When I moved the Second Reading of this Bill on Wednesday last week, I did so in the spirit of profound and sincere earnestness, an earnestness befitting an occasion such as that one. That earnestness was not born of the idea that there might be something radically wrong with the economy of our country; it was born of the conviction, a conviction which I have always had, that problems such as these—problems which have a bearing on the economy of our country as a whole, which have a bearing on the welfare of every man, woman and child in our country—should, in a place like this, always be treated with the greatest measure of earnestness. That is why I expected to find, also on the part of the Opposition—which, after all, should also have the interests of the country at heart and which also forms part of this House of Assembly—the same measure of earnestness, as well as a sincere endeavour to come here not only with criticism and negative statements, but also with a sincere attempt to contribute something positive to the solution of our problems. For that reason, Mr. Speaker, you can understand how disappointed I and we on this side of the House were to see how many hon. members opposite were treating the major problems threatening us today without any earnestness, and often with a measure of frivolity. It was almost with jubilation that they took pleasure in splaying out before the world supposed difficulties and weaknesses which may be present in our economy; we have seen how hon. members opposite, the one after the other, came forward with destructive criticism without any well-considered plan—and I shall prove this—for the solution of our problems. If one were to sift all those words that came from the other side of the House, from the first to the last speaker, and if all the chaff went through, one would only find an occasional grain to which attention has to be given.

Surely, in that case you might as well sit down.

I think hon. members would welcome it very much if I were to sit down, but I am not going to do so. It is striking that such contributions of any positive significance as were made on the other side, were not made by the frontbenchers on that side; on the contrary, the positive ideas—whether or not one agrees with them is a different matter, but the positive ideas to which one may pay attention—and suggestions came from the newcomers, from the backbenchers on that side. It is not that one agrees with those ideas, but the ideas which were tangible and could be considered, came from the hon. members for Constantia, Gardens and Von Brandis, young members in this House.

That merely goes to show how many good members we have.

Hon. members sitting in the front benches have given us very little food for thought. Sir, if you listened to the rhetoric of the hon. member for Yeoville, the poetics of the hon. member for Parktown and the comedy of the hon. member for Durban Point, you would find that virtually nothing new, nothing positive, nothing constructive came to light in those speeches, but what we did find in them was hair-splitting and verbosity. To be honest, we found that nobody on that side had a concrete solution to our problems. Mr. Speaker, I think I can really say in all honesty that our hon. friends on the other side of the House did not act like members of the House of Assembly but like politicians.

Who is talking now!

One would have said that we were on the eve of an election, for the majority of them were still making their election speeches here. In a difficult situation for our country and for our people—and the economic situation is a difficult one—they tried to derive for themselves as much political gain as possible. At this very stage, when they had to think of South Africa, they thought of themselves and they considered how, by exploiting the opportunities they are afforded here, they could derive the maximum party-political gain for themselves. For that reason they took pleasure in giving an exaggerated outline here, before the whole world, of the problems which our country, like other countries, is experiencing. They revelled and took pleasure in splaying out these problems in order that they might tell the world: “This is what South Africa looks like,” as reflected by them.

Sir, I wonder whether any person who listened to hon. members opposite during the past week, to the dark picture being sketched of our country, would ever invest a cent in South Africa? They never came near to the real problem. We are saddled here with a problem of inflation, and I am levelling the accusation at hon. members of the Opposition that they never came near to the crux of that problem. They did not analyse it properly. They only came forward with one aspect, the aspect of labour, and even that problem of labour they did not analyse properly themselves. They never spotted the consequences, the implications, of their own policy.

The Minister of Labour spotted them.

They never proved to us the effectiveness of their solution, and I think that this morning we should devote some time to analysing more closely the solution of the labour problem which they are putting forward. Sir, nobody can say that this side of the House has tried to make political capital out of this occasion. The only political capital we could make out of it, was to reveal the nakedness of the Opposition. Sir, just look at the facts. We are introducing additional taxes here; we are asking the people for an additional R47 million.

Disgraceful!

It is not easy to ask for taxes; it is not a pleasant task to pay taxes. He who seeks political popularity, does not introduce additional taxes. It is not pleasant to do so. But why did we do so? Not for the purpose of gaining popularity with the people, but because we seriously believe that under given circumstances this is the only and the best way to cure our people of the inflation disease.

And to clear up your own mess.

We shall remember those words of the hon. member. In spite of what hon. members said here, I came into contact with people from all walks of life during the past few days, since last Wednesday, and without exception they thanked us for the fact that in a time like this the Government had the courage to take a step which it considers to be in the interests of the people.

Mr. Speaker, what has emerged from all the speeches made by these hon. members? I want to refer, in the first place, to my hon. friend, the member for Parktown, who was the main Opposition speaker on economics. I like the hon. member, but, Sir, unfortunately he has been developing a tendency of late for his ideas to be engulfed by his flowery style. The hon. member told us that there was “a new strain of inflation” in America and in the world today. He said—

Sir, by telling us openly—here it stands recorded in black and white—that inflation is not a problem found in South Africa alone but a world problem, the hon. member has well and truly let the cat out of the bag. Whereas hon. members on that side attacked the Government by accusing it of having caused inflation, he negated everything that was said here by them by stating that this was a new strain of inflation about which the whole world was concerned. The hon. member must indeed have a very high opinion of the National Government on the basis of what it did in the past and the tremendous revival it has brought about, to say that the National Government should now, according to him, be able to accomplish what the whole world has not been able to do. I thank him for that confidence. At the same time the hon. member said that a mechanism had not yet been found for fighting this “new strain of inflation”. Now hon. members opposite, one after the other, are attacking the Government for not having succeeded as yet in fighting this inflation, although in our country the rate of inflation is lower than it is in any comparable country. What happens to the arguments advanced by the hon. members opposite when a frontbencher of theirs is negating everything they said by virtually saying that inflation is not an exclusively South African problem, that it is not the Government that is to blame for it, that it is a new world phenomenon and that nobody has as yet found a solution to it?

This is the double-talk to which we have been referring and which is characteristic of members on the other side of the House. On the one hand they say this, and on the other hand they are availing themselves of the same opportunity to accuse the Government of what they absolve other governments from. Now they are displaying that arrogance—I call it arrogance—in that the hon. member says that no country in the world has as yet found a solution to the modern problem of inflation, but they, the United Party, have a solution. I think the world would be very grateful if these hon. members would explain to the world at large what the world solution is which they have found and virtually patented.

This solution lies in the sphere of labour. Inflation will be solved through a more effective utilization of the available labour, through drawing in a larger number of non-White labourers to replace other labourers. Now I want to make the statement that that whole theory of the Opposition of regarding labour as the only solution to the problem of inflation, is a claim which verges on superficiality and which has not yet been considered properly. Labour is a very important means of production and it has to be used to the best of our ability, but what proof do the hon. members have that by making greater use of labour, by drawing in more labourers, it will be possible to solve the problem of inflation? This claim was made by all of them and it s being accepted outside that we merely have to bring in more workers and the problem of inflation will be solved, but what proof have the hon. members ever furnished to the effect that the problem of inflation will be solved by drawing in more workers? One may assume that if one brings in more labourers, it is possible that one may have an increased volume of production, but can one always say that under given circumstances more labourers will mean less inflation? That is what it amounts to.

That depends on how they are trained.

The question is whether more labourers, trained or not trained, will mean less inflation. I want to make the statement here today that it is no hard and fast economic law that increased employment means less inflation. It is no hard and fast economic law that increased employment means less inflation, but that is the attitude which the hon. members have adopted time and again.

These are skittles which you are now putting up for yourself.

Stop trying to get away from your own spectres. It is always being said that we are sitting here with a tremendous source of labour in South Africa, greater than those in other countries, and why are we not making more and more use of that source of labour?

More effective use.

I have noticed recently that these hon. members are swinging away from this idea and have arrived at the idea of the greater efficiency of existing labour, but behind this entire school of thought the idea has always been that we have a reservoir of labour here, a large mass of people who have to be drawn in, and that with full employment we shall overcome inflation. Let us take a look at this theory.

You are not conducting a debate now. [Interjections.]

Let us abandon the theory for a while and let us see what is happening in practice. What do we see in the world today? Here in the developing countries in Africa and elsewhere there is a mass of labour.

Have they been trained?

That can be trained; and in all those countries, in spite of all that labour, there is a tremendously high rate of inflation. Take the Western world and take a country such as Spain, not one of the most highly developed countries, but an industrial country. They have a major source of labour there, but inflation prevails in Spain. Take a country such as Italy.

But Spain does not have any gold.

No, but Spain has a tremendous tourist industry, which brings in more than gold does. That is an argument which passes my understanding. But let us take Italy. Of course, you know, Sir, that Italy has thousands of workers who go to the western countries of Europe every year to offer their labour there; good workers, not unskilled workers only; they are fine, capable people, and we came to know them here in South Africa. But in spite of all its manpower there is a high rate of inflation in Italy.

But they have socialism there.

This has nothing to do with socialism. Go to Britain where they had socialism, and where under the socialist government they had unemployment under Wilson. Skilled people did not have any employment and there was a high rate of inflation. Go to the U.S.A. Today the U.S.A.’s problem is unemployment amongst unskilled and skilled people, and yet it has inflation. Surely, the U.S.A. could have solved its problem very easily, and Britain and Spain and all those countries could also have solved their problems very easily if they had used their tremendous source of labour to combat inflation. But, on the contrary, what did America do? Recently America has, unfortunately, been promoting inflation. It created new inflation in order to absorb its redundant labour.

Now, I want to go back, Sir, and I hope you will understand that I do not want to go back to the rinderpest. [Interjections.] Yes, I am going back to the report of the Reserve Bank as well, and if the hon. member does not take care, I shall go back to the report of the Reserve Bank for 1949. But I want to take a period in our history, from 1945 to 1948, when another party was in power. During that period the S.A. Trades and Labour Council handed over to the Government, to Gen. Smuts, a memorandum in which they complained about the tremendous increase in the cost of living, i.e. over that period from 1945 to 1948. I quote—

After five years of war.

The hon. member says that was after five years of war, but here the hon. members had three years of possible growth and development, from 1945 to 1948. They had this whole source of non-White labour to draw on, and they had the whole of Europe to draw on in order to promote immigration. They had the soldiers who were coming back from the front, White soldiers, skilled and unskilled people. They had all the labour on which they could lay their hands, but, nevertheless, they did not succeed in curbing inflation, and in those times we saw the following statement in the Sunday Times: “The cost of living has risen 69 per cent in eight years.” Is that not something which reduces the entire argument of my friends opposite to a reductio ad absurdum?

That figure cannot be correct.

Well, here I have the newspaper. It is the Sunday Times, your own paper; in it figures and graphs are used to support this statement.

Sir, the hon. member also referred to growth. That side of the House has been accusing us of not being in favour of growth and of wanting to check growth in this country. They have said that we belong to the damping school and not to the growth school. Those hon. members have once again found two words to play with. The politics of the future will, in the economic sphere, now be dominated again by two words, i.e. the “growth school” and the “damping school”. That will give them satisfaction. After all, it is childish of my friends opposite to claim that this side of the House belongs to the damping school. Have we not seen 20 years of growth behind us? Now I want to ask the hon. the Leader of the Opposition this question: Is it not true that over the past two decades, since the National Party came into power, we have seen the most spectacular growth which has ever taken place in South Africa and which is comparable with the best in the world? We are the people who caused the growth in this country.

You have now joined the damping school.

Oh, we have joined the damping school? I shall deal with that. Every overseas visitor who comes here, says that he is stunned by the tremendous growth that has been taking place in South Africa in recent times. If hon. members do not want to believe me, I want to read out to them what was said last November by a person whose words they probably will have to accept. This person, whose name I shall mention in a moment, said the following in his speech—

This beautiful testimonial on the growth in the past six years, which hon. members opposite cannot deny, comes from a speech made by a very honourable person, Mr. H. S. Mayburn, executive director of the Association of Chambers of Commerce in South Africa. Sir, this party has exerted itself for creating the circumstances and the framework within which real and actual growth could take place. This I want to tell hon. members and the world outside: We shall once again take this country to tremendous heights as far as its economic growth is concerned. We know that we must do this, because of the composition of our population. We know that we must do this; otherwise we shall go under. We also know that we must do this, for if we do not, we cannot implement our own policy in this country and we would be powerless against the outside world.

Although I am now predicting and undertaking that in the decades that lie ahead the National Party will once again take our economic growth to unprecedented heights, there are two standpoints from which we shall not deviate. We do not believe in growth at all costs. Nor do we believe in unbalanced growth. There are certain forms of growth that require one to abandon values, values which mean much more to one than economic prosperity does. We are not prepared to pay that price. There is a form of growth which brings instability and uncertainty into the economy, which goes hand in hand with a deterioration of one’s currency and with inflation. That kind of growth we want to avoid. I want the U.P. to state to us on some occasion, even if it is in the course of the Third Reading debate, their standpoint in respect of inflation. Nobody knows what they want. On the one hand they are arguing against inflation as a major evil in the economy and, on the other hand, they are supporting a standpoint which implies growth at any price, and inflation. It often seems to one as though members of the U.P. are entertaining the idea that inflation is a condition for growth, and that one has to retain inflation in order to promote growth. This is an extremely dangerous standpoint. It is true that moderate inflation may stimulate growth temporarily, but in the long run inflation destroys growth.

I want to prove this in two ways. Inflation destroys one’s growth in the long run in that inflation brings along with it something which one finds in many countries, i.e. an unprecedented rise in wages and costs in the industrial sphere. In due course the costs and the wages in the industrial sphere rise to such an extent that no profits are being made any more. Rising costs, rising turnover and diminishing profits are found in certain countries, such as America. There one has tremendous price increases, but no or a negative real growth in the country. This is followed by the period to which the hon. member for Hillbrow referred, i.e. the period of stagflation, of stagnation and inflation, where there is inflation on the one hand and stagnation, or a standstill, on the other hand. All inflation eventually leads to stagnation. In our country it has not done so yet. In spite of the inflation we have here, we still have a high rate of growth, i.e. 7½ per cent in 1969 and a possible 6 per cent for last year. As yet we do not know precisely what it is going to be, but it is a fairly high growth rate. It is far from a state of stagnation.

