second place, I want to do so because the negotiations are still taking place and it would be unwise to make any remarks here which may influence the negotiations in any way.

The hon. member has asked one or two questions, and I want to give the following brief replies. His first question was whether the I.D.C. would be able to supply the necessary guidance and initiative to the proposed new company which will mainly consist of a chain of footwear shops. The answer to this question is that the I.D.C. has no intention of participating actively in the managerial activities of this company, should it be established, but, as has been its practice in the past, it will be a passive partner. It hopes that the necessary arrangements will be made to retain the present managerial staff in that capacity and to make as few possible changes in that respect. I just want to point out that one of the parties to these negotiations is also a firm which has been engaged in the footwear industry for many years and can provide valuable services as far as guidance and initiative are concerned. For the information of the hon. member and other hon. members who may not know, I just want to mention that the I.D.C. itself has already been actively involved in the footwear industry for nearly 20 years. [Interjections.] I do not know why the hon. member is laughing. It merely shows his ignorance.

The second question I have been asked is what justification exists for this step. I can justify this step in a few words—it represents the rationalization of the footwear industry. Every member who knows in what position this industry finds itself both as regards production and distribution, will know that any step towards rationalization such as may be undertaken as a result of the present negotiations, will be to the benefit of the footwear industry as a whole and that the industry itself will welcome it.

The third question which has been asked, is whether the I.D.C. is not empire building. Mr. Speaker, a financial institution like the I.D.C. is obliged to invest in various fields. It is obvious that such a financial institution will take an interest in a multitude of undertakings, but this does not mean that it is trying to build up an empire. The I.D.C. has always invited members and anyone else to negotiate with it at any time with a view to taking over any of its projects or share-holdings. That invitation is an open invitation.

The fourth question which has been asked is whether this is not simply a method whereby the I.D.C. is seeking to invest its surplus funds. We deny that categorically. If the I.D.C. was merely trying to invest its surplus funds, it would have demanded a far greater share in this new company for itself.

I come to the last question. The hon. member has referred to a possible investment by a subsidiary of the I.D.C., namely Fine Wool Products, in the Federation, and he has asked what our attitude is in that regard. I just want to say that this matter is still the subject of negotiations, and that no decision has been reached as yet. But these are negotiations which if they are successful will help to protect a South African industry and when such a step is taken in order to protect a South African industry, we cannot see what objection can be raised.

Can we protect South African industries by investing abroad?

The hon. member asks whether we can protect South African industries in this way. Does he not know that America to-day is investing on a large scale in the Common Market in order by so doing to protect her industries? And I want to go still further. I understand that the hon. member for Constantia (Mr. Waterson)—and I do not criticize him for doing so—while he was Minister of Economic Affairs also negotiated with the I.D.C. with a view to direct I.D.C. investment in Rhodesia. I make this statement in reply to the hon. member for Johannesburg (North) (Mr. Plewman) and for the rest I do not want to say anything further in this regard.

To revert to the criticisms which hon. members opposite have advanced in this debate, it seems to me that he main complaint of the hon. members for Constantia (Mr. Waterson), and Jeppes (Dr. Cronje) and other hon. members is that the Government at all times reveals a spirit of optimism and confidence in South Africa’s economy. They criticize the Prime Minister and members of the Cabinet because we at all times testify to our faith in the basic strength of our economy and in our potential future development. Hon. members opposite probably want us to follow their example, to be pessimists as they are, and to talk day in and day out about the disasters which are awaiting South Africa, about the crises which are imminent, about the banks which will have to close, the factories which will have to shut down and the unemployment which will follow. Allow me to say at once that we do not intend following their example. For 13 years they have already been employing these tactics, tactics which are calculated to undermine the economy of our country as well as confidence in our country. They have done their work so effectively that we do not intend imitating them. It is strange that hon. members opposite should be the very people who are always talking about the need for confidence, but they do nothing, nor have they done anything, during this debate to establish that confidence, but by the type of criticism they have expressed they are further undermining the confidence which does in fact exist. And not only hon. members opposite, but the Press which supports them has now been following this same policy for months past, namely of giving great publicity to everything which is detrimental to our economy and concealing as far as possible everything which is to its benefit; of always talking about crises, of retrogression and of threatening disaster. I just want to give two examples of what this Press is doing. Here I have a report from the Pretoria News, under a banner headline: “Union facing first-class depression.” All the report contains is—

When we read yesterday’s debates and we then see what the Cape Times this morning considers to be the crux of yesterday’s debates, we find in the first place a big banner headline: “Union’s economy slows down to pace of ox.” Of course the hon. member for Constantia (Mr. Waterson) did say that but many other statements have been made which are far more complimentary about South Africa’s future. But the fact that the Press sought out precisely that point and made it their main headline is characteristic of the spirit of that Press. On the front page of the Cape Times there appeared this morning: “Finance crisis ahead.” It is true that the hon. member for Constantia said that, but it is characteristic of the spirit of that newspaper that it seeks out precisely these statements to place on its front page. It is characteristic of a section of our Press that they are always talking about crises and disasters. If one is in earnest about building up confidence in one’s country’s economy, one does not act in that way. If ever there was a time when the Opposition and the Government should co-operate in order to establish confidence in our economy, it is to-day. If ever there was a time that we should show our own confidence in our country, it is to-day. How can we expect other people to have confidence in us if we do not have that confidence. Confidence generates confidence, and confidence is the basic capital on which an economy is built.

But we have no confidence in the Government.

I do not maintain that there are no problems and that we have solved all our problems. South Africa has her problems and has always had her problems, just as any other country does. I need only remind the House of the problems with which we were faced in 1948 shortly after we came into power and the economic situation which we inherited which obliged us not only to enforce stricter control but even to devaluate our currency.

It was 16 months later.

Yes, but it was the result of a policy which had been in force for five years. To prove their standpoint the Opposition are always quoting national income statistics in order supposedly to prove how weak South Africa’s economy is and how unfavourably it compares with the economy of other countries. They never refer to figures showing the reverse. Thus the hon. member for Constantia said yesterday that over the past year the national income had only risen by 1.7 per cent, while he should have known, if he had read the statistics supplied by the Reserve Bank, that it had risen by 5.9 per cent. Thus the hon. member has referred to the 1.7 per cent increase in the real income per capita in recent years. He is quite correct but the hon. member for Bellville (Mr. Haak) was obliged to point out to the hon. member for Jeppes that he was wrong in saying that this was the lowest income in the world and that other countries like the United States, Australia and Canada had the same and lower incomes. But the hon. member for Jeppes concealed those figures, and then the hon. member for Pinetown (Mr. Hopewell) asked whether the hon. member was satisfied with these figures which were similar to those for America, England and other countries. Mr. Speaker, that is not the point. The point is that hon. members opposite are always quoting figures in order to place South Africa in an unfavourable light.

Allow me just to quote one or two figures to show what the position is in other countries. A few weeks ago a report appeared in the “National Institute of Economic and Social Research” in London which stated—

We know what is happening in Britain, Canada and America. Hon. members are always saying that South Africa’s economy is the weakest in the whole world.

In their arguments hon. members opposite have made two basic errors as seen from an economic point of view, and it is necessary that I should refer to them. The first error which they have made is to adopt the foreign exchange position of a country as the yardstick of its economic prosperity. The foreign exchange position of a country is not the yardstick of its prosperity. It is an indication of the movements of funds and of goods between that country and other countries, but not of its prosperity. To take an example, as far as their foreign exchange position is concerned, France, Italy and Germany are in a much better position than the United States of America, but who will maintain that Italy and France are more prosperous than the U.S.A.?

The second error which they have made is in taking the national production statistics of a country as an index of that country’s prosperity. The national production statistics of a country are only to a very limited extent an indication of that country’s prosperity. Such figures constitute an index of the production of goods and services, and the prosperity of a country depends on the nature of those goods and services. If two countries for example with the same population have the same national production and 50 per cent of the one country’s production consists of war materials and not consumer goods, while the other country does not produce any armaments, the people of the latter country must inevitably be less prosperous.

I now want to mention one or two figures. I did not want to do so but hon. members have criticized the hon. the Prime Minister and have asked how he arrives at the conclusion that South Africa is prosperous. I feel obliged to indicate one or two of the barometers which show that we are not moving at “the pace of the ox” to which the hon. member for Constantia has referred, but that we are progressing. I do not only want to take the national income figures for recent years, but also consumer spending statistics. From 1951 to 1959 consumption in South Africa increased by 74 per cent at constant prices, as against 36 per cent. If we take the population growth into account, the figure is then 2.1 per cent per annum which is a most satisfactory position. Capital growth in South Africa from 1956 to 1958 exceeded 25 per cent, the highest in the world. Profits of public companies in South Africa for the year 1959-60, the most recent figures we have, exceeded those for the previous year by 8.6 per cent. Is this not an indication of development? In 1957 our steel production was 1.85 million tons, and in 1959 2.02 million, and whereas we exported steel to other parts of the world in 1959 we now have a shortage of steel and have had to encourage large-scale schemes aimed at increasing the production of steel. Take the generation of power. It has increased tremendously. The figures relating to building plans are higher. The earnings of the Railways have increased by more than 10 per cent during the past year. Our exports and our imports are increasing. When we take all these figures together we come to the conclusion that all the barometers point to progress in South Africa.

I now want to analyse South Africa’s economic position. We appreciate that we are faced with problems and we ask what the real causes of those problems are, particularly our capital problems and our balance of payment problems? At the outset I must state that South Africa has a free economy. A free economy is always exposed to the effect of events abroad, and seeing that our exports and imports represent nearly two-thirds of our national income, we are more exposed than many countries to economic tendencies elsewhere in the world. In the first place I want to refer to the familiar gold question. The price of gold has been pegged in terms of the dollar for more than 25 years. There was a tim when gold represented two-thirds of our exports. Imagine the position in which any country in the world would be if two-thirds of its exports had earned the same price for more than 25 years. It is an indication of the strength of our economy that despite the fact that the price of our main export product has been pegged for 25 years, we have still been able to make this tremendous progress.

The second aspect I want to mention is the fact that we are a primary producing country. Our exports consist mainly of raw materials and primary products. Hon. members know that the prices of primary products vary, and that their prices increase at a much slower rate than the prices of manufactured products. We in South Africa suffer from the fact that we are a country which mainly exports primary products. It is calculated that the primary producing countries lost no less than £750,000,000 as a result of the decline in prices for primary products in 1957-8. It is for that reason that the Government realizes that South Africa must industrialize. It has always worked in that direction and has taken steps to strengthen South Africa industrially.

The third factor in our development is the establishment of European trade blocs. Everyone who is acquainted with Europe is amazed at the economic progress which has been made, particularly in the case of the Common Market, as a result of the inspiration and the optimism to which the union of these countries and blocs has given rise. Everyone is surprised at the tremendous rate at which outside countries are investing capital so that they can share in these markets. The more capital investment of this nature there is in those blocs, the less there is left to invest in South Africa. This process may continue for a period, and then a saturation point will be reached, which can already be seen as a result of the shortage of labour. It is possible that industrialists will then once again consider investing in South Africa. We as a Government definitely do not intend overlooking the importance of these new markets, but intend developing ever-closer contacts with them. We have decided to accredit our Ambassador in Belgium to the Common Market, and to appoint a good economist to represent South Africa there and make a continuous study of developments.

The fourth factor—and this relates more specifically to the arguments of hon. members —which plays a role in the development of our economy is of course the colour problem. We concede that there are people who are critical of our policy and that there are many people who are opposed to the colour policy of this side of the House, people who do not understand our unique position and wish to force solutions from outside on South Africa. As the Prime Minister has said, South Africa has become a pawn in the game of international politics and in the hands of those powers which are competing for the favour of the uncommitted African States. These States are prepared to sacrifice South Africa, both in the political and economic spheres, for the sake of the goodwill of the emergent Black States. We must be sacrificed because we want to remain White on a Black continent; because we are carrying the torch of Western civilization in Africa; yes, strangely enough, because in the struggle against Communism we have stated ourselves to be anti-communistic; because we are not uncommitted and neutral, but because we have committed ourselves. I just want to read a report which has appeared in Sondagnuus to the hon. member who is now laughing in such an intelligent fashion—

American capital investment in South Africa is regarded as a stumbling block in the way of America’s attempts to achieve a sound understanding with Africa. Any further comment is unnecessary.

In the fifth place if there are people who are hesitant to invest in South Africa—and there are such people—it is not so much because of South Africa’s policies, not so much because of our colour policy and still less because of our economic policy. People hesitate to invest in this country because they are afraid of Africa, particularly after the events in the Congo. This is a tragic position, but one notices throughout the world that South Africa is confused with Africa. This is the worst misconception of our time, namely that people do not differentiate between South Africa and Africa. We are the most affected because any other unfavourable development in Africa affects South Africa. The confidence of the world in South Africa as such has not been shaken, but in Africa, and because they regard South Africa as forming part of Africa they are hesitant to invest in this country. I want to say that we have invited many people to come to this country, and in the next year they will come from various countries to see what the position is in this country. Do not think that it is I who say this: I shall submit other proof which hon. members may accept. Here a certain person says—

Mr. Harry Oppenheimer said that. Our task is to prove to the world that South Africa and Africa are not the same. But there are other examples. There are people who are aware of the difference between South Africa and Africa, but who are troubled by other fears, namely that eventually what has happened elsewhere in Africa may also happen in South Africa; these people fear that the onrushing non-White tide will also one day overwhelm us. It does not matter what policy is followed in this country. It is not that they are opposed to or in favour of South Africa, but they fear that events in Africa will result in White civilization being unable to maintain its position in this country, and for that reason they are afraid of investing in this country. They are afraid that South Africa will become a Black country and that everything which has been built up here in the cultural, political, religious and economic spheres will be destroyed. That is not criticism of South Africa as a country or of our policies, but results from her being linked with the rest of Africa. Allow me to add that in those quarters in Europe where this fear exists—and I found it in various places— it is also realized that the only policy which will engender confidence, is one which stands for the maintenance of White civilization. They realize that the policy of the United Party and the Progressive Party will lead far more rapidly to this position where the White man will no longer control this country and his possessions will be endangered. In nearly every European country which I visited recently, I was told how thankful they were that on the southern tip of Africa there is a strong Government which will ensure the law and order are maintained and which will prevent a repetition of what has happened in the Congo. The United Party thinks in vain that if they come into power, this confidence will be restored. Fears for the future will be still greater under their regime.

Mr. Speaker, these are the problems with which South Africa is faced in the economic sphere, namely that we form part of continent of Africa and that the international role which Africa plays in world politics will have an influence on our economic position. We must appreciate these facts in order to know what we should and can do. In the first place we must show the world that our position is different. We must tell the world that South Africa differs as greatly from the rest of Africa as Europe differs from the rest of the Asiatic land mass of which it forms part. We must point out the great possibilities which our country offers, and the resources of our country, and we must emphasize particularly to the world the character and the quality of the people who live in South Africa. We must engender confidence in our economy amongst the peoples of the world. We must engender this confidence amongst ourselves and amongst the peoples of the outside world. My plea and the plea of all of us is that the Opposition should treat these matters less superficially and should help us to create that confidence.

In my first contribution in this House I wish to speak on matters of a provincial nature since these matters in view of my most recent experiences, are still fresh in my memory. I wish to speak about the weaknesses as a result of overlapping and other reasons in the services rendered jointly by the Provinces and the Central Government, and while I am dealing with this I want to deal with it in three divisions, namely, the three most important departments of the provinces, i.e. education, hospital services and roads. Together with the purely financial considerations it will therefore also concern the Departments of Health, Transport and Education. I am aware that it is a tradition in this House that in his first speech a member should not mention controversial matters and where I am to-day going to express certain doubts or perhaps criticism I want it to be accepted in the sense that it is due to circumstances which have arisen since Union, which have developed gradually and which to a great extent were brought about by the activities of various governments.

I wish to start with education. In terms of Article 85 (3) of the South Africa Act education, with the exception of higher education, is entrusted to the provinces. On that occasion higher education was not defined and for the first time in 1922 was a definition of higher education given in the Financial Relations Act. We find that already in 1921 the Province of the Cape of Good Hope piloted an ordinance through the Provincial Council which provided for industrial and trade schools. Here comes my first criticism, or doubt, and that is that while with the establishment of Union education, apart from higher education, was entrusted to the provinces and education was divided on a horizontal plane, namely, primary education to the provinces but not higher education. That division, which was a healthy division as I shall show later, was gradually totally broken up. In 1923 technical colleges were taken over by the Union Department of Education. Already in 1925 the Union Department of Education also took over vocational education and it was later extended to trade schools, technical schools, commercial schools, domestic science and high schools. As hon. members can deduce, that brought to an end the horizontal division that had existed before and a vertical division in education between the provinces and the Central Government was made, and so the healthy division of the past was changed into a division which can in fact not be determined. Various commissions in their reports have recommended that primary education, up to and including Std. X, should be placed under the same department as one organized unit. We already find this in the report of the Jagger Commission of 1916, in para. 57; we find it in the report of the Hofmeyr Commission of 1924, in para. 554; and also in the report of the de Villiers Commission of 1948. The de Villiers Commission, inter alia, recommended that all vocational training should be transferred to the provinces and that the Government should pay a large share of the costs of vocational training, if not all the costs, and further, that there should also be a national council to co-ordinate primary education.

The next aspect I wish to deal with is differentiated education and here I wish to indicate how unhealthy the present state of affairs is. We find that various commissions recommended that differentiated education was essential. I wish to explain that differentiated education provides for the education of the child according to his mental capacity or his aptitude. So we find in differentiated education purely academic course, commercial or vocational training. Particularly in the Cape it has become essential that differentiated education be applied, especially when compulsory education was extended to Std. VIII and there was the 16-year age determination. In 1953 the Provincial Administration made provision for differentiated education in the direction of purely academic subjects, commercial subjects and practical subjects, but in 1955 legislation was introduced which firstly changed the definition of higher education and secondly compelled the provinces not to devote more than eight hours a week to vocational education. Now I wish to explain what subjects are included in vocational education. They are bookkeeping, commercial arithmetic, shorthand and typing, domestic science, art, needlework, woodwork and metalwork. All these subjects are included in vocational education and only eight hours a week may be devoted to that. The result is that differentiated education has in fact disappeared from the provincial schools, or rather to a very great extent was limited, while the Department of Education of the Central Government could apply unlimited differentiated education.

There is still a much more important result of this namely, that in technical high schools only children with an intelligence quotient of 90 or higher are admitted, while in the provincial schools there is provision for special schools where children are admitted with an I.Q. of 75 or less; this means that that section of our children with an I.Q. of 76 to 90, the section of our children who need differentiated education most, are to a great extent denied differentiated education because they cannot be admitted to the technical schools of the Department of Education and in any case do not qualify for the special schools of the provinces either. I wish to mention here that in the Cape Province alone there are from Std. VI to Std. VIII no less than 8,000 to 9,000 of those children. They now remain in the ordinary school, in competition with the ordinary child, in a state of increasing frustration until they have to leave school at the age of 16 years. My recommendation is that education up to and including Std. X should be treated as one organized unit and that it should be placed under one authority. That appears logical to me, with the services rendered by the provinces, that it should be placed only under the provinces and not under another authority. The immediate reaction will be: What about the finances? Mr. Speaker, I feel that the interests of our children are the primary consideration. It will cost money in any event and as soon as it is determined where the best services are rendered we can proceed to consider the financial adjustment.

Another division where I wish to indicate a few weaknesses in our system is in the case of our hospital services. We find that hospital services are also placed under the Provincial Administrations in terms of Article 85 of the South Africa Act, and that provides for the establishment, the maintenance and the upkeep of public hospitals and welfare institutions. It is interesting that welfare institutions were at that time mentioned together with hospitals. I think the reason for that is that it was a characteristic of the 19th century that hospital services provided by the State were regarded as a form of poor relief because other hospital services were to so great an extent private, and therefore State provision of hospital services was in 1910 also coupled with welfare institutions. Another peculiarity of our system as it was since 1910 is the fact that mental institutions, although it is not excluded for the provinces, was never transferred to the Provincial Administrations after 1910. One would have expected it to be in a Department of Health under the Central Government, but in fact it was not. It always fell under the Department of the Interior until 1943-4. I think the reason for that is that mental institutions were not originally regarded as hospitals but merely as places where people could be kept safely. Now we find that on 1 April 1940 welfare institutions were taken from the provinces and transferred to the Central Government. Only in 1919, after the flu epidemic, the Department of Public Health was established, and it was established with the main object of combating and controlling infectious diseases on a national basis. That is briefly the background of the development of our health services. In the Borgenhagen Committee’s report we find the background very clearly set out and I think that it can also serve as a sound basis for negotiations in connection with the division of health services.