The second point is that inflation destroys saving. We have seen how the figure for saving has begun to drop. Saving is the investment for one’s future growth. It provides the capital for going ahead in the future. For that reason alone hon. members and I must not adopt a half-hearted attitude towards inflation. We must not think that inflation may promote our growth. Inflation is fatal to all growth, and the sooner it is squashed, the better. Drastic measures are necessary, even if we have to pay dearly for them. Even if the price we have to pay at the outset is also a painful one, it is better to do it now than to do so later in the form of delayed or negative growth.

Sir, we are the growth people. We proved this in the past. We do not check growth. We check inflation for the sake of growth. If we did not check inflation, a new building of continued stable and steady growth would not rise on the new foundations laid by us.

I am coming back to the problem of labour. I have already said that labour forms a very important ingredient of the production, but it is not the only ingredient. One cannot solve this problem by means of the labour factor alone, as the hon. members opposite want to do. Labour is only one of the factors in the production process. Even if one had all the labour in the world, skilled or unskilled, it would still be impossible to make any progress if certain other elements were lacking. My hon. friends opposite have never recognized the necessity for those elements. I want to refer to three of those elements.

In the first place, there is the necessity for capital. Many of the growing development countries of the West have the labour, but they do not have the capital. For rapid growth a great deal of capital is necessary. The hon. member for Lydenburg referred to the fact that it had been calculated here in South Africa that the capital return ratio in South Africa was 2.4. One has to invest R2.4 to get a return of R1. If, for argument’s sake, one wants a return or an increased gross product of R500 million, an amount of R1,200 million has to be invested. Labour is a tremendously important factor, but now my hon. friend has once again come forward here with strange, winged words. He said, “There is no capital shortage.” There is no scarcity of capital in South Africa. What we have in South Africa, is a monetary distortion. Is that true? This is a beautiful phrase, but I wonder whether hon. members understand it. I do not.

That is the hon. the Minister’s trouble.

Yes, that is the trouble. I wonder whether the people outside, to whom the hon. members are referring so often, understand it. I wonder whether the people who are searching for capital today, understand it. I wonder whether this is being understood by the people who have to pay these higher rates of interest to obtain capital for carrying on their industries. No scarcity of capital! This is almost like the person who would say: There is no drought in this land; it is merely that there are scattered thunder showers elsewhere. At present everybody is talking about this scarcity. Everybody is feeling that scarcity. We would go to countries abroad, if the position is better anywhere, and we could try to get hold of capital there. Admittedly, we can obtain short-term money; that is something different, but we cannot obtain investment capital. I think that it is very strange of my hon. friend to tell the House here that there is no scarcity of capital in South Africa.

In the second place, over and above capital and labour, a country also requires an infrastructure. We need postal services and transport services; we need schools, hospitals and universities; we need harbours and we need scores and scores of services which the Government has to provide. The Government is constantly being criticized in this House by hon. members opposite in regard to shortcomings in the infrastructure in the country. We know that a great deal is being done, for instance, to extend the postal service in our country. We know that the postal services and the telephone service in our country are not perfect, in spite of the fact that large amounts have been voted for these services. [Interjection]. We are honest and admit that these services are not perfect in spite of the large amounts spent on and tremendous activity devoted to them, because South Africa has grown so rapidly that the postal service has not been able to keep pace. We know that complaints are often heard about the transport services. In spite of the tremendous amount of work done by my colleague the hon. the Minister of Transport, the large amounts of money continually being pumped into these services and the construction of transport lines, there is still a scarcity of the necessary infrastructure in the growing economy. The other day an hon. member opposite childishly wanted to know why we had not built the Orange River scheme a long time ago. But, surely, as far as that is concerned, we may as well ask why we are not building the entire infrastructure of South Africa right now, even what it will need in a hundred years’ time. But Rome was, after all not built in one day. We must go on providing the infrastructure we need. Hon. members opposite have been offering this simple solution—labour and labour alone; they do not have any regard to the capital, nor do they have any regard to the infrastructure. This is an extensive country, a large and extensive country with a sparse population. For that reason it is not as easy for us to provide an infrastructure as it is for a small and densely populated country to do so. In our country this creates major problems and requires a tremendous amount of capital. That is why it is futile to speak of labour and of labour alone.

Furthermore, they are forgetting that there is such a thing as a balance of payments, that one has to have regard to one’s imports and exports of goods and of money and of services. A country’s balance of payments plays a tremendous role in its economic growth.

Countries which grow rapidly, have a better balance of payments.

The general phenomenon is that countries which grow rapidly, develop a negative balance of payments. I am not referring now to well-established industrial countries such as West Germany, where the production apparatus has already been established over the years. No, here in our country everything has to be built up from scratch since we are a young country, and that is why rapid growth and economic development involve increased demands on one’s reserves and pressure on one’s balance of payments. This is an economic fact. We are not the only country which has to keep this in view; we are not like the U.S.A., and my hon. friend the hon. member for Parktown will know that. The U.S.A. has said that the question of a balance of payments no longer counts, because they can always pay in dollars. But no other country can do that. We, for instance, must have regard to our balance of payments. I want to assure hon. members of something they already know, i.e. that we in South Africa already have a particularly high growth rate, and that if we consider further growth, as we shall do, we shall not only consider labour, but properly take into account all the factors required for a steady growth. In this regard I want to refer to an article dated 14th February and written by Dr. Desmond Krogh, director of the Federated Chamber of Industries. By way of introduction the following was said (translation)—

This is what the director of the Federated Chamber of Industries had to say.

That is sound.

That is sound, yes. That is what we have been saying here every day, i.e. that to allow a country to be developed too rapidly, brings with it more disadvantages than advantages.

He says “more rapidly than the resources permit”.

Yes, than the resources permit, but resources do not consist of labour only—they include capital as well; they include the entire infrastructure. However, hon. members are having regard to labour only. [Interjections.]

Order!

Dr. Krogh says the same thing—

This is what the director of the Federated Chamber of Industries has to say. A moment ago I referred to what was said by the director of Assocom, and here Mr. Krogh also says what we have always been saying—to try to do too much in a short while, without sacrifice and exertion, is the root cause of our present and future economic problems.

I want to deal with another point which was so often discussed by hon. members opposite, i.e. our monetary and fiscal policy. Hon. members opposite have all been criticizing the application of our monetary and fiscal policy as an instrument in the fight against inflation. In fact, over the years they have been levelling criticism against that policy, against the policy of the Reserve Bank, against the policy of a credit ceiling, against the interest rate policy and all those things. They have always been levelling criticism against our fiscal policy and, now again, against the taxes we proposed here recently. Instead of that they are proposing purely a labour policy—no longer a monetary or fiscal policy, but purely a labour policy. And yet our fiscal and monetary policy has always rendered South Africa great services. It is the fiscal and monetary policy implemented by us over the past five to six years which has seen to it that our rate of inflation has remained amongst the lowest in the world. Similarly, it is the monetary and fiscal policies of countries such as France and West Germany that has stabilized their economies to a certain extent. But hon. members opposite pretend to know everything. Of course, I have no objection to a person expressing his opinion; he is entitled to do so. But they are saying now that everybody is against us, that we are alone in holding the views we do, and that only they are right as regards our fiscal and monetary policy. In this regard I want to quote to hon. members from the latest study undertaken by the O.E.C.D., a study which dealt with “the present problem of inflation” and in which the following was said—

This is the policy which we on this side are pursuing, a policy which hon. members opposite want to query. It is a policy which is being laid down here by an authoritative body such as the O.E.C.D. But, what is more, if there is any person who can speak authoritatively on monetary policy, it is probably Mr. Schweizer, the managing director of the I.M.F. Recently he said in Copenhagen—

This is what is being said by Mr. Schweizer and all his advisers, who visit us every year. This is the tone they maintain in their advice—“rely primarily on monetary and fiscal policies”. The view taken by hon. members opposite, i.e. that we are supposedly alone in our policy, does not tally with the true facts. I have mentioned to them here two leading authorities. I am going further than that. I have here a publication that appeared recently, “Further Weapons against Inflation: Measures to supplement general fiscal and monetary policies,” by the Committee of Economic Development of the United States. Hon. members know who the members of the Committee of Economic Development are. They say—

In America these authoritative bodies are saying that we should adhere to the policy of fiscal and monetary measures in the fight against inflation, but it should be supplemented by other policies and, in particular, a policy which goes into the question of demand with a view to reducing the demand. Sir, I think I have quoted here very important passages taken from authoritative sources in order to prove that our policy is in keeping with the general world policy. It is only hon. members opposite who do not know what it is, for they do not want to know.

In the short time at my disposal I want to deal now with a few major problems. In the time I have left I shall, unfortunately, not be able to deal with everything I should have liked to deal with and to reply to all the questions that were put by hon. members. I should very much like to deal briefly with the question of fish concessions, which was touched upon here by the hon. member for Simonstown. The hon. member will appreciate that it will take time to do so. On a later occasion he will be given a full reply, as I also gave previously, when I was Minister of Economic Affairs. On that occasion he will get that reply, but I just want to put again one question to that side: Why are hon. members opposite talking about the two South African factory ships, and why have we not heard a single word about the large numbers of foreign ships from other countries which are catching fish just off our coast-line and outside our territorial waters?

The Minister himself says that there are no foreign ships.

The hon. member is now referring to the position a few years ago.

No, now.

I am referring to the period in regard to which he has been attacking me. During that period there were large numbers of foreign ships off our coast-line. There might have been dozens of them—Spanish, Japanese, Dutch and other ships. We have photographs of them and we know what they did, but these things are not discussed by those hon. members.

Read the speeches I made five years ago.

I hope the hon. member appreciates that I cannot deal with the entire problem now.

The last few minutes which I have left, I want to devote to the question of the cost of living. It has been said to us here that we are taking a step here which will lead to an increase in the cost of living in the country. As usual the hon. member for Durban Point lamented the increased cost of living. That is nonsense. Sir; that is purely politics. Not one of them has ventured to say to what extent these new sales duties are going to influence the cost of living. They merely made general statements to the effect that the cost of living would rise to such an extent that wages would have to be increased, but not one of them furnished figures to substantiate such a statement.

Will they reduce the cost of living?

No, I am not saying that they will reduce the cost of living. I shall now tell the hon. member what the position is; we are not trying to obscure it. When we originally introduced the sales duty, we expected it to result in a non-recurrent increase of 1½ per cent in the cost of living.

Non-recurrent but permanent.

Unfortunately the hon. member does not understand the concept. What did we find after making calculations? We found that that increase of almost R100 million resulted in a non-recurrent increase of .9 per cent in the cost of living. On that basis we can now say that this new introduction of sales duty to the amount of R47 million, involves an increase of .45 per cent in the cost of living. To my mind it will be less, because the recent increase in the sales duty relates more to genuinely more luxurious articles and imported articles. We assume, therefore, that the non-recurrent increase in the cost of living which these new sales duties are going to bring about, will amount to less than .5 per cent, and these are no grounds for an increase in wages. In my opinion it would be dangerous for our workers to aim at higher and higher wages all the time. In due course higher and higher wages defeat their purpose. The labourers are entitled to a just wage, but when that wage becomes too high, it destroys the basis of their cost of living. I find here, in another American publication, that Mr. Weidenbaum, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, has said the following—

I think there is a great deal of truth in these words. If we push wages too high, we run the risk of really undermining the standard of living of our people.

But let us get back to this sales duty and the tremendous impact it will have on the standard of living of our people. Over the past five years, from 1964 to 1969, wages and salaries rose much more rapidly than did the cost of living. I want to emphasize that during these five years the cost of living rose by less than 3½ per cent per year, whereas wages and salaries rose more rapidly, i.e. by 5½ per cent. Hon. members should not talk about a lowering of the standard of living of the labourers and our people and our wage-earners, for during the past five years, from 1964 to 1969, the wages and salaries rose more rapidly than did the cost of living. Therefore, they are better off, and during the past year, during 1970, wages and salaries even rose much more rapidly than they did during the previous period. I just want to mention the figure relating to the scope of the sales duty in the economy as a whole so that hon. members may appreciate its significance. If hon. members take the gross return of our local manufacturing industry, they will find that the articles subject to sales duty amount to only 13.9 per cent. Only 13.9 per cent of the goods manufactured locally, are subject to sales duty. If we take the sales duty collected by us in relation to the gross domestic product, we find that the sales duty is only equivalent to 1.393 per cent—let us say 1.4 per cent—of our total gross domestic product.

Hon. members asked me to go into the question of why we did not introduce the sales duty at the final stage but in fact at the source. This is a very important question. I should have liked to go into this matter if I had had the time, but I shall perhaps do so on a later occasion. I just want to say that this matter of whether the sales duty should be levied at the final stage, at the retail stage, as was requested by the hon. member for Yeoville, or whether it should be levied at the source, i.e. at the import or at the manufacturing stage, is a matter that was studied in detail by a commission of experts, the Franzsen Commission, which made a study of all the systems in the world. After thorough consideration of the pros and cons, they arrived at the conclusion that the best way for South Africa would be to collect the sales duty in the way we are doing it at present, i.e. at the source and not at the final stage.

What about the labour shortage?

The hon. members are complaining about a labour shortage. Are we then to use the labourers we have in unnecessary ways? Are we to waste this labour? Let me tell hon. members that if we had collected this duty at the final stage, we would have had to register approximately 125,000 to 150,000 factories, importers, co-operatives, retailers, etc. We would have had to register and keep an eye on between 125,000 and 150,000 points, but under the present system there are only 5,500 points which we have to supervise for the purposes of collecting the sales duty. And the cost involved in keeping an eye on all of these 125,000 to 150,000 points, would have been enormous. The Franzsen Commission calculated that 87 per cent of the retailers of South Africa, with a trade income of between R1,000 and R100,000, have a net profit margin of 5 per cent. In other words, a retail business with an income of R100,000 has a net profit margin of R5,000. Now, can hon. members imagine what would have happened if that retail business had still had to find people to administer that sales duty at the final stage, what it would have cost and the labour it would have required? If they can imagine that, I think they will appreciate how expensive and how difficult this would have been. [Time expired.]

Question put: That all the words after “That” stand part of the motion.

Upon which the House divided:

Tellers: G. P. C. Bezuidenhout, H. J. van Wyk, M. J. de la R. Venter and W. L. D. M. Venter.

Tellers: H. J. Bronkhorst and J. O. N. Thompson.

Question affirmed and amendment dropped.

Motion accordingly agreed to and Bill read a Second Time.

Committee Stage taken without debate.

Mr. Speaker, I move—

That the Bill be now read a Second Time.

The provisions of this Bill have already been explained in a memorandum which has been tabled. As appears from that memorandum, this Bill deals only with matters concerning pensions for persons in the service of Bantu authorities in the Republic and corresponding authorities in South-West Africa.

Pension funds for the authorities concerned can of course be established under the appropriate legislation relating to the establishment of the authorities. Thus a complete pension scheme for employees of Bantu authorities in the Republic can be established in terms of the Bantu Authorities Act, 1951, and legislation by Parliament will be necessary only in so far as it is necessary to arrange for the transfer of the rights of persons who are members of existing schemes and who enter the service of Bantu authorities.

As stated in the memorandum, there are, however, certain reasons why the authorities concerned are not yet in a position to establish and administer their own schemes. The main reason is that, especially when established for relatively small numbers, a pension scheme can cause rather difficult administrative problems and it was, therefore, thought fit to start off with a centrally administered scheme. It will then be possible for the different authorities to participate in that scheme until such time as they establish and administer their own scheme. The central administration will consequently be run in such a way that it will be easy for an authority in due course to establish its own scheme and to withdraw from the central administration.

It is particularly with a view to inter alia a centralized administration that provision is made in the Bill for the delegation of certain powers, functions and duties to officers of the Department of Social Welfare and Pensions so that the expert knowledge and assistance of that department, which already specializes in the administration of pension funds, can be utilized to the benefit and in the training of the authorities.

The fact that there are different authorities with differing needs, is one of the reasons why provision is made in the Bill for basic matters only, while the detail will be arranged by means of regulations so that the circumstances of the different authorities can be borne in mind.

I wish to state here that the different territorial authorities and other bodies which are mainly concerned, have been duly consulted in regard to the principles and have expressed their agreement therewith, but have indicated that they would like to be consulted on the detail, and each authority concerned will consequently be consulted beforehand about the regulations which will apply to it and its staff.

I have already referred to persons who are members of existing pension schemes and who enter the service of authorities, and I would like to enlarge upon this. Bantu in the service of State institutions may, depending on the nature of their work, be members of, for example, the Public Service Pension Fund, the Police and Prison Service Pension Fund, the Provincial and the Territory Service Pension Fund or the Government non-White Employees Pension Fund, and it is possible that a member of one of these funds may at some stage enter the service of a Bantu authority. In terms of the laws governing the different funds, he may not continue to be a member if he changes his employment; from the nature of things it will in any event not be proper if he continues to be a member of the fund concerned. The only suitable alternative is to provide for his transfer to the appropriate Bantu Authorities’ Fund.

It is of course standard practice that membership of a particular fund is determined by the nature of the employment and the employer in whose service the member is. Thus one will not find that a public servant is a member of a municipal pension fund even if the person concerned were previously employed by a municipality. In this regard, the establishment of suitable new funds for Bantu authorities and the transfer from other funds to the new fund, do not involve new principles.

As the whole system is in the initial stages, the exact nature of the cases which will arise cannot now be foreseen. For this reason the legislation must of necessity be all-embracing and consequently provision has not only been made for transfers from State institutions, but also from municipalities. In this connection I refer to the definitions of “revenue”, “municipal pension fund” and “declared department or body” in clause 1 of the Bill, which can be used in conjunction with other provisions to adjust individual cases.

Although the Bill may at first glance appear to be long and involved, this is due solely to the different circumstances for which provision has to be made, and the whole position is summarized in what I have now said and in the memorandum.

Mr. Speaker, we on this side of the House support this Bill which is before us, in principle as it extends and makes available facilities for persons who are in the employment, whether or not it be permanent employment, of these authorities to belong to a pension fund or to a superannuation fund. We realize that this Bill is essentially a Pensions Bill and that the Department of Social Welfare and Pensions has played a major part in drafting the legislation which is now before us. We also realize that this legislation is in fact enabling legislation to bring about the administration and the establishment of a joint pension fund and a joint superannuation fund. There are certain observations which we would like to make at this stage concerning certain aspects of this Bill. Although the Committee Stage will give us an opportunity to perhaps discuss some of these matters in more detail we would like at this stage to bring them to the attention of the hon. the Deputy Minister.

First of all there is the question of preserving pension benefits which is of major importance, when considering any Bill which is formulating a structure for a pension fund or a superannuation fund. Here the hon. the Deputy Minister has referred to certain clauses dealing with the transferability of pension rights and accrued pension benefits which might have accrued whilst that person was an employee contributing to another pension fund. We feel that this is an important aspect particularly in view of the fact that in recent times it has become more and more apparent that there is a shortcoming in many sections of our pensions legislation, as regards the transferability and the preservation of accrued pension rights.

That is why, on closer examination, there are certain questions we would like to ask the hon. the Deputy Minister. There is for instance the position as far as the Transkei is concerned. This Bill states in terms of the definitions that “other pension fund or a provident fund” means other pension funds and provident funds administered by the Minister of Social Welfare and Pensions in terms of any other law or Act. It then goes on to mention schemes established by a pension law which are administered by the Government of the Transkei in terms of the Transkei Constitution Act of 1963. We would like to ask the hon. the Deputy Minister whether this in fact means that those persons who will be in the employ of the Transkeian Government, or a body established by the Transkei Constitution, who are then transferred to another body and who would then be liable to join the Bantu Authorities’ Service Pension Fund, will have full transferability of their pensionable rights in terms of that definition. In other words, whether this legislation which is now before us will also cover the situation as far as employees of the Transkei Government are concerned.

Then there is the principle involved in establishing whether those persons who are in employment, whether permanent or not, shall be deemed to be members of the funds that are established in terms of this legislation. We realize that there are a number of details which will be dealt with by means of regulations. When one studies this Bill one soon observes that it is merely in line with many other pieces of legislation enabling the establishment of various pension funds and delegating the authority to make regulations which become part of the final Act. However, we are not able to discuss the question of these details that will be defined in terms of regulations, but it is hoped that these regulations, which are very wide—indeed, the clause which covers regulations covers several pages in this Bill—will be more or less on a standardized basis so as to facilitate the transferability of pension rights when a person joins a pension fund or is transferred and falls under the jurisdiction of a Bantu authority and is compelled to join that pension fund. There is no right of election as exists in other pension legislation passed by this House. It is therefore important that there should be a standardization of these regulations so as to facilitate such transferability. The commission, which discussed the question of transferability and preservation of pension rights and benefits, indicated clearly that this was desirable, but that it will not be possible until such time as there is greater standardization as regards the rules of pension funds and as far as State pension funds are concerned.

The other aspect we would like further clarification on is the question of definitions, which was referred to by the hon. the Deputy Minister. In terms of the Bill now before us, there are one or two items which are new as far as pension legislation is concerned. Here I refer to the definition of a child in clause 1 of the Bill. As this is a Bill which will be applicable to Bantu persons, it is important to have clarity in regard to the question of who is a dependant as far as children are concerned. The definition embraces a child born out of a customary union, as defined in the Bantu Administration Act of 1927, and also the child of a deceased member who was born out of such a customary union or a marriage as so defined. However, there is the position of the adopted child which is not included in this definition. Incidentally, this definition is something which I have been unable to find in any other Acts dealing with pension schemes and the various State pension funds as they exist at the present time. Then there is the position of the Bantu who has a child who was not born out of such a customary union or out of a normal marriage, but who is paying for the maintenance of such a child. Such a child is therefore a dependant. We would like to know whether it is not possible for the hon. the Deputy Minister to give consideration to this aspect so as to broaden the basis on which this joint pension fund is to be established. The other aspect also concerning the child and dependants of members included in this Bill is that in other pension funds and legislation regarding pensions, provision is made whereby dependants can also be classified as a dependant where that child is still attending a full-time educational institution. The definition of a child is clearly stated as someone who has not attained the age of 18 years. In other words, if a member of the fund dies while he is still in service and he has dependent children who are still attending an educational institution after the age of 18, which is the case in many instances, such a child will not be considered to be a dependant in terms of this Bill. Perhaps the hon. the Deputy Minister could give his consideration to this as well to see if it is not possible to bring about a greater degree of flexibility as far as this aspect is concerned.

The other funds referred to in the definition of “revenue”, like the Government non-White Employees Pension Fund and others, are also important aspects of this Bill. We have had the opportunity to compare the various provisions provided for in this Bill with existing legislation. The hon. the Deputy Minister referred to the position of local authorities and clause 3 (7) deals with the question of a person who is in the employ of a local authority when that local authority is declared as a department or body to be taken over by any undertaking in terms of this Bill by a Bantu authority. In other legislation passed in this House it was seen fit to have an enabling clause for such persons to have the right to elect whether they should join the fund or not of the new organization or body of which they have now become permanent employees. There is no election in this regard and it is felt that the hon. the Deputy Minister should perhaps give further thought to this particular aspect. It is sometimes very important, as in other legislation which was passed by this House fairly recently where special schools were taken over by the Central Government and where those persons were given the right to elect whether to remain a member of the Provincial Pension Fund to which they had previously belonged or whether to transfer their pension rights and become a member of the Government Service Pension Fund.

Similarly, when the Durban municipal telephone service was taken over by the Post Office Administration those employees were given the right to decide whether they should retain their pension benefits under their existing pension scheme, or whether they should transfer to the Government Service Pension Fund. Here there is no option, however. It is clearly stated in the Bill that they shall transfer their pension rights to the Bantu Authorities Service Pension Fund or the Superannuation Fund, if they belong to a provident fund of the local authority. This is one of the points we believe is an important one although one sees that provision is made at the end of the clause whereby it is stated that the benefits shall not be less or to the detriment of the employee on such transfer to the employ of the Bantu authority.

I think there are several other items which we on this side of the House would like to examine further during the Committee Stage and I therefore do not intend to deal with any details of some of the other clauses which are now before us. One important point is that we certainly accept the principle that where a person is in the employ of a State department, a local authority or a Bantu authority or an ordinary employer in the private sector, he should be entitled to belong to a pension fund, to contribute towards such a pension fund and, if they are not in the permanent employ of such an authority, to a superannuation fund or a provident fund. This has become an accepted fact among all the racial groups and we know that some of the legislation passed in this House has in recent times extended this to our non-White groups. I believe it is an encouraging sign that the Bantu people are now accepting the concept of the necessity of making provision for their old age, for their widows and for their dependants. This Bill sets out to do just that. It does provide an incentive for these people and indeed makes it compulsory for them to provide for the security of their old age, of their widows and of their dependants. In principle we accept this as being on the right lines, to see that all these persons are covered by a pension or a superannuation scheme.

My last point relates to the question of the delegation to the Department of Social Welfare and Pensions of the administration of this Bill. We agree that this is essential. This department at present administers something like 30 pension funds and thus is the ideal department to deal with this matter too, because of the vast experience it has had in the administration of such funds. But this legislation appears to be Government policy in reverse. In the past we have had legislation which was introduced by the Minister of Social Welfare and Pensions with provision for that legislation to be delegated to other departments, such as for Coloureds, for Indians and for Bantu. Now, however, we have a Bill being introduced by Bantu Administration delegating the power of administration back to the Department of Social Welfare and Pensions.

With these comments I should like to say that this Bill is fully acceptable to us and we wish to see it being implemented successfully by the Bantu authorities when they have the opportunity of extending their own pension schemes to be covered by the provisions of these two funds.

I want to express my thanks, in particular to the hon. member for Umbilo for the calm and collected way in which he stated his case, and in general to the Opposition for the fact that they support this Bill. We know the hon. member for Umbilo to be a knowledgeable person on matters regarding pensions, and for that reason we welcome and appreciate the fact that he participated in this debate. We are dealing here with an important and a salutary matter; we are doing the Bantu a great service here, since we are here making machinery available to the Bantu, and want to help them to take over that machinery themselves in due course and want in that way to lead them to a point where they are eventually able to help themselves. I am glad the hon. member for Umbilo also views this matter in this way.

He is correct when he states that there are quite a number of matters here which can to far greater benefit be discussed in the Committee Stage. However, there are a few points which he mentioned to which I want to furnish a reply at this stage already; perhaps this will facilitate further discussion. The hon. member referred to the case where a Bantu official of the Transkei, for example, is transferred to another territorial authority, and asked whether in such a case it would be possible for his pension benefits to be transferred as well. This Bill makes provision for that, and my reply to the hon. member as far as this is concerned, is therefore “Yes”.

As regards the definition of “dependant” and of “child”, these are matters in regard to which one could have a long, general and interesting discussion. As the hon. member was quite right in saying, we are dealing here with two aspects: On the one hand the customary Bantu law in regard to ties and on the other hand ties in terms of our Christian traditions and set-up. That is why we must, when we are defining “dependant” and “child”, take this thoroughly into account. I can give the hon. member the assurance that this has in fact been done.

Before elucidating this matter further, I just want to say that the Department of Social Welfare and Pensions was naturally involved in the drafting of this Bill; in fact, it was drawn up by them, in conjunction of course with senior officials of my Department. The obligation to support an illegitimate child—I am mentioning this as an example to show how we set to work—rests, according to Bantu law and Bantu custom, on the parents of the mother. The parents may, however, in terms of Bantu law and Bantu custom, lay a claim against the natural father, a claim for damages, for example. Our courts recognize this Bantu law and Bantu custom, but went even a little further by saying that when the grandparents cannot for some reason or other support the child, the courts of course hold the father responsible. The welfare of the child is the decisive factor.