I think medical men will agree with me that there is a general realization that there is little difference between mental and physical illness and it is precisely there that I feel that the position is unhealthy as it is to-day since mental disease is actually the responsibility of the Central Government while physical illness is the responsibility of the Provincial Administrations. The difference there is so slight that they cannot really be separated from each other. We find more and more to-day that the tendency is that the large hospitals also provide wards for mentally ill patients and who must be treated accordingly. I feel, therefore, that as far as these two sections of our health services are concerned—mental and physical illnesses—both ought to be under one and the same department in order to achieve the best results. But there is another problem in our hospital services, namely the treatment of our aged. Sick people, also sick old people, are admitted to our provincial hospitals, but needy cases, as the result of poverty, are the responsibility of the Department of Social Welfare. Now we find the great problem of the so-called “helpless aged”, the old people who do not have a curable illness but who still need treatment. We particularly find the problem that when those old people are admitted to the provincial hospitals, say for example for pneumonia, then they are treated there. They are perhaps not able to care for themselves as a result of illnesses they had before—a stroke or another illness—which demand that they must constantly be looked after, but they are not hospital cases. The experience in the hospital then is that after such an old person is cured in the hospital of this illness which is curable, the authorities find it very difficult to get them to leave the hospital with the result that they remain in the hospital and occupy the bed of a patient who should really be in hospital. The Department of Health has already accepted the responsibility for those cases in that it already pays a subsidy to the provincial hospitals in respect of those cases who are not really sick patients. But, as hon. members will understand, this gives rise to tremendously long correspondence and arguments because the Department must of course look after its finances. This is an unhealthy position and I feel it is essential that separate institutions should be established under the Department of Health to overcome the problem in connection with the so-called “helpless aged”. The same problem also exists in the case of the so-called curing of patients and their rehabilitation. Where it is treatment, it is the responsibility of the Provincial Administrations. Where it is rehabilitation it is the responsibility of the Department. I want to submit that the difference between those two is so slight that they are one by nature, and that it will bring about nothing else but unnecessary correspondence, arguments, a waste of energy and of money, and that a very definite line should be drawn, therefore, in that connection, between the provision of the services.

In conclusion, a few remarks in connection with our provision of service in so far as roads are concerned. Roads were also entrusted to the provinces by the South Africa Act. To be more specfic, roads, outspans and bridges were entrusted to the provinces. The history concerning roads is very short. Only one important change has taken place in relation to roads and that was in 1935 with the introduction of the National Roads Act. The only big change that followed on that was in 1948 when the National Roads Board was replaced by the National Transport Commission. Now I wish to emphasize the advantages which this National Roads Act brought about for South Africa. I think hon. members will all agree with me when I say that the country and the population of South Africa receive very greatly benefits from the splendid network of roads which is the result of the National Act of 1935, and the subsequent establishment of the National Transport Commission. I want to submit that this system of an impartial authority, with funds from the Central Government, could possibly in future be the key to the solution of our financial relations. But even in this case services are rendered by two authorities and it is inevitable that we should find a duplication of work and unnecessary friction there. I also wish to mention a few examples here. In the first instance a measure of difference exists about the interpretation of Section 10 of the relevant Act. The section, for example, provides that the National Roads funds should be used in connection with work authorized by and executed to the satisfaction of the National Transport Commission. It is generally felt that the National Transport Commission goes too much into detail in the execution of the work and does not delegate powers sufficiently, that they do not delegate these powers even to their own officials. The position is aggravated by the fact that the seat of the National Transport Commission, namely Pretoria, is often so far removed from the works. We are all agreed that prior consultation and agreement are necessary between the provinces and the National Transport Commission but it is felt that the National Transport Commission’s supervision should stop at the basic plans and the design and that the details and execution of the work should be left to the different Provincial Administrations. It would also help a lot if the officials of the National Transport Commission obtained more powers so that they could decide on their own initiative and negotiate with the provinces without reference to Pretoria, when necessary. There are very many cases of delay that can be quoted in this connection. I think the most obvious here near Cape Town is the fly-over bridge at Koeberg near Maitland where the plans and specifications were several times referred back to Pretoria and where there was a delay of about 18 months in the building of the bridge, with great inconvenience to the public. Similarly we find with the purchase of machinery and with the granting of contracts that the National Transport Commission is not prepared to accept the recommendations of the Provincial Administrations, even by its Executive Committee, but that the National Transport Commission itself wants to deal with it. I say it causes extended negotiations and delays and it can also result in tenders submitted in respect of the work being adversely affected. It will be admitted that the Provincial Administrations have excellent officials and it really does not appear necessary that the National Transport Commission should keep so close an eye on the work on National roads. Hon. members will agree with me that the delegation of powers is the basis of good management and I want to submit, therefore, that it will be greatly to the benefit of our works and that it can be done much more cheaply and speedily if the National Transport Commission would delegate its powers to a great extent.

The last point in connection with this subject is the question of the possibility of a pool system in regard to road building machinery and supplies, between the Provincial Administrations and the National Transport Commission. In the Cape Province there are ten large road building units, eight of which were purchased from the National Roads Fund and two from provincial funds. The National Transport Commission requires separate books to be kept of all machinery and supplies bought from the National Roads Fund and that that machinery and supplies should be used exclusively on National and special roads. This often results in delays and expense and it would be much better if a pool system were established from which road building machinery could be provided either for the provincial roads or for the National and special roads and that it should then be debited to the various departments. Here I want to give an example which will possibly shock hon. members. Only last year it was necessary for a road building unit to be transported from Kokstad to Garies—nearly the most distant corners of the Cape. Such a road building unit consists of big heavy machinery and many supplies, besides 60 to 70 families with their homes. The transportation of that road building unit from Kokstad to Garies cost about £50,000 and the major portion of it could have been eliminated had there been a pool system so that this road building unit could also be used on the big roads of the Provincial Administration in the vicinity of Kokstad.

Mr. Speaker, I have mentioned a few examples which I regard as weaknesses in our two-fold system of services between the provinces and the Central Government and I feel that only conscientious consideration and consultation could eliminate these weaknesses. As long as we have the provincial system, which to my mind is very good and efficient, especially as far as local services are concerned, we will of necessity have to get together from time ta time to make adjustments as dictated by changing circumstances and I feel that it can be done with great success but it is essential that we should firstly not have a division of indivisible services. Indivisible services must under no circumstances be separated from each other if we want efficiency in our services. Secondly, it is essential that there should be a very definite line of division of services so that the correspondence and the friction and the arguments between the various State Departments could be limited to a minimum. But most important of all is that negotiations should be conducted in the right spirit. We so often find that very good and reliable senior officials of the State are, so to speak, jealous of their Department. That is human and right but it is not the spirit in which we must divide and hand over our services. The basis of the division of services, when there are negotiations, should be the following: That which is to the greatest advantage and what will render the best services to the entire community and the entire population of the future Republic of South Africa.

Sir, may I compliment the hon. member for Ceres (Mr. Muller) on a most interesting speech, in the course of which he showed a mastery of his subject. The confidence with which he addressed this House, and the manner in which he made his points, was appreciated by all of us older members. I feel sure that the House will listen to him with close attention in future after his excellent initial contribution.

I would like to follow the hon. member part of the way along the path that he has followed. He dealt with provincial matters with special reference to roads. It is my intention to-day, in the short time that is available to us as a party, to make some specific suggestions in connection with future road planning. Before I do so, however, let me say this to the hon. Minister for Economic Affairs. I can usually resist anything but temptation, and must fall to the enticement of answering some of the arguments advanced by him a short time ago in this debate. I shall not digress at undue length. He said that “confidence breeds confidence that confidence is the greatest stay and support of the economy of a country. Then he went on to accuse this side of the House of misusing figures and indulging in faulty arguments to display South Africa in a disadvantageous position compared with other lands. He maintained, like the Prime Minister, that our land was one overflowing with milk and honey. He is a great reader of economic publications and must have come across the “Survey of Contemporary Economic Conditions and Prospects for 1961” by van den Berg and Hupkes of the Stellenbosch University, where both are research officers for the Bureau of Economic Research. Sir, they deal with the grievous position resulting from an outflow of capital. Let me read out just a short paragraph to illustrate the serious view these objective economists take. This is not the United Party talking, these are not partial politicians expressing a view. It is not even the Minister of Economic Affairs, talking. These are not party political economists, who are only at home when they are on their feet addressing meetings yet are so bad at running the business of the country. These gentlemen say—

These are the key words—

In other words, investors have lost confidence in us. These are the objective opinions of men of standing who have no axe to grind, politically. Sir, the Minister is wrong. We do not try to prove our economy is weak. We know, thank God, that our economy is one of the strongest in the whole world. That is why it can withstand the impact upon it of this Government and its policies. That is why we can survive economically in spite of the outrageous legislation from this Government and its Ministers. We are indeed fortunate in having such a strong potential. That is what gives us hope and confidence for the future. The Minister mentioned the importance of the common market in Europe to continental nations. Years ago I raised this same subject. I urged that serious note should be taken and lessons learned from the economic trends and happenings in relation to the European Common Market. I suggested that the time was ripe to form common market agreements here in Southern Africa. Four or five years ago was the logical time in which to make a start towards breaking down tariff barriers and creating a common market that would place South Africa and its neighbours in an advantageous position in relation to the total African market. The Rhodesias have the same type of economy and the same basic problems as we have. I suggested that we should work together to become the workshop of Africa, and seek to bring in with us the Protectorates and perhaps the Portuguese possessions. I made other suggestions, but I will not go into further detail to-day. I will simply say this that since this Government came into power, we and our neighbours have grown further and further apart economically; trade barriers have become higher and higher, more difficult to surmount; both in the realms of trade and transport in the sphere of commerce generally, the co-operation between the two main countries on the southern tip of Africa, has deteriorated. I blame the Government for lack of foresight in letting this happen. But I must not be longer diverted. I come back to the main subject I intend discussing to-day.

As a prelude to some suggestions as to how an intensified road building programme would help to cure our economic distress, may I say that it would be wise for this Government to look at our economic situation, realistically if possible, and not through rose-coloured spectacles. The Government should realize that there are significant signs of a recession in South Africa at the moment; it should realize that in agriculture the situation is more than serious and that economically, in commerce and industry there is a great degree of stagnation which the inherent strength of this country does not justify. It would be wise for the Government to realize what the situation is and take timely financial and fiscal preventive measures. Business has begun to fall away, industry is marking time, largely as a result of the shortage of money and the reluctance of financiers and entrepreneurs to invest in our country for the very reasons given in the Stellenbosch study to which I have referred. When a recession like this rears its head, unless careful safeguarding measures are taken against its repercussions, unemployment results. The State should take opportune action. In this debate suggestions have been made, on both sides of the House, of useful ways and means of keeping our labour in full employment, of sustaining the purchasing power of workers and the public, of generally keeping our economy from sliding down the banisters into a depressing condition. It has been proposed that the hon. Minister should take decisive action, that his Government should do something positive in the direction of state sponsored schemes, financed perhaps out of his surpluses; productive public works, should be initiated using Loan Funds to finance schemes that will cause greater employment; he should consider subsidizing foodstuffs and increasing pensions to put some money into the almost empty pockets of the poorer classes.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to add my suggestion that serious consideration should be given to the great value of initiating a forward-looking, vast and imaginative scheme for improving our roads and transportation services. I know that a special committee is sitting to inquire into this matter, but I do not think we can afford to wait for its findings. We already possess advanced knowledge that indicates that something urgent must be done. Sir, I would remind the hon. Minister that in this field investment would be richly productive. If the state would invest in the direction I have indicated, it would be productive of employment; it would improve distribution facilities and trade; it would bring about significant savings in transport costs, which should lower the cost of living. I am sure the hon. the Minister will be interested in this possibility: it ought to bring in increased returns to the Treasury by way of increased taxes. It would increase our income from tourism; it would be a great aid to the automotive industry which is experiencing difficult times—and all allied trades would benefit. From the defence angle, the strategic point of view, it would be of great importance, to have stronger, better roads. Then, in addition, if we build better, safer roads, it is certain that we would avoid some of the R70,000,000-odd that are wasted, so we are told by the experts, in accidents and casualties on our deteriorating roads. I am sure that this is the time to do something: now is the time to tackle this very serious problem.

Sir, the advanced road building scheme I envisage would also provide useful avenues of employment for those who have lost their positions, lost their jobs through the fact that the Railways have nearly completed their urgent capital development plans. Now that the Railways are able to carry all the goods offered for transport, the calls upon the Treasury for Railway capital expenditure will be less. Unfortunately for them, fewer people will be required to do the work that had to be done in the past. Vastly enlarged road building projects, would provide additional avenues of re-employment, in the transport field, for many of our unemployed workers. I am certain that this Minister could, if he so wished, find the money to finance, with much greater generosity, the road funds which in the past have been starved of sustenance.

Sir, I have said that the development I suggest is urgent. Our road and street system, particularly in the urban areas has been greatly neglected. It has become a drag on our economy. It seems to me that local and urban authorities have not got the money available to maintain or construct the necessary roads in their localities and that the present rate of extension, improvement and development is so low as to be dangerous. The roads are getting worse, many have become obsolete and fail to stand up to the requirements of modern transport needs. I regret that the hon. Minister of Transport is not here. I understand that he is unable to attend this debate. I am sure if he were here he would support my contentions. But in any case it is the financing of my road building plans in which I am interested and that does not directly concern his Department. As a matter of fact, the Department of Transport has itself reported that our national roads are running to ruin. They were never initially built to stand up to the heavy traffic they now must bear.

It was never visualized that they would have to stand up to the use, in such mass, of such heavily loaded vehicles. The reports we get, Sir, show that our national roads are breaking up as a result of the use of these heavy vehicles. Particularly ruinous are the South African Railways heavy diesel-traction units which are running on roads that were never made to stand their weight. As far back as 1958, the Department of Transport reported—

Industry and commerce are also unanimous and have made known through their Transport Consultative Committee that there is a necessity for the Government to take dynamic action. They demand that more funds from the existing taxation should be set aside for road construction and maintenance. I quote them when I say that “the raising of loans, specifically for road building and maintenance, whether from internal or external sources, is necessary; road development could be done without increasing the present fuel taxation”. I suggest to the hon. the Minister, and I think he must realize by now, that the present formula by which the Road Fund is financed is quite inadequate and out of date. I submit that it is time that it was drastically revised for the good of the economy of our country. If, as I have indicated should happen, the Transport Commission faces up to the need (which in the past they neglected) of urban road development in addition to national road building; to the provision of through-ways, express ways, link-roads and rural links and in addition, to the maintenance of these transport avenues, the financial formula will be found to be increasingly inadequate for present day needs. In my opinion, and I should like the hon. Minister to consider this figure, the present Road Fund should be at least doubled if we are not to obstruct by inadequate road services the future development of our economy. It is high time that a new formula was devised. A fairer, larger share of the taxation raised from road users should be set aside by the Minister for road development in South Africa. The original plan, a 25-year plan I think it was, has just about come to an end. New plans must be made. I am certain that our development will be severely impeded, grievously handicapped, if the National Roads Act is not amended to allow contributions to the Road Fund from excise duty on locally refined petrol, as well as custom duty on imported fuel.

The situation is that more and more fuel is locally refined. That is the tendency to-day and indeed it is good for our general economic development that it should be so. But the Minister must remember that, as more and more fuel is locally refined and while at the same time, road building costs grow higher and higher each year—while these unavoidable costs become more onerous and burdensome, the Road Fund itself, from which we draw the money to finance road building, is steadily contracting. We know now that the proportion the Road Fund gets from Customs duties is totally inadequate. Some proportion of the Excise duty on petrol should be given to the Fund. In addition the heavy diesel-powered vehicles should pay their contribution. Funds from these sources should go to swell the very slender road fund with which the Transportation Commission is trying to do its work. It has been estimated (and I have no reason to disagree with the estimate, because it comes from authoritative sources) that in the next 20 years, for the maintenance and orderly development of our roads and road services, we will require about R100,000,000 a year. At a rough estimate—the hon. Minister will correct me here if he can—on the present formula of taxation allowances, we will get about R70,000,000 for this purpose. This will leave a shortfall of R30,000,000, as a minimum each year. Some of this money, not all of it, could be found by revising the formula, without any necessity to increase taxation. I do not think one should increase taxation on the transport system. Distribution is one of the most important items of production, costing just as much, rand for rand, as the cost of production. Any increase in distribution costs must be passed on to the public and merely increases the cost of living. I believe that I am right when I say that the Government and the provinces between them derive from taxation of road users at the present time (by way of duty and excise on fuels, vehicles, equipment and the proceeds of licensing and registration) over R100,000,000 a year. Of this amount only R60,000,000 is spent on roads and streets and subsidies to our road transport system. Thus, something in the neighbourhood of R40,000,000 a year is diverted from road users’ tax contributions to general revenue. We plead therefore for a general revision of this formula. In the past we have been met by the same old argument. The Minister of Finance gets up and says to us: “If the contribution from excise duties on all fuels is paid to the Road Fund, extra taxation for that amount of money will have to come from other sources.” I submit that is incorrect. I believe that the increased use of our roads, that would follow on their improvement, roads strengthened to carry more and heavier loads, would very shortly almost double the returns in taxation by increasing the vehicular traffic that would use those roads. All the allied industries that would benefit by a greatly increased use of road transport would also contribute more taxes. In any case, even if the method I suggest to raise this extra revenue is not attractive to the Minister he must find some other way. He must know that, unless we are going to have a serious breakdown in our transport system, he must find the money from somewhere in order to maintain, much less to improve, our road transportation system. He must know that only two years ago the Viljoen Commission reported that in many respects the development of our road transportation system was more urgent than the further development of our South African Railways. To the best of my knowledge no notice has been taken of the report of the Viljoen Commission, although it was solemnly accepted as Government policy by both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Economic Affairs. The backlog alone in our road programme is serious. When I remember the basic five factors that the Transport Commissioners have told us have to be taken into account, I am certain that our present financing is totally inadequate for the purpose. First comes the maintenance of our existing roads; secondly, consolidation of those roads by re-construction, if necessary; thirdly, building of greater safety and permanence into existing roads (by the building of bridges, intersections and the doubling of certain portions and the construction of by-passes); forthly, the selection of new and important roads to add to those at present in use (part of the plan for the future); and finally, the necessity for examining, as the hon. member for Ceres (Mr. S. L. Muller) mentioned, the financial assistance to be granted to the indigent and poorer local authorities to aid them with their roadmaking plans. Sir, I think the Minister must consider seriously the suggestion by the Chambers of Commerce that Loan Funds, if necessary, should be used for this purpose. Come what may, the Minister should know—and I am sure that if he confers with his colleague, the Minister of Transport, that knowledge will be reinforced—that it is urgently necessary to divert more money to road construction. If he does so, he will be tackling our economic ills with a two-edged weapon. He will not only create something that is productive and will inject new strength into our economy, but he will also make a significant contribution to cure the unemployment that has been caused by the condition of recession into which we are sliding. The first step that he should take is, as I suggested, a revision of the formula that is at present used. He must see that more of the taxation taken from the road-users goes back into the production and reproduction of better new roads. I think that an answerable case has been made out by both commerce and industry. I am sure that the hon. the Minister would be wise to reconsider this formula and see to it that more of the revenue derived from road transport by way of customs duties and excise duties on vehicles, spares, tyres, batteries, etc., should be allocated to road construction and maintenance. If he does so, he will find that he has invested money in a sound undertaking in which the profit to the community, and incidentally to his own tax revenues, would be in direct ratio to the quality of the roads and the enthusiasm and energy with which this whole task is tackled. It would definitely give a shot in the arm to the distribution services in our country and that in turn would help our economy at a very vital time. I might ask him to remember that in helping the transport industry, he is helping a vast number of workers. Two out of every five of our total labour force in South Africa are directly employed in the transportation field. To give stimulus to this mass of workers would definitely liven up, in an essential way, the economic activity of the whole country and help to keep spending power buoyant.