In this Bill “dependants” are defined for the purposes of the Bill itself—for example in clause 3 (a). In addition provision will be made in the regulations in terms of clause 5 (1) (b) for the person who is entitled to benefits upon the death of a member of the pension or superannuation fund. The same thing is being done in the Public Service, that is, it is being done by way of regulation. Provision will be made therein for any person who in terms of law should have been maintained by the deceased member, as well as for any person whom he was normally maintaining. In other words, we are going even a little further here than was requested by the hon. member, if I understood him correctly. It includes the maintenance of an illegitimate child, for whom the natural father was responsible. It will also include cases where a member was supporting his aged or indigent parents. Hon. members will note from this that we are approaching this matter sympathetically, and that it is our intention to make provision in the regulations for dependants in a wide sense —as in the case of the Public Service Pension Fund. In point of fact this Bill followed the pattern of the Public Service Pension Act; except for minor differences it is basically the same.

When I say that we are approaching this matter of dependants sympathetically and will attach a wide interpretation to the concept in the regulations, I must in the same breath utter just a few warning words. The hon. member will know that according to Bantu custom in regard to children and dependants there is an extensive system in terms of which the Bantu themselves make provision, in accordance with their traditions and customs, for their dependants. We must therefore try to create the necessary balance here between that traditional Bantu custom, which is a fine one, of caring for their children and dependants themselves, and on the other hand to make the necessary provision, as we are doing in this Bill, for the dependants, by way of pension benefits.

I want to give the hon. member for Umbilo the assurance that this is precisely what we will try to do. We will try on the one hand, in conjunction with the Department of Pensions to take the traditional Bantu law and customs into account and not try to detract from them, and on the other hand to display sympathy in actual cases of deprivation, where we will attach a wider interpretation to the law to include not only illegitimate children or children who must be supported, but even dependent grandparents as well. In other words, we will try to implement the legislation in a sympathetic way.

The hon. member also raised another point which is very important in respect of subsection (7) on page 12, which deals with local authorities. He requested that a member of the pension fund be able to exercise a choice. I want to tell the hon. member that I am prepared to reconsider this, but I do not think that it will be very easy to give effect to that request of the hon. member. The matter was discussed thoroughly with the Department of Social Welfare and Pensions in the course of our discussions when drafting the Bill. They pointed out that the right to exercise a choice would create problems since we are dealing here with Bantu. The hon. member is of course correct in saying that the Bantu are given a choice in the other Bill which I shall submit soon, viz. the Bantu Affairs Administration Bill. The choice is in fact left to a member there that he can remain a member of the pension fund of the local authority, or may become a member of the pension fund of the new council. But in this case the Department of Social Welfare and Pensions felt strongly that it should rather not be stated in that way, i.e. that a choice may be exercised here, but that the principle must be accepted that a member will not lose out if he transfers to the other pension fund. That is why the Bill reads as it does here, because the Department of Social Welfare and Pensions states that it will create confusion if such a choice is allowed.

Sir, with this I think I have dealt with the most important points raised by the hon. member. If there are any further points to which I have not replied, I shall gladly do so in the Committee Stage. It has been a great pleasure for me that we have been able to discuss this Bill in such a pleasant manner, a fine Bill in which we are trying to do the Bantu a service.

Motion put and agreed to.

Bill read a Second Time.

The House proceeded to the consideration of private members’ business.

I should like to move the motion standing in my name, as follows—

1. (a) possible amendments of the penal provisions;
2. (b) stricter application of traffic laws; and
3. (c) protection of road surfaces against destruction in consequence of overloading.

This motion is actually in the form of a serial, because year after year this same subject is debated either here, in the Other Place, by way of a private motion or in a debate. I should like to refer to an occasion in 1964, Sir, when you were kind enough to allow me to debate this subject in terms of section 25 of the Standing Orders. In commencing I should like to quote what the hon. the Minister of Transport said on that occasion. He said—

There we have the hon. the Minister of Transport in 1964.

But, Sir, now seven years later we are faced with the problem and find that the position has in no way changed since the hon. the Minister made those statements. That position continues, and if we look at the present statistics—and I do not want to bore you with a lot of statistics—we find that the position is deteriorating every year and that the problem is actually getting bigger and bigger. Sir, I just want to quote you two figures in connection with the number of traffic accidents that have increased as follows: In 1966 there were 152,000 in round figures; in 1967, 163,000; in 1968, 168,000 and in 1969, 192,000, a gradual increase. Then let me quote you the number of casualties during these years: 1966, 5,700 people killed; 1967, 5,900; then a slight decrease in 1968 to 5,800, and in 1969 an increase to 6,600. Stated in different terms this means that the annual number of people we kill on our roads is equal to the number of White inhabitants of a town such as Mafeking or Delmas or Parys in the Free State or Riversdale in the Cape. This means that the total number of White inhabitants of such towns are wiped out annually on our roads.

What is alarming is that the accident rate in our own country is three-and-a-half times greater than that of Britain and Australia, but six times greater than that of the United States of America. Another disturbing fact that I want to mention to you is that an insurance company found that 52 per cent of the claims resulting from the death of persons younger than 25 years of age were the result of road accidents. This means on the one hand that it is chiefly young people who are the victims of the road accidents, but on the other hand it means that the type of person who has his life insured is specifically the man who has qualified himself in a field or who is indispensable; he is usually someone who has studied and someone with a family. The extent of the tragedy is therefore greater than one notices at first glance. Sir, so much for the problem.

The answer to this problem is not a simple and obvious one, and the solutions are in no way simple ones at all. A very large number of factors are responsible for the slaughter taking place on our roads. Finding the solution to it is a whole complex problem. Sir, I want to make the statement that our road traffic system is obsolete and useless and in places also dangerous. Time does not allow me to elaborate on this in detail; I shall just mention a few examples to you briefly in proof of my statement. Firstly, as regards the approaches to our freeways we find from place to place that the control over traffic that can land up on the wrong side of a freeway is altogether inadequate. Provision is simply not made, particularly in bad light, to ensure that traffic does not land up in the wrong lanes of a freeway. You see examples of this very near at hand, here in the Cape. I shall mention another example where planning is very bad and can possibly cause accidents. If one drives up from the docks along the Heerengracht one finds that there are pedestrian robots immediately preceding traffic islands. The drivers of motor cars are so conditioned that when a light turns green it means that they can drive off, but then they must still take traffic into consideration that has already entered the traffic circle and therefore enjoys precedence. A position is therefore created in which an accident could very possibly take place if a person did not take that into consideration. I want to mention another example to you in the Cape, and I am now not singling the Cape out for one or other reason; I am only doing it because all of us here are familiar with the position. We have a corner here in the Cape at the intersection of Buitengracht and Waterkant Streets where Somerset Road enters. Five roads intersect there without there being any control whatsoever. There is an unbroken white line round a corner to Somerset Road, but no-one has yet been able to tell me who has precedence there and who does not. A situation has been created there that could lead to an accident at any moment, and no-one knows exactly what to expect there.

But there is also another aspect of our obsolete traffic control, and that is the obtusion we are instilling in our people. We condition our people to ignore certain traffic signs. Sir, if you drive in from Paarl there are repairs being done to the freeway in the vicinity of Brackenfell. There is a traffic sign erected with a speed limit of 25 miles an hour, but at that stage the work had already been concluded; the tar road has been repaired and there is still machinery to indicate that work had been done, but there is still a speed limit of 25 miles an hour. I am convinced that there is not one motor car in ten thousand using that road that keeps to that speed limit. Our people are being blunted into ignoring such road traffic signs. If we drive through our country we very frequently find that at the approach to a town, where the municipal land begins, there is a speed limit. It is in the veld, half a mile or a mile away from the built-up area, but because it is by chance municipal property, there is a speed limit for which there is no sense or reason and for which one cannot see the logic. The result is that 99 per cent of motorists ignore it and the obtusion process therefore continues, so that people do not pay attention to road traffic signs.

Sir, at present we have beautiful freeways in our country. I wonder how many motorists use those freeways correctly and utilize their full potential. We have heard that in the Transvaal there is an ordinance that provides that a certain minimum speed should be maintained on the freeways, but I wonder if prosecutions have ever taken place of people travelling too slowly and presenting a very great danger on those freeways. It is simply not done. In all the miles that I have driven on these roads I have never seen a traffic officer stopping anyone travelling in the right hand lane and telling him that he is a danger to other traffic on that road. Our concepts in this respect are obsolete. In order to make my next statement I want to quote the hon. the Minister again, once more from Hansard of 1964, column 2305. On that occasion the hon. the Minister of Transport said—

Sir, legislation had already been drafted at that stage. For the reasons he mentioned the hon. the Minister of Transport decided not to submit the legislation. But the hon. the Minister said that it was a start, and I want to make use of the same point of departure and say that if we can obtain uniform legislation, if we can obtain a uniform, centralized and co-ordinated road traffic system, it is not necessarily a magic formula to solve all traffic problems, but it is a point of departure from which development will take place and from which a great deal that is beneficial can result.

I want to state here that during a period of seven years, since that debate took place here, the provinces have in no way succeeded in reducing the accident rate either by way of ordinances or by way of control, neither have they created a basis for the solution of the problem. Therefore they appear powerless to handle this problem as desired. Hence my repeated plea today that this House should pass legislation to tackle this problem.

The Road Safety Council is doing a great deal of meritorious work in this connection, and I should like to give them the praise they deserve. They made certain recommendations, and I merely want to mention a few of them. Time does not allow me to quote. The Road Safety Council is giving constant attention to the problem, and doing what is necessary in that connection in terms of the Act which called this Council into being; but the Council does not in any way have the executive powers to have their recommendations implemented. I gather that the commission of inquiry that was appointed to investigate this Council is present, and I do not in any way want to anticipate their findings or their subsequent report. I just want to say that I believe that the time has come for the Act to be so amended that the Road Safety Council can also draw up legislation and submit it to this hon. House so that more rapid action can be taken with the bottlenecks that exist.

I want to refer to a centrally-controlled traffic force. It is a present-day phenomenon that almost every town in the country has its own traffic force, larger or smaller as their needs may be, and in addition that we also have a separate traffic force in each province. Apart from the fact that everyone’s uniforms differ and that one never knows precisely with what authority one is dealing, particularly if one is not an inhabitant of the area or province and is a tourist, no uniform training whatsoever exists, no uniform code according to which they act and no centralized organization. I do not want to go into this point any further. Other hon. members on my side of the House will refer to this in greater detail at a later stage.

I now want to come to the penal provisions referred to in my motion, and here I want to quote the hon. the Minister once more. In 1964 the hon. the Minister again said—

We find a strange phenomenon in our application of the law in respect of traffic accidents. I just want to mention a few examples to illustrate this. I read in the newspaper recently that a person had picked flowers at Hout Bay and received a R400 fine for doing so. Another report referred to a person who had shot a klip springer buck in the vicinity of Touws River and was fined R700. And it is a well-known fact that if a person goes hunting illegally in the Transvaal Lowveld and in certain other parts of the country, his gun and his motor car are confiscated, in addition to any subsequent punishment the court may impose. We find strangely enough, however, that people commit very dangerous traffic violations, where human lives are endangered and frequently forfeited, without any comparable punishment being imposed upon them. We can wax lyrical about these small things such as game and flowers, but in these cases human lives are not yet at stake. When it comes to crimes against the person, I regret to say that in no way are the same criteria and the same seriousness reflected in the action that is taken. In saying this I do not in any way want to reflect upon the discretion of the courts. The principle of minimum punishment exists in our legal system. I think the time has come for minimum punishments also to be incorporated into our law in respect of traffic offences. With our present-day standard of living it is no punishment to speak of if a fine of R50 or R100 is imposed on anyone. I think it must be brought home to a person in physical terms. In this connection I want to refer to an example here in Cape Town. I read in the newspaper recently that Dr. Chris Barnard was very upset because his motor car had been towed away after he had been guilty of a traffic offence in the city. Sir, I do not believe that it would have inconvenienced him very much if a slight fine had been imposed upon him, but the very fact that he was very tangibly made aware of an offence he had committed upset him a great deal more. In all probability he will not commit the same offence again. I gather that in a South American country there is no such thing as a punishment for someone who over-parks. A traffic officer who notices something like that simply lets the air out of the car’s tyres and leaves it there. I am told that people in those countries simply do not over-park. Our concepts must change. We must bring such an offence home to people in a tangible way.

I think it is necessary for us to have special traffic courts to handle traffic offences. I am informed that at present our courts are overburdened and that the time simply cannot be found for dealing with these cases as desired. There are many magistrates who have reached retirement age who can still give very valuable service to our country. Then there are also retired prosecutors and other staff that can give a great deal more service. I think that they could very profitably be used in traffic courts.

A past hon. member of this House, Major Van der Byl, recently recommended that so-called T-men be appointed. These persons would belong to a voluntary organization that will be empowered to report traffic offences. Time does not allow me to discuss the merits of the case, but I consider it to be a valuable suggestion in the sense that it will help us to identify the roadhog. If they are linked to the central traffic bureau they will be in a position to find out eventually who the people are who repeatedly commit such offences.

I now come to the last part of my motion. This is the question of road surfaces and their destruction as a result of heavy vehicles. I said earlier that we had beautiful freeways in our country. I am thinking, for example, of the Ben Schoeman highway between Johannesburg and Pretoria, which carries very heavy traffic and provides for a very big need. Some of these roads cost between R400,000 and R600,000 per mile. We have a beautiful freeway into the Transvaal from Johannesburg and Pretoria East. We have a lovely freeway between Paarl and Cape Town. Is it really necessary for heavy vehicles, with all their limitations, to be allowed onto those roads? There is always the old road that was used before these freeways were made available. The heavy vehicles always made use of it in any case in conjunction with other traffic. I do not consider it an unreasonable suggestion that heavy vehicles should use the roads that existed before the freeways were constructed. The freeways can then be set aside for fast traffic. They will then really serve the purpose designated by their name. Those other roads, the old roads, can in any case still carry the heavy vehicles, because such vehicles move at a slower speed. One of the problems we encounter on these roads is the consistent overloading by heavy vehicles. Another hon. member will refer to the damage done on these expensive roads by heavy vehicles, without any reason existing why they should make use of these roads. The excuse has been mentioned that these heavy vehicles will be compelled to maintain a minimum speed of 35 miles per hour. But this does not happen in practice. No attention whatsoever is given to offences in that connection. On the contrary. One frequently finds that a heavy vehicle is moving at 20 miles per hour, while another one is moving behind him at 25 miles per hour. It makes use of the other lane to pass the first lorry, with the result that for a whole mile there are two lorries in the road that no one can get past. American researchers have determined without doubt that speed as such is not the cause of accidents, but that in this connection uniformity of speed is important. When a number of vehicles, properly spaced, are moving along an expressway at high speed there is little danger of accidents. But when speed irregularities develop as a result of one heavy vehicle passing another, or something of that nature, the accident potential increases by a tremendous percentage. Therefore, in order to utilize those expressways to the full it is necessary that these heavy vehicles be prohibited from using these expressways.

My time is almost up. In conclusion I just want to say that I believe that the Road Safety Council must still be used as a condenser to condense all the diverse factors giving rise to our high road accident figure into a form in which they can be made available to this hon. House, which in turn can convert this into legislation. I feel that rapid legal amendments are necessary when bottlenecks develop in our traffic ordinances and traffic laws. There must be no hesitation in applying stricter laws. What I suggest is no instant solution. Indeed, no instant solution exists. But it is nevertheless a start along a long and very difficult road towards the eventual end. We must start somewhere. I believe that if this is done in the way I advocated, we have made a correct start.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the hon. member for Middelburg on the presentation of his case in regard to road safety. I intend in the course of my speech to deal with the various points that he made.

It is perfectly true that no single problem probably confronts South Africa as much as road safety itself, because all of us know of family or friends who have been affected by the high accident rate on South Africa’s roads. No other subject has probably received more discussion privately than road safety. In no other field I believe are there so many experts as there are in the field of road safety. Any discussion among two or three people will result in every single one of them putting forward a different idea as to the cause of road accidents and how to eliminate them. But because there are so many experts or so-called experts and because so many of us are jealous of our rights as drivers or representatives or officials of bodies, perhaps so little has been effectively done to reduce the high accident rate on South Africa’s roads. I can remember when we discussed, not very long ago, the 70 miles per hour speed limit in this House. Members on both sides of the House agreed or disagreed that speed was a relevant factor in motor accidents. I can remember people on both sides of the House saying that 70 miles per hour as a speed limit was far too low. Such an august body as the Automobile Association was hesitant about suggesting that the introduction of a 70 miles per hour speed limit would help to reduce accidents on our roads. And, of course, the hon. member for Paarl does not like the 70 miles per hour speed limit either. I believe too that the driver of the Administrator of Natal does not like the speed limit of 70 miles per hour either. I do not want to labour the issue whether speed is or is not the guiding factor in regard to accidents. I am also one of the thousands upon thousands of experts on road accidents in South Africa and I am one of those who believe that speed is an overriding factor in all motor vehicle accidents. Whether this in itself is important, is another matter. I would like to suggest that one of the guiding factors, certainly in regard to the freeways the hon. member for Middelburg mentioned, is that people who have been travelling on a freeway at a speed of 60 or even 70 miles per hour, when turning into a side road, find it hard to reduce speed to 35 or 25 miles per hour. I believe that this is one of the faults of our traffic engineers. Here again, I am playing the expert, as well, on how to avoid motor accidents.

One of the most important points in my mind is that we in South Africa do not give sufficient attention to the people who control our road traffic, namely the road engineers. I believe that one of the first things we must do in South Africa, is raise the status of people responsible for road safety. I think this is a most important matter. Surely the road engineer, who is responsible for the design of the roads, its camber, its locality and for the construction of the road, plays a most important part in road safety. Therefore his status should be elevated to the position it deserves.

We have had criticism of the type of paint used on roads. The yellow paint was criticized in Cape Town recently as causing skidding in rainy weather. Here again the road engineer plays an important role. It has been suggested that we should have fewer road signs on our major roads, rather than the many we have today. All these are factors in the control of road safety. All too often the recommendations of the people concerned with road safety go ignored. We have had reports issued in South Africa, going back for many years, but when one analyses these reports, one soon discovers to one’s horror that very few of their recommendations have been implemented. In my own constituency there is a tree which is known to have caused at least two fatal accidents. On receiving the advice of the Road Safety Council of the city that the tree be removed, the local authorities decided they preferred the beauty of the tree rather than have it removed in the interest of road safety. This is something which has been happening over the years. We have had road safety councils and authorities recommending that intersections in certain areas be done away with. But all their recommendations fall on deaf ears and the accident tolls at those particular intersections continues to mount. One of the major faults of road safety in South Africa is that the experts are ignored, because they have too little authority.

We have been told that, where we must start with regard to road safety, is to educate the driver, but we must also educate the pedestrian, particularly the African who is so often the victim. We must realize that the driver as well as the pedestrian are human beings with human failures and that the effect of the education of the driver and the pedestrian is going to take a long time to be felt. What we can do, and do speedily, is rectify some of the matters under our control. For instance, the testing of drivers varies from province to province. It varies from city to city and from town to town. In some towns the driver’s licence test is a very severe one, but one can travel no more than 20 miles to the next town and find that one can obtain a driver's licence very easily indeed. It has always been strange to me that a person once having obtained that driver’s licence, retains it for life. I believe that there should be some form of re-testing of drivers. I believe that this is one way in which we can ensure that the people driving on our roads are at least qualified to do so.

I would mainly like to deal with the traffic police, who play such an important part in road safety. It has been said that one of the greatest effective deterrents with regard to road safety is for the driver to see a traffic policeman in his rear view mirror. I can remember that the then member for Durban Central, Dr. Radford, made a suggestion in this House that our traffic police should not hide behind corners and in ditches, but rather that they should be seen. At that time he even suggested, as a possibility, that the traffic police might be dressed in red uniforms so that everyone could see them. I am not suggesting that our traffic police should be dressed in red uniforms, but the point Dr. Radford was making at the time was that the very presence of a policeman has the effect of reducing accidents. In Japan they have gone so far as to erect plastic dummy traffic policemen, because they found that the presence of these dummy policemen on the roads reduced the toll of accidents on that particular road. The driver never knows whether the figure he sees is a dummy or a real live person. We so often find in our cities in South Africa that the time of our traffic police is taken up in issuing tickets for parking offences and so on. In the city of Durban the traffic police force is 60 per cent under establishment, though the number of vehicles has increased by over 60 per cent over the last ten years. The only part of the force which is up to establishment is the meter maid force. It seems to be the pattern throughout the major cities in South Africa that local authorities concentrate on earning revenue by issuing parking tickets for parking offences rather than preventing accidents and keeping their vehicles moving. It has been suggested and it works in certain States of America, that the traffic force be concentrated only on the major arterial roads of the cities. The force is concentrated in full there, so that the driver sees the traffic policemen on the road and becomes disciplined to the presence of a traffic policeman. He finds himself applying this discipline, which he learns on the arterial roads, on the minor roads of the cities. As with the roads engineers, one of the first things we must surely do, is elevate the status of all traffic policemen. Their rate of pay is far too low for the work they do or the responsibility they carry. It is my firm conviction that we will never come near to solving our road traffic problem until we treat traffic policemen and all people concerned with traffic control far better than we do at present, and that we pay them at least according to their responsibility of the job that they hold.

In some parts of the world traffic wardens are employed. In certain cities in this country we now have traffic wardens or traffic police reservists used to direct traffic. I want to suggest that our traffic authorities in South Africa give serious consideration to this particular point and make far more use of traffic police reservists because, with the shortage of manpower, it is unlikely that we will solve our traffic police shortage very easily. Traffic wardens could serve the same purpose as the South African Police reservists do at the present time, but I believe that traffic wardens will be ineffective if they are used to control stationary traffic. They must be supplied with vehicles to enable them to patrol moving traffic. It is no earthly good putting them on point duty or issuing parking tickets. The problem of traffic in South Africa and the high accident rate on our roads is caused by moving traffic offences and not by stationary ones. Our traffic control, and our traffic police reservists, or wardens, should be used for this purpose and this purpose only. In America they have a system of sending out warning letters. When they notice an offence, members of the traffic police reserve report it to a central body and this body sends a warning letter to the offender. The offender can, after having been sent a number of warning letters, be brought to court. In England the use of the breathalyzer has resulted in a reduction in the number of accidents in the U.K. Thus, in the period 1962-’68 the number of traffic accidents were reduced despite an increase of 48 per cent in the number of vehicles on the road. There is too little propaganda here about the use of traffic belts and too much propaganda about the speed of vehicles. One can see an advertisement being shown in our cinemas at the moment in which the emphasis is entirely on the speed that particular vehicle can attain. While I do not suggest that we should have some form of control over our advertisers, I nevertheless believe that if we were to make our feelings felt strongly enough people responsible for advertising of this sort would realize that it is not popular because it only adds to the traffic hazards and deaths on our roads.

I also feel we should have a standing committee for the consideration of all suggestions in regard to traffic improvement. A number of suggestions have been sent to me over the past few years, suggestions motivated by a sincere wish to supply a need. I suppose the hon. the Minister knows about the gentleman in Pretoria who designed a barrier for unprotected railway crossings. However, it seems to me that these suggestions invariably reach a dead end. Who is there to implement their ideas? Therefore I should like to see a standing committee for the purposes of considering such suggestions. The hon. member for Middelburg made reference to traffic courts, and I agree with him. We shall never make the best use of our traffic police while they have to waste their time waiting to give evidence in magistrates’ courts sometimes for very minor offences. Therefore I feel that we should give serious consideration to this suggestion of the hon. member. This is the only way in which we shall be able to make full use of the available manpower.

I should like to ask the hon. the Minister to pay particular attention to State vehicles. These vehicles are responsible, on average, for a higher rate of accidents than the vehicles of the public. It may well be argued that these vehicles have to travel on all sorts of roads and under all sorts of conditions, but propaganda in regard to road safety may well be directed towards these vehicles as well. What we really need is a streamlining of our present system. Far more powers should be given to our regional councils, our regional road safety councils, more power than they have at present. At the present moment a regional council has to approach its head office for the most mundane type of thing. Furthermore, I feel that if road safety councils were reduced in number they could be more effective. Too much money allocated to the Road Safety Council is being wasted on administration; their staffs are far too large. On the Road Safety Council itself there are representatives of bodies who do not have the same degree of interest in road safety as others who are perhaps not represented. What we really require, I think, is an executive made up of the 15 regional councils plus ten representatives from organizations who are intimately concerned with road safety. This can bring about a far more effective control than we have at present.

With this in view I should like to move as an amendment to the motion proposed by the hon. member for Middelburg—

It gives me great pleasure to support the motion of the hon. member for Middelburg on the basis of certain remarks I shall make in the course of my speech. At the same time I want to thank the hon. member for the enthusiasm he has displayed in again bringing this matter to the attention of the House today for the umpteenth time. It is virtually a platitude to say that as far as safety is concerned, we are dealing with one of the greatest enemies of our people. At the same time we have here one of the most complex and intricate problems of modern times. Road accidents not only claim an appallingly high toll of human lives annually, but are at the same time responsible for, relatively speaking, the greatest number of disabled, people who are injured in road accidents and cannot develop to their full potential. That is one of the tragic consequences of road accidents, alongside of the fact that annually so many human lives are claimed.

Business suspended at 12.45 p.m. and resumed at 2.20 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, before the adjournment this morning I made the statement that road accidents could be regarded as one of the biggest causes of retardation throughout the whole world. In my humble opinion it is time for us in South Africa to give proper and very serious attention to the possibility of applying a very much more dynamic programme to the combating of road accidents. It must not only be dynamic, but very serious consideration must also be given to the possibility of letting the emphasis fall on other fields and on more fields than has been the case up to the present time. South Africa not only has the highest accident rate in the world, relatively speaking, but it has also been proven here, as it has elsewhere, that the enemy cannot successfully be dealt with by regulation alone. We have proved that the symbol of the uniform has not yet got through to people sufficiently.

For that reason it is my well-considered opinion that it has indeed become time for us to give attention to other areas upon which the emphasis must fall. Apart from this one must, to one’s own sorrow, and unfortunately without fear of contradiction, admit that the South African pedestrian and cyclist are among the most undisciplined in the world. It is generally accepted that human beings in motion, in order of importance, contribute at least 80 per cent to this question. Road construction and motor vehicles are only responsible for the remaining 20 per cent. An endeavour to approach people in the first place and to persuade them is in my opinion the basis of the renewal that must come in the approach to this problem. In the approach to this problem we must single out, from amongst the basic factors, the lack of safety consciousness and the possible absence of the minimum intellectual ability necessary for the development of safety consciousness. Every person in South Africa must today be regarded as a potential source of power for the development of our country. This applies in respect of culture, economy, the sciences and all other sectors of our national economy. The destruction of life and happiness, of potential and production ability through road accidents, is a matter that strikes deep. It is also a platitude to say that no-one today will deny that road accidents are chiefly the result of carelessness and lack of education on the part of the drivers on our roads. We are very glad for what Education and organizations such as Road Safety are trying to achieve today to better equip and educate our people. But unfortunately we must admit that this is hopelessly inadequate. Awareness of danger is a matter of the mind, and what we need here is a stimulation of minds to activate them to such an extent that they will declare war on this merciless enemy. This brings me once again to my point of departure, that education is the basis in our tackling of this problem. The question crops up about what is being done today in our private homes, in our schools, in the army, among our motor mechanics and their apprentices and at our technical colleges in order to make a contribution. This is such a serious matter that we must be satisfied with nothing less than that the awareness of danger and an orientation towards the avoidance of road accidents must become a part of our personality structure; if this does not happen we are wide of the mark. This applies particularly to our young people, who furnish the greatest number of people who lose their lives in road accidents are under 18 years of age and 65 per cent fall into the age group between 18 and 50 years, more than half of which again fall into the age group between 18 and 24 years. In other words, more than half of the total number of fatal accidents belong to the age group 24 years and younger—the future citizens of our country. One sometimes gains the impression that this matter is not judged at its true value, and the question arises about whether the time has not come for serious attention to be given to getting road safety instituted as a statutory body under the Department of Transport, particularly with a view to standardization and co-ordination of all activities in this field. If one takes into consideration the number of funds made available for this matter and the body that must apply this for advertising purposes, one cannot but deduce that this is a terrain where we have let things slide a little. There will be excuses—for example it will be said that enough of a positive nature is being done; what more can be done? In the thirties a balanced programme was introduced in America to fight this enemy. Then the figure stood at .28 per annum for every million traffic miles. In 1960 the figure stood at .053—a decrease of 80 per cent! And that as a result of the programme that was set up to deal with this enemy. This is indeed a very praiseworthy effort. Also, it ought to serve as a stimulus for us to give this matter very serious attention after we have made the necessary investigation. In my humble opinion there are already sufficient statistics and there is sufficient proof at our disposal for us to adopt a final positive and progressive standpoint in this connection.