I have confined myself up to now to this one subject, trying to give one idea or plan of how we could inject a productive effort, through finance policy, into our economy. Many other speakers in the course of this debate have made various useful suggestions. They have urged the necessity for reversing the adverse flow of capital from our country; they have made suggestions for reversing the adverse flow of migration, which is a draining away of wealth; they have suggested other measures to make workers more productive. The Minister in the course of this debate has received helpful advice from all sides as to how he can seal up the cracks that are appearing in our economic and financial structure. We are all anxious that ways and means should be found to prevent the serious financial and economic position from deteriorating still further, and above all to prevent it from percolating through to the man in the street, particularly the pensioner whose fixed income handicaps severely when prices rise. I think we must do all we can to sustain the pensioners’ standard of living in the face of a steadily rising cost structure. We must also see that unemployment is kept at bay, and that spending power flows back again into the all-too-empty pockets of some of our workers. The means I have suggested, I think, will help materially. I am sure the Government will not be deaf to the eloquent pleas from this side of the House concerning the hardships suffered by pensioners in the present state of recession and the rising cost of living. We have tried to do our best as an Opposition. Two or three years ago in connection with Railway pensions, Sir, when the Government only granted 10 per cent, we on this side of the House moved an amendment to give them 5 per cent more. We pointed out that the money was available, that the Railway Pension Fund was growing, through contributions, by R20,000,000 a year, and that the interest on the total fund, some R10,000,000 a year, was sufficient to cover the benefits to be paid out. In other words, here was a railwayman’s fund that had been built up beyond the highest margin of safety, and could well afford the suggested increase. The extra payments would have only been a bagatelle compared with the fund’s annual growth. Yet the Government turned a deaf ear to our pleas. The Minister refused to help these very needy railwaymen, who, in the evening of their life, are so hard-pressed after rendering valuable service to the state. We hope the Minister of Finance will be able to persuade his colleague, the Minister of Transport, this year, out of his increased surpluses which seem to accrue to him almost inadvertently because they seem to be totally unplanned, to give some greater relief to his pensioners, to the men who have made it possible for the Railways to survive very difficult times.

With that, Sir, I end my plea on behalf of the pensioners, and I finish my time by returning to my first point and asking the Minister, in the interest of transport, to give very careful consideration to altering the obsolete formula which he uses at present to feed the inadequate Road Fund which attempts unsuccessfully, to maintain a proper and efficient road transport service for our country.

In the past I have repeatedly referred to the fact that although Governments throughout the world accept gold in exchange for their merchandise, gold-producing countries obviously remain the victims of a fixed gold price. I have also mentioned that, while the prices of other commodities have been changed from time to time and have risen under the influence of world events, the price of gold has been pegged for more than a quarter of a century with very confusing and crippling results for the whole world. Two years ago I produced figures here in the House to demonstrate how production costs have risen from 19s. 4d. per milled ton of ore to 46s. 11d. per milled ton since the price of gold was pegged more than a quarter of a century ago. That is an increase of 143 per cent. I pointed out that the pegging of the gold price and the rising cost of producing gold were threatening the low-grade mines to such an extent that no less than 17 of them a few years ago could continue only as a result of Government concessions and because it was hoped that with a change of Government in America a more favourable trend would develop in the pegging of the gold price. These 17 borderline mines persevered and they are still working to-day. But the announcement that the new Kennedy régime has such high regard for the high and mighty American dollar that they are not prepared even to consider changing the pegged gold price has come as bad news for South Africa and particularly for the low-grade mines of the Rand. We are left with the problem of deciding what we are going to do about this important matter. Fortunately for South Africa rich goldfields were discovered a few years ago in the Free State, on the Far West Rand and in the Eastern Transvaal. Very fortunately for South Africa several of those goldfields have now reached the production stage and are consequently in a position to make considerable contributions to the State coffers in the form of taxes. At this important juncture with our low-grade mines hard-pressed and America adamant about not altering the unjust gold price pegging one iota, I venture to suggest that some of the extra revenue which the new gold mines are going to contribute should be used, not only to maintain those low-grade mines, but to establish research bureaux or centres to serve the mining industry in South Africa as a whole.

In the past, research, as applied to the mining industry, has been left almost exclusively to private initiative. Now that we have reached the stage where our low-grade mines, which are situated in our more densely populated and better areas, are again facing the threat of having to close down, I respectfully submit that the time has arrived for such research bureaux to be established. In the short period that the C.S.I.R. has existed in Pretoria, enough evidence has been produced to demonstrate the importance of such an institution to a go-ahead country. It is my humble opinion, however, that this problem of our mining industry is such a vast one that it must stand alone and warrants separate consideration. I also respectfully submit that a research centre or centres, which could start working from Heidelberg in the Far East Rand to Randfontein on the Far West Rand, could investigate what possibilities there are for extending the life of many of our low-grade mines. There is an excellent example. Considerable doubt exists in the minds of our old mine-workers —we call them “old-timers”—over these low-grade mines. One will tell you that the Black Reef has not been properly exploited. Another will say that there is still a large section of Kimberley Reef. We have a good example on the East Rand in the E.R.P.M., a mine which is more than 65 years old. With new machinery, new methods and more deep-level mining this mine’s life has been prolonged and E.R.P.M. shares are being quoted to-day at 39s. to 40s., while a dividend of 30 per cent to 40 per cent is paid. I submit, Mr. Speaker, that the first function of such a research bureau might be to assist the old mines along that long stretch from the Far East Rand to the Far West Rand with an investigation into the possibility of formulating a plan for prolonging their existence.

But I also submit that such a bureau could also be of assistance to new mines, in their planning, their expansion and production.

I do not, however, want to confine myself to the question of mining. I would like to raise two other problems to which a research bureau of this kind could give its attention. The first is the pollution of water. Mr. Speaker, I listen to speeches here every day. One person talks about soil conservation, another about money shortages. But, Mr. Speaker, I feel that the biggest problem—and particularly on the Witwatersrand—is water shortage. The greatest threat to the Rand is a shortage of fresh water. With Johannesburg and its 200-odd suburbs, and the big towns of the East Rand expanding progressively, and with Pretoria also expanding, our existing supplies of fresh water are being drained to such an increasing extent that the experts have expressed doubt as to whether the fresh water sources on the Rand, which supply the Rand, parts of the Free State and also Pretoria, can last much longer. But what is happening now? On the Rand and also in the case of gold mines elsewhere millions and millions of gallons of water flow away every day after being polluted by contact underground with poisonous substances. Millions and millions of gallons of water are being pumped out every day in the form of slime. What is being done about it? In a country like South Africa, where the gold mining industry has been in existence for so many years, we should by this time, through research, have evolved a method of purifying that water. Mr. Speaker, I am told that the position is so serious now that it is not only a question of the wastage of fresh water, it is not only a question of the pollution of the clear streams running in that area; there is so much water in the slime that is pumped up that the heaps which eventually develop into ugly mine dumps contain enough water to constitute a menace to private water sources in the vicinity. Not only do we have a wastage of the water which is being pumped out of the mines but also the pollution of private water sources. I respectfully submit, Mr. Speaker, that a research bureau established with money provided by the mines in the form of taxes could help those mines to make fresh water available. It would also render a very great and invaluable service to South Africa by making more water available.

There is another matter that I would like to touch on briefly here and that is the question of smog. Some of our friends here may not be so familiar with the Witwatersrand and Pretoria, but let me tell them that the position has become so serious that certain experts have expressed the fear that smog is public enemy No. 1 to-day as far as health on the Rand is concerned. A prominent expert has placed the towns which are most affected by smog in this order: The worst culprit is Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand; the second is Durban; and the third is Pretoria. We also find that the experts are now saying that the veil of mist which, particularly during the winter months, hangs mainly over the towns of the highveld—and that is where Johannesburg and the Rand are situated—is treacherous. It is not easily perceptible but it forms smog which is inhaled regularly, day and night, on the Rand, in the greater part of Durban and in that beautiful city Pretoria, the Jacaranda City. These places are being so polluted that the experts say that the smog which hangs over Pretoria and the Rand, particularly in the winter months, is resulting in the efficiency and output of the workers being completely undermined. It is a threat to health in general and is regarded as a contributory cause of lung cancer. It hastens the death of people, especially elderly people, suffering from certain diseases. What do we find on the Witwatersrand? We are surrounded by gold mines which give off smoke. We have factories in our midst. We have the railways and on top of it all we have a paper factory. All those gases combine and they are inhaled daily. In Pretoria, the Jacaranda City, Iscor is the biggest culprit, according to the experts—I do not say so. The second is the Railway Administration and the third is the municipal rubbish dump. Mr. Speaker, I have been asked to draw the attention of the House briefly to the fact that it is common practice for the workers and those who are not secret drinkers to give names to the drinks or cocktails that they have on the way home. You find one group asking for a “dop en dam” when they want brandy and water. Another person would ask for a kaffir taxi if he wants a Limosin. Another would ask for an Ambrose Reeves when he wants an export ale. And then we have the individual who asks for a gloomchaser, and another who asks for a London fog. Now they say they are evolving a new cocktail, and that is the Pretoria smog.

I do not believe that such a name would redound to the honour of our beautiful capital. I have given reasons for paying serious attention to these ideas, and, since our gold mines are going to contribute more taxes to the State coffers, I submit that it is time the South African Government also undertook research at Government level to help our low-grade mines, in the way I mentioned earlier, and also our new mines; in addition it would help with the other problems I have mentioned and which are only one or two of the most serious. Hon. members may laugh because I raise the question of smog here, but I would just like to say that within the next two or three years the Government is going to be asked by experts to introduce legislation against it. You may laugh at the pollution of water, but I can tell you that it will not be long before we on the Rand and in Pretoria will be obliged to seek other sources of fresh water. Mr. Speaker, I do not ask for any relief or remission of taxes for the mines. I merely ask that as the new mines which have now reached the production stage are going to make a considerable contribution to the State coffers, part of those taxes should be ploughed back into the mining industry, to the benefit of the mining industry and the country as a whole.

Mr. Speaker, during the past two weeks our farmers have repeatedly referred to the dangers of over-exploiting our soil, but there are other types of over-exploitation which are far more harmful to our country. I just want to refer very briefly this afternoon to one of these types of over-exploitation. I am referring to the large-scale export of unprocessed ores. This great asset which Providence has given us, our rich ore deposits, are being exported on a very large scale. I want to commence by emphasizing that this phenomenon is not an imaginary danger or phenomenon. May I point out to the House that in 1946 77.2 per cent of the Union’s total production of industrial metals and minerals were exported. Only 24.8 per cent was sold locally. As a result of the wise policy which has been followed in the Union since 1946, we find that the tendency has developed for us to process our ores in this country to an ever-increasing extent, and not to export them in the unprocessed form. For that reason we can also testify that at the moment a far healthier balance already exists. Approximately 50 per cent of our ore is still being exported in an unprocessed form, and 50 per cent is already being processed in our country. But when we examine this 50 per cent, we find that it is still a vast quantity. In 1946 the exports of four of these raw materials, namely manganese, chromium, copper and iron, totalled 1,750,000 tons in weight. By 1959 the figure was no longer 1,750,000 tons, but 5,000,000 tons. When we turn to the position in the case of manganese and iron, we are dealing with raw materials which are mined particularly in the Northern Cape and in which I am interested. We find that in 1946 that the local sales of manganese totalled 22,000 tons, while 354,000 tons were exported. Mr. Speaker, from January to June, 1960—a period of six months—the local sales of manganese ore totalled 301,000 tons compared with exports totalling 410,000 tons. All our iron ore has been processed locally since 1946, with the exception of 1955 when approximately 4,000 tons were exported. But in 1960, during the same period of six months, 172,000 tons of iron ore were exported. I also want to point out to the House that the people who are interested in iron ore and its export, are usually interested in the high grade ore. They are not interested in the low grade ore. It is for that reason that I say we are here dealing with a form of economic over-exploitation. It is like the crow which picks out eyes; the low grade ore is left for future generations to process, if possible.

In bringing this matter to the notice of the House, I want to point out particularly that it is of the utmost importance to our country and our country’s economy that this trend should reverse and that we should not allow our raw materials to leave this country in an unprocessed form. We must create facilities and opportunities, and we must do exerything possible to encourage the local processing of our raw materials. In the first place I want to refer the House to the economic reasons, and I say that hon. members should just consider the earning capacity of iron ore. Raw iron ore earns £1 12s. 6d. per ton f.o.r. at the mine, as compared with cast iron which earns £12 per ton, steel plates which earn £34 per ton, and tin plates which earn £90 per ton. This is the position in the case of unalloyed steel. In the case of alloyed steel products, the earnings are far higher.

Manganese ore costs £5 per ton delivered at the mine, and then it depends on the grade of the ore. The price can even go as low as 36s. per ton. But when it is processed into ferro-manganese, its price rises from £42 to £45 per ton. But in addition it does not only earn the country this revenue. The indirect benefits are equally great. The Railways earn .5d. per ton mile when they convey manganese ore from Lohathla to Durban, and .57d. to Port Elizabeth. But when this same ore is conveyed to Meyerton and ferro-manganese is produced there, and it is then conveyed to Durban, the average earnings for the Railways are 2.74d. per ton mile. Processing this ore also means that we are creating greatly increased job opportunities in our own country. It has been urged for many years past that a steel factory should be established in the Northern Cape, or some plant which will be concerned with the production of ferro-manganese. I just want to remind the House that all the facilities are available, and what an asset it would be if these employment opportunities were to be created in that area. It will mean a great deal if something of that nature could be established in that area. It is not only a question of high grade ore. In the past we have been under the illusion that we have high grade ore in unlimited quantities. But an authority has now told us in a survey of the position of our iron and steel industry that that is not so. In a survey of our iron and steel industry Mr. S. O. Eklund, scientific editor of the Industrial Review of Africa, has stated—

We therefore urge that more be done in that direction so that our low grade ores can also be utilized to greater advantage. New processes are available, such as for example the Krupp-Renn process, the R.N. process, the H.-Iron process, the Swedish Wiberg and Ball Furnace, as well as the German Niedeschacht Ofen. These are new processes which may enable us to utilize even our low grade ores to far greater advantage.

Mr. Speaker, I conclude by making a very earnest appeal that our Government should give greater attention to doing everything possible—even if it should necessitate a new tariff policy—to encourage the processing of our ores so that we shall see less of this phenomenon of financial and economic over-exploitation, whereby we are exporting our ores instead of processing them locally.

This debate this afternoon and yesterday has ranged over a wide field. We have heard from the hon. the Minister of Economic Affairs this afternoon that, in his view, our economy is often susceptible to events which take place in the outside world. I think we can deduce one lesson from what he has said this afternoon, and that is that however independent we may become, whatever our political status may be, we in this country are still very largely dependent for our economic future upon what may happen in the rest of the African Continent and in the outside world.

In the earlier stages of this debate a theme which ran through the discussions was the need to increase productivity and to increase the purchasing power of the community; a very valuable theme indeed. And there is no doubt that when one applies one’s mind to that theme, we get back to the basic fact that the biggest problem in the Union to-day is the urban Native. After all, in the ultimate event, our economy depends for a very large part, upon the urban Natives. He forms the very foundation on which to build an expanding economy. One of the advantages which our country has had in the past and, indeed, one of the main reasons for our being able to attract a good deal of investment capital into this country, was the fact that we had, by and large, a relatively cheap and docile African labour force, which was available for new enterprises in the industrial and the mining spheres of South Africa. I say that that formed, to a very large extent, the foundation for our development and, in particular, our industrial development in South Africa. However, events in this country over the last year or two have shown that this labour force cannot realistically be said to be contented and happy. On the contrary, there is every sign that a very large section of it has become frustrated and angry, with all that that means. That, naturally, tends to instability and all the potentially dangerous consequences that may follow from it.

This growing discontent, this potential instability, this frustration erupted just about a year ago at Sharpeville and Langa. That was followed by the statutory state of emergency proclaimed by the Government on 30 March last year. Now, once again we have on our hands an emergency; the emergency which the hon. the Minister for Bantu Administration and Development has proclaimed in respect of Pondoland. I want, in the short time at my disposal this afternoon, to concentrate attention for a while on those two significant events, the statutory state of emergency which, for part of last year, paralysed our country, and the present state of emergency which still exists in Pondoland. This is really the first occasion since Parliament adjourned last year, which we have had to discuss the first of these incidents. When we adjourned in July 1960, the emergency had not been lifted by the Government. A great deal of information had not been given, either to Parliament or to the country, in regard to the intentions of the Government regarding the persons who had been detained. We did not know at what stage the emergency would be removed. In due course the emergency was lifted. But there is a great deal which has not as yet been told, a great deal of information which, in my view, this Government is bound to give Parliament and to give the country; a great deal not only in regard to the facts of the emergency itself, but a great deal which requires to be explained about what one might call the root causes which led to that statutory state of emergency.

With the recent happenings in Pondoland we find the same reluctance on the part of the Government to take the country into its confidence. The hon. the Minister for Bantu Administration and Development, armed with powers which he derives from certain old Transkeian proclamations and earlier enactments, has sealed off certain areas of Pondoland in the shape of five large districts. He made a statement about them. He said that there had been trouble, which according to him, was caused by outside agitators who were chiefly communists. But he seals off the area; he prevents members of the Press going into the area. And, of course, there is a buzz of inquiry and suspicion and uncertainty as to what is actually happening there. The Police Force is reinforced, but we are not told how many extra police have been drafted to the affected areas. Units of the Defence Force have moved in and go on Active Service. But we do not know how many or how they are operated. We do not know what is happening. We have no information at the present time. We do not know how far these operations—for whatever purpose they were inaugurated—have been conducted. We do not know how long it is intended to maintain this state. We are fobbed off by statements from officiais in the Minister’s Department. We are fobbed off by statements by his Press Officer who says it is quite exaggerated to state that large numbers of persons have been arrested and detained. Yet only the other day, in answer to a question put by one of my colleagues on this side of the House we were told that a very large number indeed of Natives and others have been arrested. I shall give those figures in a moment. But the only source of information was an official. Why did the hon. the Minister not allow the Press to go there? Why was he not prepared to offer access to these areas to accredited representatives of S.A.P.A., and representatives of the morning Press and the afternoon Press? This secrecy, this cloak and dagger method which is adopted gives the impression that either the Minister and the Government have something to hide or, if they have nothing to hide, then the only conclusion one may draw is that their public relations are very badly handled and that this is once again a striking example of ineptitude, incompetence and muddled handling.

Let me just say a word or two about the emergency last year, and I want to direct a question or two to the hon. the Minister of Justice about what happened last year. According to the information given to me by the Minister of Justice a week or two ago, the total number of persons of all races, Europeans, Coloureds, Bantu and Asiatics, who were detained under the respective provisions of the emergency regulations was 11,503. I refer particularly to the respective provisions, because certain persons were arrested under one section and they became known as political detainees. A number of Africans were arrested under Regulation 4bis, which purported to deal with so-called “won’t-works” and tsotsis, but all the arrests flowed from the powers conferred on the Government by the emergency regulations. The total number given to me by the Minister was 11,503, of whom 98 were Europeans, 36 Coloureds, 11,279 Bantu and 90 Asiatics. Now, it is very curious that those figures show a marked disparity with those given by the Minister in this House nearly a year ago to the hon. member for East London (North) (Mr. van Ryneveld), and I find it very difficult to reconcile the two answers. On 6 May 1960, in reply to a question put by the hon. member for East London (North) the Minister stated that 18,011 Bantu persons had been arrested and detained in raids on Native townships since the beginning of the emergency. At that time it was known that there were very nearly 2,000 political prisoners who had been arrested and detained in terms of another provision of the emergency regulations. It was expected at that stage, as a result of the information given by the Minister, that the total number of persons arrested and detained was approximately 20,000. I want to ask the Minister this afternoon, if the May 1960 figures were correct, how it is that he gave the figure which he gave me the other day.

5,000 cases fell outside the emergency regulations.

I would be very glad if the Minister would enlighten me and the House. It is difficult to understand why 5,000 persons were arrested outside the emergency regulations.

Those were routine arrests.

Is the Minister suggesting that there was a wave of activity on the part of the police resulting in 5,000 arrests being made in a short time in addition to those arrested under the emergency regulations? I would like the Minister to make it clear to the House.

The second point about the figures given by the Minister is this, that taking the Europeans first, out of a total number of 98 of both sexes who were detained, only four, one of whom was a woman, were charged before the courts, and not one was convicted. And of the 11,405 non-Whites who were detained, according to the Minister’s figures, only 301 men and 19 women were charged before the courts with specific offences not relating to pass laws, but the nature of those offences has not been given and it would be very interesting if the Minister could give fuller details as to the type of offence with which these persons were charged. But what is significant is this, that probably the greater number of these detainees were kept under detention for long periods. Many of the women suffered both mentally and physically. Members of the House last year pressed the Minister and the Government as to what their intentions were; were they to be tried? Why were they arrested? Had they committed some offence, and were they going to be brought before the courts? Well, in April 1960, the Minister of Justice, in reply to a question by the hon. member for Berea (Mr. Butcher), said that it was proposed to frame specific charges against persons detained under the Public Safety Act and that they would be brought before the normal courts in due course. What happened? Out of 98 Europeans arrested, only four were brought before the established courts and nobody was convicted.

That is nothing new. More people are always arrested than are convicted.

But why did the Minister say that they would be brought before the courts? You see, it leads me to the irresistible inference that as no charges were preferred, the vast majority of these persons must have been arrested without there being any prima facie evidence against them. If they were arrested it must have been because off the political views they held and not because of any actions which were calculated to be a danger to the State. I hold no brief for the political views of any of those persons, but what I am prepared to say is that, that we have not yet reached the stage in this country, I hope, where persons are to be arrested and detained because they happen to hold political views which are not in consonance with those of the Government of the day. I think the figures show that a great many of these persons were unnecessarily arrested and because no prosecutions resulted, the figures show that a great many of them should have been released at a much earlier stage, which would have saved them as well as to their relatives much hardship and anxiety and mental anguish.