In support of this motion I should like to make very serious representations to the hon. the Minister himself, to the effect that he and this Department of Transport should take the necessary positive steps to consider whether what we have suggested is not possible. In my opinion the following argument is very simple logic. This problem must first be approached from the point of view of local communities. We must consider establishing local bureaux; an office in each town that will be orientated towards trying to preserve life on the road. As an aid to these offices there can be a central control that will channel standardization, the necessary information and education through such a local office to the various fronts and layers of our society to which I have already referred. We must give consideration to offices where travelling motorists can report other reckless drivers. They can, for example, furnish the registration numbers of such cars. Cameras can be placed at strategic positions so that photographs can be taken throughout the day of people driving on the wrong side of the white line, who do not stop, who are reckless and who are driving too fast. With the aid of closed circuit television similar information can be gathered and furnished to that travel or traffic bureau. These traffic bureaux can be manned by officers who can confront the guilty parties with that information. In the first case it can take the form of a warning. This can be done by post if need be. These officers can carry out the same function as our welfare officers in our Department of Social Welfare and Pensions. They will be locally linked up with a traffic court. Such an offender can be warned three times. After that the law can be set in motion. We have already admitted that the uniform and regulations alone are not sufficient. We must act positively and sympathetically as public relations officers that can guide the public throughout the year and serve on the delimited level of local communities. I have no doubt that we will achieve positive results in this connection.

There must be continuity and standardization. This can only happen with the help of centralized control. This is nothing unusual in our society. Up until 1936 the traffic police formed a section of the Department of Transport. Then, however, it was abolished. I personally do not quite know for what reasons this was done. The traffic police could easily be linked up to that Department again so that we can have a fixed ethical code according to which action can be taken by all traffic officers throughout the country. The traffic tickets, the cabling across the roads and the positioning behind trees must make way for the public relations officer and the sympathetic leader of such a community. How much time is not lost in trifling convictions? How many manhours are not lost every day? There are public prosecutors who admit that they handle as many as 10,000 traffic offence cases per year. A defendant must bring one or two witnesses along who have to spend a whole day in court, and two days if the case is postponed. One can work out how many man-hours are lost in this way, and frequently the accused is also found to be innocent and acquitted. In speaking of a code of honour I should like to refer to one example. A regulation exists as a counter measure, but it is an impersonal matter. It obtains its personal facets as a result of the interpretation process by the person handling it, i.e. the traffic officer. The traffic officer gives a soul to regulations or laws. He works with the public and must therefore cultivate a particular understanding and orientation. One gets the impression that these laws and regulations are being violated. Laws and regulations are being deprived of their personal facets. They are becoming dead letters of the law and an enemy of man. Man was surely not made for the law, it was the law which was made for man. One misses this too frequently in today’s public life. I want to refer hon. members to a single example in clarification of my statement. In my constituency there was the case of a cartage contractor who was stopped by a traffic officer one day. That officer drew his finger across the lorry’s bodywork and found that it was covered in soot. He then told this man that his lorry’s diesel engine was emitting too much smoke and issued him with a ticket. The man then said that he was innocent, but the traffic officer paid no attention to him. The man then told the officer that he had transported coal on his lorry the previous day and that the soot had nothing to do with his lorry’s engine. In court this man was found innocent because he could produce a certificate to the effect that his vehicle had been approved by the Johannesburg Municipality the previous day. He and his witnesses, however, lost one day. Here we have a case of the faulty interpretation of circumstances, and also of a regulation that is being made lifeless instead of being given life. The uniform must be relegated to the background and the man in the uniform must come forward as a sympathetic leader of the public. He must convey to the public and instill in them the fact that he is concerned about the life of the reckless driver and also his fellow travellers on that road. I personally think that we would then make greater progress.

My time is up, but before I resume my seat I should like to refer to the speech of the hon. member for Port Natal. When he began his speech I thought that we now had a case of the lion and the lamb lying down together in the face of the common enemy, i.e. death on the roads. That was unfortunately not the case. The lion and the lamb got a whiff of politics, and this amendment which the hon. member moved smells to me like a fine bit of politics. It smells so much like Natal that does not want to resign itself to centralization in this connection. I do not blame the hon. member because it is tactically correct. However, I just want to tell the hon. member that we do not agree with his amendment.

At the outset, I am given to understand that the members of the Road Safety Council inquiry are present this afternoon and is also the general manager of the Road Safety Council. If I may. Sir. I would like to welcome them here this afternoon and thank them for the interest they are taking in this very important debate.

Sir, as far as the motion is concerned, the United Party supports it because it is actually United Party policy and consequently have always supported it. As the last speaker has said, with the exception of the few words “centrally controlled” we support this motion. I would like to thank the last speaker for the seriousness of his words in this debate; it is in fact a very serious matter. I would also like to thank the hon. member for Middelburg, who saw fit to introduce the motion during this Session. We were together in the Provincial Council in Natal for several years and I never knew that he took so much interest in this matter but I am glad to see that he does and I again thank him for introducing this motion.

The hon. member for Randburg mentioned the group of people of roundabout 25 years of age. Sir, to show you the seriousness of the matter, I want to say that I believe that for the first time in the history of South Africa there are more people under 25 years than people over 25 years, and I sincerely hope that that age group will take note of what the hon. member said here. When a suggestion is made in very good faith from this side of the House, it is automatically criticized by members on that side and very often vice versa; it is invariably claimed that the one or the other is making political propaganda. We will never make headway with road safety if we cannot co-operate in an endeavour to find a solution to this matter of great national importance. During the last session of Parliament I was taken to task by hon. members on that side, including the hon. the Deputy Minister for apparently having the temerity to criticize the S.A. Road Safety Council. Surely I would have been neglecting my duty if I had not done so when I felt that it was a worth-while national cause. Is the Council supposed to be immune to criticism? Sir, my critics informed me that the hon. the Minister had already appointed a committee of inquiry to investigate the workings of the Road Safety Council. If there was no necessity for criticism, then why appoint a commission? Apparently as a result of my criticism, the chairman and the members of the committee called upon me in that very connection. The first point I made was probably the most important. I informed them that if they wished to serve the country and road safety they should recommend that “road safety be entirely removed from the political arena”. I gained the impression in the past that we were debating from at least two different political angles with the result that we failed to achieve anything positive. This is bad. Sir, and we are probably to blame for the fact that the Road Safety Council now finds itself the subject matter of an official inquiry. What made matters worse, is the fact that the hon. the Minister of Transport denied that he had anything to do with the council and said that they were only there to advise. Surely they must fall under one or other ministerial portfolio; surely they must be under the protection of some Minister. The hon. the Deputy Minister virtually accused me of delivering a funeral oration on the Road Safety Council. Did he expect me to play a wedding march? In the same breath, however, he said that there may be a great deal of truth in what I said. Of course, I agree with him on this last point because since the inception of the Road Safety Council, the general manager has built an empire around him in Pretoria, as I have previously stated, just another Government department. Subject to correction, Sir, I believe that we are paying for a staff of plus-minus 70 persons at some time or another. The Road Safety Council was brought into being by Act of Parliament during 1960. What, may I ask, have we seen for all the thousands of rands spent by them during the past decade? Apart from the highway code, which has been revised and re-printed from time to time, road safety pamphlets and posters have lost all appeal to the general public. But the hon. the Minister had a surprise for us last year, as he described it—something pleasant about the Road Safety Council. He announced that at long last they had published a booklet called “Enjoyable Motoring”. Here it is, if hon. members wish to see it. I immediately thought that here at last was something positive off the drawing boards of the Road Safety Council but, no, another disappointment! With the exception of one article, all the contributions are contributions from outside, with some extracts from well-known pamphlets. What was the purpose of publishing this “Enjoyable Motoring”? Were copies distributed to schools and universities, White, Brown and Black, as road safety does not recognize colour or creed? May I ask, who paid for the printing? My copy cost me R1.50, so it was not intended for the low-income group of drivers. After all, let us be honest and admit that only a very small minority group of drivers can afford to pay that price to enable them to enjoy their motoring. This reminds me of a most useful booklet which a motor engineer in Pietermaritzburg compiled some years ago on kinetic energy and speed in feet per second, two of the most important aspects involved in accidents. This was submitted to Pretoria for publication, but as it did not originate from Pretoria we never heard of it again—sad but very true.

Too great a proportion of the Road Safety Council’s expenditure is, I suggest, devoted to never-ending research, the results of which are out of date before they become available, and to the production of verbose action programmes that never get off the table. Mr. Speaker, voluntary serving members of local road safety associations have long since lost all their interest in road safety mainly because of this dictatorial attitude of the Road Safety Council. I have stated that I personally think a motor engineer should be appointed as the new general manager to co-ordinate, and not to control, the activities of the five provincial road safety associations, including South-West Africa. But according to the motion it would appear as if the prince for the position has already been nominated and all that is required is this motion under our authority to crown him and to re-establish the council in Pretoria, so that we are back just where we were. I say distribute funds and allocate them evenly to the provinces and then let them get on with road safety and let them show provincial pride in their work in their provinces.

The authority of traffic officers is far too limited. They can arrest and detain a drunken driver, but as soon as possible they must hand the offending driver over to the S.A. Police to be charged and here their authority ceases. During the past festive season the newly appointed M.E.C. in charge of traffic control in Natal decided on a tough line of action. He ought to be commended for that, Sir. He stated in the Press that drivers found under the influence of liquor would be arrested and kept in gaol until they appeared in court. Statistics show that this had the necessary effect, as there was a marked drop in drunken driving offences, but unfortunately there was no law to enable traffic officers to carry out the threat of the M.E.C. As soon as these drivers were handed over to the police they became subject to the ordinary Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act, with the result that immediately they sobered up they applied for bail as they were entitled to do. Their applications were granted, in one case at the request of the person’s attorney. Three hours later this person was re-arrested 50 miles away in another town for the same offence. I leave to your imagination, Sir, what the traffic officer had to say! Ten years ago, while still in the Provincial Council of Natal, I pleaded for the establishment of special traffic courts completely divorced from the criminal courts, and for the automatic suspension of driving licences for serious traffic offences, especially where persons were injured or killed or where there was driving under the influence of liquor. I do not wish to detain the House, but just to prove my point I should like to read a short article from the Daily News of 15th May, 1962, nearly a decade ago, and the heading is “Road safety chief wants special traffic courts”—

It went on, and the one point I wanted to mention was—

Sir. these things never came to fruition. No action was taken in the matter.

But you were the road safety chief then.

What happens on our roads today? During a traffic blitz in Natal the other day a sports car was timed at 216 kilometres, 134 miles per hour, on the national road between Ladysmith and Van Reenen. He went so fast that they never caught him. Why must we have any consideration for drivers like these? These are matters that the Road Safety Council should have taken up with the Minister with a view to having the law amended, but nothing has ever been done. I suggest that our ordinary criminal courts should be used during the evenings for this purpose. Retired magistrates, Police officers and Defence Force officers could adjudicate. They all have sufficient knowledge of court procedure. If holding a court at night is considered inconvenient for the accused, all the better, because this will further impress upon them the seriousness of their anti-social habits.

*We can no longer afford to close our eyes to this serious matter. During the decade from 1960, since the functions of the Road Safety Council were placed on the Statute Book, accidents, fatalities and injuries have increased astronomically. Accordingly I cannot see how the Road Safety Council can claim any success as a direct result of their propaganda machine, whatever this may be. The figures speak for themselves, and they are disturbing. The number of accidents increased from 116,000 to 192,000. The number of persons killed in accidents increased from 3,040 to 6,605. The number of persons injured increased from 39,000 to 59,000. How can we afford this? The question is, how dare the Government of the country allow the slaughter on our roads to continue unabated without doing something drastic to stop it, without mentioning the economic implications of the destruction of thousands of motor vehicles, which most probably run into millions of rands? On page 5 of this booklet Robot we find the following (translation)—

In column 5 on the same page it is suggested that the Government should provide more financial assistance. This amazes me, because I was under the impression that too much financial assistance was already being granted. It is in terms of an instruction of the committee during the 1969 financial year that they have to spend most of the amount allocated to them. They had too much money. I agree with the main speaker’s appeal, or “reveille”, as it is termed, at the annual meeting. In the last paragraph they say that enough has been written and said about road safety. In order to make things safer for road users we should not delay any longer. Act now. Take positive action now. Do it now! And I add: What, in fact, must be done now? The only sentence of any importance to the ordinary motorist is disqualification, and consequently the automatic suspension of licences of those drivers found guilty of causing serious accidents, one month for the first offence, three months for the second and six months for the third. This is reasonable, and the fourth offence should bring irrevocable cancellation of the licence; and believe me, Sir, there will be very few cancellations, and when licences are in fact cancelled, I say that society demands it.