Then I come to the third point. During the emergency efforts were made by the Leader of the Opposition and by the hon. member for Queenstown (Dr. Steytler) and by me to press the Prime Minister and the Government to appoint a commission of inquiry into the root causes of what had happened at Sharpeville and at Langa. On 22 March last year the Prime Minister announced that he was prepared to set up a commission of inquiry concerning the facts of what had happened at Sharpeville and Langa, and he went on to say this—

A little later, when pressed to say what was being done about it, the leader of the House, on behalf of the Prime Minister, on 29 April 1960 said that the necessity for holding a high-level inquiry into the underlying causes of the emergency was receiving the necessary attention as stated by the Prime Minister. Well, it may have received the necessary attention, but no commission of that kind was appointed. It has become abundantly clear from the figures to which I have referred and the fact that so many people were arrested without any charges being preferred against them that a stronger case than ever before has been built up for holding an inquiry. It is not sufficient simply to appoint commissioners to find the facts of what happened at Langa and Sharpeville. One has to get down to something much deeper than that if we are ever going to hope to build up productivity and to have an expanding market which must be dependent on our non-White labour. That there are grievances cannot be brushed aside. Even the Langa Commission, which was a fact-finding commission and not one charged with an inquiry into root causes, made this observation. On page 135 of the report Mr. Justice Diemont pointed out in his conclusions that the Pan-African Congress launched a national campaign on 31 March 1960; and that the two immediate aims of the campaign were the abolition of the pass laws and the guarantee by the State of a minimum wage of £35 per month for all workers. Then in paragraph 4 the learned Judge said this—

The Judge records that as a fact. He does not go on to analyse the grievances, for very correctly, in view of the terms of reference, he had to exclude such an inquiry. But it is significant that that evidence was given to him and it bears out the contention of those who had been pleading with the Government and urging the Government that in their own interest and certainly in the interest of South Africa as a whole, and certainly in the interest of amicable relations between Black and White, they should be prepared to have the spotlight of an inquiry focused on the underlying root causes which led to the dissatisfaction.

When one reads these findings, such as those given by Mr. Justice Diemont, and when one remembers all the upsurge of frustration that took place then, then one’s view is strengthened that the greatest problem in South Africa to-day is that of the urban Africans. On the one hand, our economy is dependent upon them. On the other hand, they form a natural centre for political discontent, which flows from the social and economic and political disabilities from which they suffer. After all, the African cannot own a house. He must produce a pass on demand, and he may be forced to leave the urban area at a moment’s notice under certain circumstances. He is uncertain and has no roots, and he is in no state to become a stable and component part of the industrial community. Sir, the answer to that is not apartheid. The Government cannot generate the resources needed for the rapid economic development of the Bantustans, and on the other hand the South African economy cannot get on without the labour of the Bantu worker. So the only real solution is to raise the standard of living of the urban African and to remove the other root causes of his discontent. That is why it is significant to see that there is this movement from this side of the House—we heard it yesterday and before and it comes from the industrialists also—to face the facts, a recognition that if you want to deal with the basic causes of this problem it is a question of building up the standard of living of these people. Sir, I was very impressed by the maiden speech of the hon. member for Bloemfontein (District) (Mr. Schlebusch) last night. The hon. member depicted what he called the formative period of our nation and referred to what he suggested was a dreary episode in our history, the migration to the towns of the poorer sections of the European community, when our people lived in misery in hovels, etc. It was a period of very grave difficulty indeed, and it exercised the minds of social workers, economists and every humanitarian. But that difficulty was overcome because there was the will to overcome it and to recognize a human need. I want to remind my friends opposite that history is not guided in its development merely by the colour of a person’s skin. There are movements amongst the non-Whites to try and drag themselves out of their difficulties, and in many cases their misery, because of their way of life. Let us face that. Do not let us bury our heads in the sand and believe that the problem does not exist, or that simply because it is occurring to only one section of the community, the non-Whites, we can brush it aside. Let us take the warning and realize that this problem can only be tackled by facing it fearlessly and by the recognition on the one hand that there is a permanent urban population which has to be dealt with. Sir, so much for the urban problem.

Now we have on our hands another emergency, in Pondoland, and that is the problem of the rural African, the problem typified by Pondoland, Zeerust and Sekukuniland. It must be remembered, too, that the proclamation which was issued declaring the state of emergency in Pondoland came after the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development had been reassuring the country in statement after statement that everything was under control, that all was well, and that the Bantu were satisfied with the Bantu authorities, and that trouble had occurred as the result only of agitators from outside and communists. The Minister became quite lyrical, as he so often does, in regard to the contentment amongst the Pondos. But we remember that only two years ago he said to us: Give me two years and I will show you a new South Africa. Well, he has had the two years and he has given us a new South Africa. He has given us Pondoland, and he has done what the Minister of Lands said. He has closed the old book of South Africa, at Sharpeville and Langa, and now he gives us Pondoland. What is wrong with this Minister is that either he is self-gullible and induces himself to believe any story put to him, or otherwise his judgment is extremely bad. Either he must have been wrongly informed about the situation in Pondoland, or he must seriously have misinterpreted the information given to him. After all, we know that this hon. Minister is susceptible to putting misinterpretations on the actions of others. We know how the Minister castigated the Burger for not reporting his speeches, and then we saw afterwards that he had been wrongly informed. He went into paroxysms of anger against the Burger and said that they did not report him adequately and the Burger was able to prove conclusively that the Minister was misinformed.

Order! That is not relevant.

I am only showing how necessary it is for this Minister to get accurate information. We are dealing with human fallibility and this Minister has been charged by the Prime Minister with looking after the destinies of the Bantu, and if he can go so far wrong as to make a wrong assessment of his own position, then it is not surprising that he has made this very wrong assessment of the position in Pondoland.

What is the position in Pondoland? His information officer told us that it was an exaggeration to say that large numbers had been arrested in Pondoland. But what are the facts? That 4,769 Natives, two Europeans and two of another race were arrested. We don’t know very much about the communists and the outside agitators, but they arrested 4,769 Pondos, and what is the present position about these people? What have they been charged with, those who have been charged, because we are told that 2,067 were charged before the courts. Where are they at present? Are the families of these detained persons allowed to see them, and are they allowed to seek legal advice? How many additional police and soldiers have been drafted there, and what did the report of the departmental committee which inquired into the causes of the unrest say about it? The Minister has refused to lay it on the Table. He said it was not customary to table such reports. I say it is absolutely essential that such reports should be tabled. Either it discloses that the Minister was right when he told us that all was well in Pondoland, or else it shows that the Minister should have realized what really was happening. What is the root cause of the unrest? Obviously it is the Bantu Authorities system which the Minister said was working so well, and obviously it is essential that we should have a proper inquiry into the things that are agitating the minds of the rural Natives. We certainly cannot go on like this. Pondoland cannot be isolated from the racial situation in the rest of the country. What is happening there is similar to what happened in Zeerust and Sekukuniland, and may happen somewhere else later. You simply cannot go on dealing with these things on an ad hoc basis, employing mobile forces and Saracens, unless these Ministers are prepared to condemn South Africa under the new republic to a perpetual state of emergency year in and year out. Because of that, while approving the amendment moved by the hon. member for Constantia (Mr. Waterson), and supporting it, I would like to move as a further amendment—

1. (a) investigates thoroughly and takes steps to lessen the grievances making for increasing discontent and instability in our urban and rural non-European communities; and
2. (b) in particular gives an assurance that it will consider the advisability of appointing a judicial commission of inquiry into the root causes of the disturbances which led to—
   1. (i) the declaration of a statutory state of emergency in 1960;
   2. (ii) the declaration of the statutory state of emergency existing in Pondoland at the present time; and
   3. (iii) existing unrest in other parts of the Union.”

I second. Mr. Speaker, this House has been asked to vote the sum of R300,000,000 to the Government to administer the country, and therefore it is essential that this side of the House should examine in detail the way in which the Government has administered the country in the past year. It is precisely for that reason that the rules governing Budget debates allow a wide discussion to be carried on by the Opposition, founded on the very excellent British parliamentary principle that redress of grievances precedes supply. Now, if one surveys the field of administration over the past year one can entertain very little hope that the forthcoming year will see better administration of the country. Last year’s sorry record contains some of the blackest episodes in our history —Cato Manor, Sharpeville, Langa, and later the Pondoland episode. This year has started with further unrest. The result is of course that our economy has suffered all the usual consequences engendered by lack of confidence following political unrest. Our investment has slackened off. There is loss of confidence overseas. Valuable citizens are leaving the country, and the general rate of the development of our economy is slowing down. A country which with its potentialities should be bursting at the seams is facing the prospects of an economic recession.

I want to carry on the theme introduced by the hon. member for Salt River (Mr. Lawrence), as this is the first opportunity we have had to do so. South Africa and the whole world were shocked last year by the dreadful episodes at Sharpeville and Langa. We know that judicial commissions have sat and have reported on those happenings. I must say that I have listened with some amazement to members on this side of the House making a statement that if only the Government had published the reports earlier South Africa’s good name overseas would not have been maligned. I can only say that those hon. members could not have studied these reports very well, nor the evidence presented before the commissions. In no way did the evidence or the commissions exonerate the authorities for what happened at Langa or Sharpeville. Have those hon. members forgotten that 69 people were killed at Sharpeville, among them 8 women and 10 children; that 180 people were wounded, among them 31 women and 19 children; that some 216 families were left destitute and that they will for ever suffer economically? To these people the date of the publication of the report, and even the type of bullets that might have been used at Sharpeville by the police, is of little but academic interest. All of us would very much like to forget these episodes. No one likes to dwell on tragic happenings, but one cannot just forget these events. The least one can do is to see what lessons can be learned from them. One of the lessons which I recommend to the hon. the Minister of Justice is that in future the most stringent methods of training should be given to the police on crowd control and dispersal, and that in future no young, untrained policemen should be sent to deal with crowds. Now unfortunately one read only last night that in Pondoland unjustified and excessive, and even reckless—I am quoting the words of the magistrate—shooting was done in Pondoland by the police. At least in such situations the police sent to deal with them should be most carefully trained and be the most experienced men at the Minister’s disposal. That is only one elementary lesson, but there are others to be learnt from these episodes. The first is that, as the hon. member for Salt River has pointed out, simply declaring a state of emergency and detaining thousands of people without trial is no way of tackling the underlying causes of the unrest. John Locke once said that “there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotion and that is oppression”. For this Government to state blandly, as it has done the whole of the past year, that the disturbances last year were not due to any genuine grievances at all is not only utterly stupid but also utterly cynical. A proper inquiry into the root causes of the disturbances has been refused, and this is nothing short of criminal folly for unless the root causes are discovered and examined and unless the grievances are set right, we can look forward to nothing but a dreary repetition of civil unrest, put down by saracens and guns, until South Africa ultimately gets the reputation of being a full-fledged totaliarian régime. Sir, it is no exaggeration to say that there are genuine grievances suffered by the Africans to-day, and it is no exaggeration to say that to the Black people of this country South Africa is fast becoming little different from an occupied country. [Interjections.] Sir, this is not an exaggeration. If the hon. member will listen he will hear why I say this. The average African cannot move about in the country in which he was born; he cannot move without passes, without permits and without being accosted at every turn to prove his legal right to be in whichever area he happens to be. His political organizations are banned. He has absolutely no voice through the normal political channels, through constitutional channels, to voice his grievances. His leaders are banished without trial. According to the figures given to us by the Minister in this House this year and last year, it seems that at least 60 people are still languishing in banishment, people who have been sent away without trial. Some of them have been there for five or six years and still do not know why they have been banished. The economic grievances of the African cannot be voiced through the normal channels. Their trade unions are not legally recognized; they have no way of legitimately putting their demands to their employers. The cruel operation of the pass laws and influx control break up family life, restrict the African’s right to sell his labour in the best market and remove any stability whatsoever which the urban African might attain. If you lose your job you lose your home. On the Rand a man cannot lose his job and legitimately go and look for work in the neighbouring municipality of Germiston. He suffers the loss of his home if his employer happens to dismiss him. Sir, what sort of freedom is it that these people enjoy and are these not genuine grievances? Worst of all to my mind is the fact that as a result of this system, of the growing up of all these legislative barriers surrounding the Africans, they are no longer treated as individuals or human beings. They are considered simply as units by the civil servant who has to administer these laws. In the hands of the civil servant lies practically the power of survival as far as the African is concerned, for what does that dreaded endorsement “endorsed out of the urban area” mean to the African? It means that he is deprived of any possibility of making a decent livelihood. Sir, these unfortunate Africans who are surrounded in this way by these regulations, are subject to the administration of officials who, by virtue of their work, have to become callous and indifferent to the demands and sufferings of these people as individuals. Every facet of the life of these people is controlled. Nor can one say that as a result of this, at least the life of the African is ordered, that it is an ordered existence, that every man has a legitimate place where he may lay his head, because this is not so. When a man is endorsed out of the urban area, who cares what happens to him after that—where he is to go, how he is to live, how he is to earn his livelihood. The official puts the stamp “endorsed out of the urban area” on the African’s documents, and as far as he is concerned, that is the end of the matter. Thereafter the man can spend his time dodging the police and in and out of a police station. Sir, these are facts; they are socio-economic factors—pass laws, housing problems, low wages, poverty, lack of opportunity to earn a living, lack of mobility. These are genuine grievances, and it is no good the Government saying that all the disturbances are simply caused by agitators. I would like to tell the Government now that never has a more fertile field been left open for agitators than this system under which the life of the African is being administered at the present time. If one couples these socio-economic grievances with political causes, one can see clearly why we constantly have this state of unrest in South Africa.

The position in the country districts is not very much different from that in the urban areas. The Pondoland and Transkei unrest, and the unrest in other rural areas, also have behind them genuine grievances. Hon. members will remember that in October 1960 a departmental commission of inquiry was set up to look into the grievances of the Africans in Pondoland. They found that there were legitimate grievances, although these are sometimes “wrongly associated”, they say, with the Bantu Authorities system. The Chief Bantu Commissioner of the Transkei at that time promised to look into these grievances. On 9 November the Institute of Race Relations issued a warning that unless immediate attention was given to the underlying causes of the unrest in Pondoland, fresh outbreaks could be expected. Well, Sir, what happened? Instead of the Government investigating and setting right the genuine grievances of these people we had a repetition of the events following Sharpeville and Langa—the declaration of a state of emergency, the use of strong-arm measures, the calling out of the army and the police and the detention of thousands of people without a trial and without recourse to legal representation and without being allowed to see their relatives. Sir, ugly stories are filtering out of Pondoland despite the ban on the Press. One hears stories of villages being surrounded by army units, of helicopters overhead while the huts are searched, of escapees being watched by helicopters, of thousands of Native women being taken off in trucks to detention camps.

Exaggerations.

These stories may or may not be exaggerated; I do not know. Is the hon. member for Cradock (Mr. G. F. H. Bekker) prepared to allow the Press to go in and see for themselves and to tell South Africa exactly what is happening in Pondoland? Sir, again no judicial commission of inquiry has been appointed to go into the troubles in Pondoland. Sir, anybody in this House could have warned the Government that unrest could be expected in the rural areas, just as on this side of the House we have warned the Government over and over again that there will be unrest in the urban areas. Sir, I have sat in this House year after year listening to the then member for Transkei (Mr. Walter Stanford) warning the Minister and the Government that there was unrest in Pondoland, that there was trouble in the Transkei, that the Africans in the Reserves did not welcome the Bantu Authorities system, in the way the hon. the Minister has told us they do. The then member for Transkei warned us over and over again that there was going to be trouble, but the Minister simply stood up and said that Mr. Stanford had been holding secret meetings in the Transkei inciting the Africans. Sir, the secret meeting that Mr. Stanford held was a public meeting held at Umtata in order to report back to his constituents. These meetings were held at night, as the hon. the Minister said, but that is about the sum total of the veracity of the accusations which the hon. the Minister made against Mr. Stanford. I want to remind the House that some of the grievances of which we know, both from what Mr. Stanford has said—and his warnings have proved to be fully justified—and also from other inquiries which have been conducted in Pondoland into the grievances which in fact exist among the people of Pondoland and the Transkei. First of all, they do not accept the Bantu Authorities and welcome it with open arms as the Minister has said. I have no doubt that there is a côterie of chiefs who have accepted it, but they themselves are not generally acceptable to the people. Many of them have been put there in the place of chiefs whom the Government have deposed, and the tribesmen themselves do not accept the Bantu Authorities with any degree of enthusiasm at all. This came out quite clearly even at the departmental inquiry which was held at the end of last year. Sir, the people object not only to the Bantu Authorities—and I will say that many of the other objections are willy-nilly associated with the Bantu Authorities because the Government has put the Bantu Authorities’ personnel in charge of the implementation of other unpopular reforms. I concede that agricultural reforms are always unpopular with a peasant people, but when you couple unpopular reforms with unpopular leaders and when you put it in the hands of those leaders to see that those unpopular reforms are carried out, then I say that you are looking for twice as much trouble as you would have normally. Sir, the tax system is deeply resented by these people. There has been an increase in taxation, and again it is the Bantu Authorities who have to see that the taxes are collected—grass tax, cattle tax, hut tax. All these are taxes which have been increased and to which the people object strongly.

Taxes are always unpopular.

Yes, taxes are always unpopular, and when you appoint unpopular officials to collect those taxes and when you increase taxation, as this House did last year, on people who are sorely bent under a burden of great poverty, then again you are looking for trouble. We all know that the poll taxes were increased last year, and that these taxes are felt particularly hard by the people of the reserves who have to face two things; first of all, the fact that the land itself is getting less productive because of the growing pressure of population on the land, despite all the Minister’s betterment schemes, despite all the reforms, and secondly because of the intensified use of the influx control system and the pass laws against the rural African who cannot go and seek work in the urban areas. These two things, coming together with the increased taxation, have obviously led to growing unrest in those areas. These, Sir, are the things that the people object to. They object also to the compulsory labour system which has been forced on them by the chiefs to whom the Minister and the Bantu Authorities system have given increased authority. Sir, levies, taxes and even political punishments can be inflicted upon these people. They can be made to work on the chief’s land; they can be levied with taxes at a moment’s notice, and indeed the ad hoc nature of these taxes is one of the great grievances because these people do not even know how to budget for the increased expenditure that they are asked to meet. They can be made to work compulsorily on roads, dams, and fences—all of which is in the interests of the people themselves but unpopular because of the way in which it is being enforced. Sir, may I remind the hon. the Minister about the Corvée before the French Revolution, the work which the peasants had to do on the roads and the growing resentment that that produced. Sir, all these are factors which have led, together with the accusation of nepotism and corruption of the chiefs, to the growing dislike of the Bantu Authorities system. Sir, what I really want to say this afternoon is that the Government never seems to learn any lessons from history; that force may for a time restore order but the restoration of such order can never be anything but temporary unless the underlying causes of the unrest are examined and set right.

What happened at Sharpeville and Langa and Cato Manor, and what is happening in Pondoland and Tembuland have all been foreshadowed by previous events in history—by Zeerust, by Sekukuniland and by other events in the areas of the Transvaal where again there were objections to the Bantu Authorities system, to the Bantu education system, to taxation, to influx control, to the carrying of passes by African women. All these things are simply a thread in the same historical evolution of this unrest, and the Government must take notice of it because, Sir, you can govern by statutory enactments only just so long, and I must say that the whole process becomes increasingly unpleasant not only for the non-Whites but also for the Whites. Therefore I say that unless the Government is prepared to take notice of grievances, to do something to set right those grievances, to do something to prevent future unrest, a tremendous legacy of hatred is being built up in this country against the White man, and we say that the Government should show some sign of change of heart, and some realization that we cannot continue along the path on which we have been led for the past 12 years. Unless the Government does something to steer us from this path, which can only bring ruin and disaster on this country, we are unable to vote supply, for these grievances have not been redressed.

We had hoped that this debate would be concluded without Pondoland being dragged in, and when it became late in the afternoon we thought that this would actually be the case, but because there is a Pondoland we were mistaken. The main theme of hon. members opposite who participated in the debate this afternoon in this connection was the protection of the evildoers in Pondoland. One after another they got up to indicate how badly things are going in Pondoland and how irresponsible the Government is. Not a single word of appreciation came from that side of the House for what was being done in Pondoland to protect property and lives. Mr. Speaker, on this occasion one really requires more time and I think that hon. members on both sides of the House are probably keen on going home, after a long day, and therefore I wish to move—

I second.

Agreed to; debate to be resumed on 15 February.