Mr. Speaker, I regret that I have to give up some of my time to reply to the more negative parts of the speech of the hon. member who has just resumed his seat. In the first place he quoted examples from his own field of experience. Those examples come from the province of Natal where there was a provincial council in power to which that hon. member could surely have stated his case. But nothing was done there.

The Road Safety Council is a body that gathers and processes information, that carries out research on a modest scale and then disseminates that information to the provinces again. One of the matters being debated today is specifically the question of whether that information and the results of their years of experience were properly disseminated and adapted in the Ordinances.

Are you bringing politics into this matter?

Mr. Speaker, I do not know how long the hon. member has been sitting here. He has just come in. He should have been here when his hon. bench mate was speaking. He would then have known who brought politics into this debate. What is more, the hon. member reproaches us for having spent too much money on a body such as the Road Safety Council, but at the same time he appeals to the Government to promote road safety and put a stop to the slaughter on our roads. However, he does not take into consideration that in terms of money that slaughter on our roads costs us R96 million a year.

The hon. member has apparently read Robot, but does he know that it has been proved conclusively by a statistician of stature that the recent safety campaign among cyclists was extremely successful and that the casualties in a certain area decreased from a certain percentage to zero? The hon. member has apparently only read the issues up to 1953. Has he any knowledge of the work of the C.S.I.R.’s agency, the National Institute for Road Research? That body manages with a minimal sum of money. The Government finances them with barely R½ million and their results are phenomenal. Does the hon. member know of a periodical published by that body, a periodical called Via? In it we are taught new lessons from day to day. Does he know of the well-known publications? Apparently he does not.

Sir, I have said that this slaughter on our roads costs us R96 million. We are the silent witnesses to that slaughter. To give a better illustration, five disasters each equal in extent to those at Ceres and Wolseley are the equivalent of the slaughter on our roads. Sir, you know how quickly we reacted to that disaster. We must therefore react more quickly to the clarion call emanating from this House today. Thirty-seven per cent of the R96 million that it costs our country finds an echo in human suffering and pain. Today we have the opportunity of sending out a clarion call from this House for a dynamic, short-term campaign to bring road safety home to each and every one. It is very clear to me that when we debate this matter we must take various factors into consideration, factors such as traffic communication, the motor car and the road. We must give particular attention to human beings. They represent 89 per cent of the causes of road accidents. On a short-term basis we can very effectively address ourselves to the human weaknesses that result in these casualties. Here we have the opportunity of launching an imaginative and dynamic campaign. We have the opportunity of capturing the public’s imagination with unique measures, with exceptional measures, because we are dealing with an exceptional matter.

On a short-term basis we shall aim at educating the present and future road users alongside the training and education given to our children at school. On a short-term basis we shall aim at discouraging traffic offenders. We shall aim at refusing the use of the road to traffic offenders who are a danger to their fellow-men. How can we do this? I have already told hon. members that a successful and nation-wide campaign will have the desired effect. The campaign must be tackled on a nation-wide scale, like the Water Year. We must be prepared to invest money with a view to obtaining dividends in the form of human material. It must be spectacular. I want to suggest a few examples in this respect. What about an endorsement on an offender’s motorcar, an endorsement, engraved on the car in red, which a motorist may not remove for a year even though that car is sold? He will never be able to sell it. Set up a reserve force of a few thousand men to supplement our traffic police force. They could act very efficiently. And if we could include our high school children it would be that much more interesting for them. Reduce the speed for one week to 50 miles per hour so that the driver’s blunted conscience can again be shaken out of its sleep. During that week this reserve force of 10,000 men or more could operate efficiently. We could even use our ballotees for this. I cannot think of a bigger and more interesting task than the undertaking of this campaign. Charge a few people with murder, because there is in fact no difference between a man who fires a pistol in a street where people are moving around, knowing full well that he must hit someone, and a man who drives amongst moving people at a very high speed, as we see happening so frequently. There is no difference. It is precisely the same set-up, because they ought to know that there will be casualties. In our administration of justice there is an example of such a prosecution. We do not necessarily have to obtain a conviction, but the object is to awaken that social conscience.

To temper all this a benevolence week can be held in which the traffic officer can be made a friend of the public. This must form the basis of our future success. We must set up this central traffic bureau quickly and we must ensure that it works on such a basis that we can refuse the use of the road to those road users who are a danger to life. This will only be possible if we have centralized control in respect of this matter. We must co-ordinate the issuing of licences. What is the position at present? It is possible for a person who is refused a licence in one province to obtain it in another. It is possible for a person whose heavy duty licence has been endorsed, to obtain a licence for a light vehicle.

In conclusion we must ensure that when we prosecute it is really done effectively. When a person is punished it must stir the public’s conscience. At present it is unfortunately sometimes regarded as an achievement to get away with a traffic offence, or to outsmart the traffic officer concerned. I say again, this is the way in which we shall have to reactivate our consciences with regard to traffic matters. It ought to form the basis of a successful campaign.

Then traffic courts must be set up to co-ordinate all these matters, courts consisting of people who are knowledgeable about and have a grounding in traffic matters. It must be ensured that our highway code is standardized and applied realistically in respect of traffic crimes which are proportionally just as serious as any other crime for which a heavier punishment is imposed. All this can be achieved if we accept this motion today; centralization of control is absolutely necessary for this purpose.

In support of the third aspect of the motion I just want to focus hon. members’ attention on the fact that through its agency, the National Institute for Road research, the C.S.I.R. has come to the conclusion that one vehicle with an 8,000 lb. overload does as much damage to a road surface as 25,000 large passenger cars. We have invested R1,800 million in our existing traffic system. It is therefore necessary for the so-called “axle load” of each of these vehicles to be fixed with a view to protecting this investment. Hence my support in respect of the third aspect of this motion.

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased that we have been afforded the opportunity today to discuss this very important subject. By and large, I agree with the motion put forward by the hon. member for Middelburg. I say “by and large”, as there is not much wrong with the motion, except that I do not agree where he says that it should be “centrally controlled.” I have always believed that we should recognize the functions of our provincial administrations and that we should, as far as possible, not interfere with their autonomy. I do not believe that the problem facing us on our roads today rests just there, namely that it should either be controlled by the Central Government or by the Provincial Administrations. The subject is very much further involved than just that. Very good suggestions have been made here. I believe, too, that we should be more positive and dynamic in our approach to the problem.

*The hon. member who spoke a few moments ago, mentioned liaison officers who can act between the public and the traffic police or officials. I fully agree with that. But unfortunately the hon member did not go far enough. This afternoon I want to go a little further and approach this problem in a more positive way.

†No one, of course, will deny that road safety is of paramount importance in South Africa today. And yet so few of our people, the travelling public in particular regard the road safety councils as a means to an end. I believe that these councils should be assisted more by the public than they are at the present moment. When it comes to uniformity we know the Administrators meet regularly at least once a year with their officials to discuss uniformity among all the provinces in this regard. This is a very good policy.

Everybody has the opportunity to discuss these matters.

Yes, it gives them an opportunity to discuss uniformity and problems of national importance. Opportunities will arise where they can discuss this very problem. But we, the travelling public, should play a bigger role in trying to solve the problem. This is not generally observed by the public. Statistics were given to us this morning by the hon. member for Middelburg, but he did not mention that most road accidents occur on Fridays and Saturdays, that is over the week-ends. The reason is simply that there is more traffic on the roads and we do not have the manpower to deal with that traffic. I agree that the uniforms of traffic officials could be changed to make them more conspicuous. Giving them red uniforms, or brown uniforms, or blue uniforms, as has been suggested, is fair enough, but it will not assist us very much. We do not have enough of these people because we do not have the manpower. The financial resources too, of course, play a large part in maintaining a strong provincial traffic force.

The statistics which the hon. member quoted show us that of the 6 605 people who died on the roads in 1969 more than half were Bantu. 3,721 were Bantu. This brings me to the suggestion which I want to make. In the Eastern Cape, and particularly in the East London area, we have a problem which I do not think faces many other road safety councils. I happen to serve on this council. The jurisdiction of that council extends to the Transkei, right to Umtata and beyond. It is not necessary for me to tell this hon. House what the problems in the Transkei are. However, I just want to refer to the large number of uncontrolled animals that roam the roads particularly at night. These are horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, etc. There is very little control over the animals in the Transkei. I must admit that some of the roads are fenced in, but I seldom see a gate closed. This is a danger facing anybody travelling through the Transkei. I have had many complaints from our road motor transport drivers.

In the Transkei?

Yes. We have been able to establish a small road safety branch, an appendix to the East London Road Safety Council, in Umtata with a small committee. Mainly Bantu serve on this committee. They try to do what they can. Our council in East London tries to enlighten them in this regard and teach them the functions which a branch should perform, but it is very difficult indeed. The hon. member for Randburg says that we should use “skakelbeamptes”. I want to go further than that, because we have to do something and do it quickly.

I want to suggest that drivers who have an accident-free record of at least 10 years should be given some recognition. I myself, and I am not patting myself on the back, have been driving motor vehicles for 35 years. Believe it or not, I have never yet had one accident, not even so much as having scratched another motor vehicle. The hon. member for Carltonville pats himself on the chest. I want to congratulate him, because to have an accident-free record does not come just like that. It does not just happen. There is not much luck on the South African roads. It takes caution, careful driving and responsibility at all times. If I should find myself returning from a party at night and if I believed that I was not fit to drive, I would find someone else to drive.

One should know when to leave.

One should know how much to enjoy yourself, and also how fast to travel. I have never been a fast driver because I do not believe in fast driving. I believe that by and large, driving at reasonable speed circumvents accidents, but also it is more economical to drive at a reasonable speed. I now want to come back to my point. If a driver has an accident-free record he should be appointed by the traffic authorities to act as an assistant eye to traffic policemen. In other words, he should be given some form of recognition like a badge or an emblem to put on his car, and carry a certificate. When I see a driver infringing the rules of the road I report that driver to the traffic police regardless of his colour or anything else. But what happens after that? If he decides to contest the case I am called upon to give evidence, and few people like doing this. Very often you report a driver from another province, and it does not always suit one to go and give evidence at far away venues, and so these drivers get away with it every time.

I want to suggest that if these appointed drivers, responsible drivers with good records who know and respect the rules of the road, report another driver for infringing the rules of the road, let it be what it may, that the guilty person should have a file opened for him. Every time this driver is reported for bad driving it should be recorded. This will assist the traffic police to keep an eye on those particular drivers. One finds that only certain drivers make themselves guilty of these offences. The hon. member for Pietermaritzburg City has told us of the driver who was warned of an offence and who committed the same offence again less than 50 miles from where he committed the first. It is clear that there are only certain irresponsible people who should be watched.

I know that many of us are trying to do this in our unofficial capacity, but psychologically it would be an excellent idea if every driver on the road, or every pedestrian, realized that somewhere or other, either in front of him or behind him, there could be someone keeping an eye on him. He need not be conspicuous and no one need know who he is. But people should know that if they infringe the rules, they will be reported that they will have a black mark against them in their file, and that this will count against them if they are taken to court some day, I believe that we must think of some way to try to solve this problem. We cannot rely solely on our provincial traffic policemen. They are doing a wonderful job. In fact, I have seen them assisting people on the roads. Not only do they try to keep death off the roads, but they assist people at breakdowns and they even sometimes assist people who run short of fuel, or who have punctures.

Then there are two further suggestions which I should like to make. I have travelled and driven vehicles in other parts of the world, in other countries and other big cities, and quite the worst city in which I have ever had to drive a heavy vehicle is Cairo. I have never seen so much disorganized traffic in all my life. There is no discipline whatsoever. But what shakes me is that when one reads and studies statistics one finds that although in a city like Cairo there is no road discipline at all, the death rate in Egypt is lower than that in South Africa. I cannot believe it but there it is; I must accept the figures. In Rhodesia I saw a very good system which I believe we should adopt more and more in South Africa. To some extent we are already practising it. All vehicles moving on the right should have the right-of-way at intersections where there are no robots. I repeat, all vehicles moving on the right should have the right-of-way. This would not necessitate stop-streets either. When I was in Rhodesia I did not see stop-streets in those cities. It is an accepted fact that if a vehicle is on your right, he moves and you wait for him to pass.

The second point I want to mention was brought to my notice by an insurance company. I am informed that most vehicles which are damaged or meet with accidents are green in colour. Some people believe that green is an unlucky colour but in fact there is no such thing. But it seems strange when one hears from insurance companies that most of the accident claims made upon them come from people who drove green motor cars. The explanation which I was given is that they are not so easily seen, and possibly this is something we could consider too.

Mr. Speaker, I see my time is up. This is such an important subject that I regret we could not go on debating it all afternoon.

To me it is very clear, and, I think, to this House as well, that the hon. member for Middelburg is not the only one who is extremely concerned about the accident rate in South Africa, but that all the members who participated in this debate are equally concerned. I do not believe the hon. member for Middelburg need make any excuse for coming to this House with a motion of this nature time after time. In 1964 he moved a similar motion. I think South Africa and this House owe him a debt of gratitude. I think it is necessary for us to keep the spotlight on road safety in South Africa at all times. We must have regard to the appalling slaughter which is taking place on our roads today.

†Sir, I think the House and not only the House but the Press and the whole of South Africa should take note of the road accident situation in South Africa at present. According to a report recently released by the National Institute for Road Safety Research of the C.S.I.R. the fatality rate for the Republic, that is to say, the number of persons killed per million vehicle miles travelled, is almost three and a half times as high as the fatality rate of Great Britain and Australia and six times as high as the fatality rate of the United States, while the total accident rate for South Africa in fact compares favourably with similar rates reported in the same overseas countries.

The unduly high fatality rate for South Africa with a reasonably moderate total casualty rate as compared with those of other countries means that here a greater percentage of casualties are injured fatally than is the case in the other countries. Comparing the rate in different countries, allowance must be made for various circumstances. For example, pedestrian fatalities comprise only 18 per cent of all fatalities in the U.S.A., but 42 per cent of the fatalities in South Africa. In another report of the Institute analysing road accidents and statistics for the eight-year period from 1960 to 1967, the results indicated that pedestrians constituted the largest group of fatalities, or 42 per cent. The majority of these, namely 89.9 per cent, were non-Whites, who represent 80.9 per cent of the total population of South Africa.

I fear no contradiction when I say that in road traffic accidents there are three elements, namely the vehicle, the road and road user, with the interaction between these three elements causing the accident. Although a single factor may in rare cases be responsible, such as a driver losing control over his vehicle as the result of a heart attack, an accident is seldom attributable to a single cause. Research in the Republic and abroad has indicated that road accidents are the result of varying factors and that the human factor as such plays a major part in almost 90 per cent of all accidents. In the light of the above-mentioned research the main causes of road accidents can be summarized as follows: Ignorance, especially with regard to self and environment, including the vehicle, the road and the climatic factors; and, secondly, ill-breeding. Factors such as lack of culture, poor disposition and general outlook on life play a part in this, but I will come back to this ill-breeding.

This brings me to the hon. member for Port Natal. I wanted to congratulate the hon. member for Port Natal for his own positive approach to this problem and for the constructive suggestions he made, but then he came with a dummy amendment, not a dummy traffic policeman as he mentioned, but a dummy amendment which I am sorry I cannot accept. But he came to something else. He mentioned the accidents caused by State-owned cars and I want to analyse that. If I look at the total accidents for the two months in South Africa from 1st December, 1969, to 31st January, 1970. I find that we had 1,143 accidents. 366 White people and 1,315 of all races were killed. That is an average rate per day of 18 accidents, with 6 Whites and 21 all races killed per day over those two months. I want to compare that with the accidents caused by State-owned cars.

*Now I want to say that vehicles of the private sector in South Africa kill from two to three times as many people per day as the total number of State-owned vehicles do in a full year. In my opinion it is wrong in a debate such as this one to try to make the political point that Government Garage vehicles are involved in such a large number of accidents.

I never said that.

Of course, the hon. member did. For the sake of the record, because the hon. member mentioned figures, I have to point out that we had 1,887 accidents in the year 1967-’68, 1,758 in the year subsequent to that, and 2,030 accidents for the full year in 1969- ’70. But, Mr. Speaker, these State-owned vehicles travelled 88 million miles during that period. This represents an increase in the period during which the accidents occurred, i.e. in the last year I mentioned, of 103.2 million miles. This shows that accidents involving State-owned vehicles are much fewer. In this regard there is a number of aspects to which regard should be had. One of these is that State-owned vehicles often have to be used in much more difficult circumstances than those of the ordinary public. An example of this is one’s traffic patrol vehicles. At times they have to be driven at high speeds. But I want to mention another important aspect. Of the 1,887 accidents reported in 1967-’68, 602 involved no damage to the vehicles. In 210 cases the damage amounted to less than R10, whereas in 279 cases the damage amounted to a figure between R10 and R20. In 595 cases the amount varied from R20 to R100. The damage to the vehicles indicates the nature of the accidents. These figures may in turn be compared to the figures I mentioned before, figures in respect of the alarming number of accidents in South Africa.

These accidents do not represent a pleasing picture. They represent an appalling loss of human lives. When we consider this problem, we find that motor car accidents no longer have any news value to the Press. The Press no longer derives any news value from such accidents. They pass virtually unnoticed. It is said that during the latest moon flight Americans no longer sat in front of their television sets. They have become accustomed to people flying to the moon. It no longer has any news value. This reminds me of the story of the boiling of live rock lobsters. When somebody objected to that being done, he was told, “never mind, the rock lobsters are used to it”.

I do not wish to refer to the terms of reference of the commission now. However, I am pleased that the members of the commission who have to investigate the results submitted to us by the Road Safety Council are present here while this debate is being conducted. I believe they have found the ideas of hon. members, not only of hon. members on this side of the House whom I sincerely thank, but also of hon. members on the opposite side of the House, very useful and that they will be able to include these ideas and elaborate on them in their report, which we hope will be made available to the Minister before long. The appointment of this commission is proof of the Government’s concern in this regard.

In the short time I have at my disposal it is necessary for us to consider a few important factors. I hope I shall be allowed injury time. In the first place, road traffic control and legislation in the Republic and South-West Africa are the exclusive responsibility of the four provincial administrations and the administration of South-West Africa. As far as the Transkei is concerned, this responsibility is vested in the Transkeian Government. The hon. member for Pietermaritzburg City took it amiss of the hon. the Minister for having said that he did not have the power in this connection. In terms of the legal position this responsibility is vested exclusively in the provinces at the moment. As far back as 1962, in consequence of the department’s concern about this matter and a proposal which had been made, a Bill was prepared at the instance of the Minister in 1963 with a view to creating uniform legislation. But the administrators of the various provinces requested the Minister kindly to leave the matter in their hands. The Minister left the matter in their hands, in recognition of their democratic right and their autonomy. What happened then? The provinces themselves met and appointed the Du Plessis Committee. This committee had to investigate road traffic legislation in the four provinces. It had to ascertain what steps were to be taken in order to bring about uniformity. That investigation led to a report being presented by the committee on 6th November, 1964. In the first place that report resulted in the establishment of the Inter-provincial Advisory Council on Road Traffic, consisting of the following people: The Administrator as chairman, and five members, i.e. a member of the executive committee of each of the four provinces and South-West Africa, and the Secretary for Transport. This interprovincial advisory council was assisted by a technical committee or board. Time will not permit me to give the constitution of the technical committee here. They were instructed to ensure the introduction of completely uniform traffic legislation in South Africa on the same date. That was done and the legislation was introduced. I must say at once that with regard to the South African Road Safety Council, the committee recommended that the constitution of this action committee should be different, i.e. (translation)—

The problem which the hon. members opposite refused to take into account, especially in the form of their amendment, is that this Road Safety Council, as well as the Inter-provincial Advisory Council, has absolutely no executive power. They simply make recommendations to the provinces, and that is the only thing they may do. When the inter-provincial advisory council meets and its members differ among themselves, a recommendation is not even made. In that case the matter is left at that and no further action is taken. In other words, we still find ourselves in the impossible situation of having a large, cumbersome road safety council and an inter-provincial advisory council, but they have no authority to see to it that the research which has to be done, the essential legislation which has to be introduced and the traffic control which has to be uniform, will be undertaken and carried into effect, because there is no legal provision for that. That is why I cannot understand the concern of the hon. member for Pietermaritzburg District when the hon. the Minister said that he could not accept responsibility for the Road Safety Council.

Seeing that this is the position, my predecessor wrote to the provinces as long ago as 30th November, 1966, and stated that he wished the following aspects to be investigated, and I am going to mention them in brief: The question of what is happening with regard to road control and safety control measures in urban areas; uniformity in municipal by-laws; “traffic officers should be used judiciously”. The plea of these hon. members was that the traffic officer should be an information officer or a liaison officer and not a prosecuting officer who simply collected fines. Another aspect was, “allocation of traffic fines”. If traffic fines are used as they are being used at present, the traffic officer is nothing but a collector who is ensuring that, the accounts of certain local authorities are balancing. In addition he asked for an investigation into uniform training for traffic officers. We have made progress as far as this matter is concerned. He also asked for an investigation into the powers of the transport inspectors with a view to bringing them into this to the extent of gaining their co-operation, especially in connection with the problem of the pirate motor cars, as this problem has been called here. These thousands of pirate motor cars are the very cars which are extremely unroadworthy and which are to a large extent responsible for these accidents. His next request was for an investigation to be made into the overlapping of the duties of traffic officers. I want to deal with this in brief. He said it was desirable to increase the number of traffic officers so as to keep abreast of the increase in traffic, but that it was realized that the shortage of manpower necessarily was a restricting factor. For that reason the existing forces had to be utilized as effectively as possible. Especially the elimination of any overlapping between the bodies concerned with traffic control, i.e. the South African Police, the provincial and local traffic officers, had to be ensured. In other words, the Government was fully aware of the fact that there was a job to do in this regard. The Government, however, went further than that. As far back as 1964 the provinces were informed that an investigation was to be made into the possibility of placing all traffic officers under one central control. This would ensure effective, co-ordinated action and an investigation was to be made as expeditiously as possible into ways and means of effecting this desired co-ordination. Because we realized the importance of this, all our thinking followed this trend. Subsequent to that my predecessor and the Government further informed the provinces that an investigation should be made into the desirability of having road accidents records and statistics which could immediately assist these members in their ideas. These would assist them in this respect; if one had the records and the statistics of these people, one could start bringing to book the man who repeatedly committed offences. The Government as well as the department felt at the time that there should be a central register of licensed drivers in South Africa. If a central register existed, a point system could be introduced with regard to that central register. It would mean that a person could earn points or could lose points depending on the accidents in which he was involved and on convictions for negligent driving. In this way it would be possible to indicate his negligence and his irresponsibility.

Hon. members raised the question of effective penalties, but the provinces had already been informed that an investigation was to be made into this matter. The penalties which are being kept in mind are the suspension and the cancellation of driver’s licences, which was mentioned here by hon. members. Then there is the matter of retesting drivers, including clinical tests in suitable cases. In addition there is weekend imprisonment for dangerous offences such as negligent driving of a serious degree. Moreover, consideration is being given to impounding a person’s motor car for a specific period in accordance with the seriousness of the offence committed by him. We also have corrective penalties in mind, for instance, compulsory attendance of schools for offenders. We are engaged in taking these steps.

Now I want to point out, and because this is important we should take cognizance of the fact that the full Road Safety Council and the action committee expressed the opinion through their chairman that we should not take the matter any further at this stage. They said we should confine ourselves to the Du Plessis Committee, with its two basic proposals of an inter-provincial advisory council and the technical committee, and that we should let the matter rest there. This is as far as the matter has been taken up to the moment. Now I have to say something, and I want to put it very clearly. The safety of the individual on our roads is not the concern of only the provincial and the urban traffic authorities. For that reason I cannot agree with the hon. member on the opposite side. It is in the first place the responsibility of the State to ensure that its citizens and other inhabitants of the country are not molested or harmed in any other way or maimed or killed recklessly by traffic. For that reason the State will have to step in if people think a driver’s licence gives them a free licence for taking other people’s lives. What is happening on South Africa’s roads at the moment, is nothing less than licensed slaughtering.

In the second place, this is and still remains a function of the South African Police, because they are going to investigate cases, in spite of the fact that we have traffic officers, so as to ensure the maintenance of road safety, and they are going to investigate accidents in order to prosecute the guilty parties if necessary. To my way of thinking we should think the matter over so that control may be centralized. The fact that the State authorizes the provinces to fulfil certain functions in connection with traffic does not mean that the State has completely abandoned its powers and that it can evade its responsibility towards the public on that account. I think it would be wrong for me to anticipate the report of the commission of inquiry, because I do not know as yet what that report is going to contain. I do think, however, that even at this stage we should make South Africa realize full well that in the last instance it still is the Government that is accountable and that it may not hide behind city councils and provincial administrations while many thousands of the country’s inhabitants die on the roads each year. Because this is so, I believe we shall have to consider making it possible for the Road Safety Council to submit its recommendations to an authority that can ensure the implementation of those recommendations in legislation.

The Road Safety Council should be able to ensure that all research work undertaken in South Africa with regard to road safety, road construction and the safety factor involved in road construction, and town planning, such as the example mentioned by the hon. member there, will be co-ordinated so that it may be translated into legislation or carried into effect. At present one finds that the universities and the C.S.I.R. are doing research while the Road Safety Council nominates certain people to do research and other bodies are also undertaking research. When such research is completed, it is left hanging in the air. Nothing comes of it. No-one uses it. No one is obliged to use it. For that reason I say we shall have to constitute the council in this particular way. It still depends on what the commission is going to say. A decision still has to be taken as to whether it should be an autonomous body under the jurisdiction of the Department of Transport, like the National Transport Commission, or whether the Minister, through the advice it gives, may instruct the provinces what uniform legislation ought to be introduced. The position is the same as regards the Department of National Education.

I want to mention another example, a very important one to me. Let us take a look at the metropolitan development complexes. Take for example Boksburg, Brakpan, Benoni, Springs, Johannesburg and Germiston. Each one is engaged in a transport system. Each of these transport systems causes traffic congestion at certain points, which gives rise to a higher accident potential as well as increased traffic frustrations and delays. If one had a council of this nature, one that could bring all these municipalities or city councils together and say to them: “Let us investigate the entire system; let us investigate how the entire matter should be interwoven, so that the traffic may flow properly and the best safety measures may be taken”, the difficulties could be ironed out.

But they already have such a council.

No, they do not have such a council.

That is how they are appointed by the Administrator.

Yes, but what is made of it? Nothing!

It has just started.

Then one would have the report. The Minister could go back to the provinces and tell them, “Here is a task which you, as guardian of the local authorities, now have, i.e. to see to it that they implement this report on a joint and co-ordinated basis”. In that case one would get somewhere with this development.

Another statement I want to make is that it will not be possible to eliminate overlapping summarily. It would be virtually impossible to interfere with the function of the Police without a thorough investigation having been made into the question whether it would be justified to do so. Secondly, the function of the inter-provincial advisory council is clearly set out in paragraphs 32 and 33 of the Du Plessis Report, and actually relates only to obtaining uniform legislation on provincial basis and nothing more. For that reason I cannot associate myself with the idea of the chairman of the Road Safety Council, i.e. that we should let the matter rest at the report of the Du Plessis Commission. As regards the control of traffic as well as the appointment and co-ordinated training and use of traffic officers, the provincial advisory council can merely advise the provinces with regard to amending their ordinances in this respect. There is no binding factor. As a matter of fact, as far as the Road Safety Council is concerned, the Du Plessis Commission finds in paragraph 9 of its report, that with regard to the implementation of legislation the Road Safety Advisory Council has no such authority and that it is acting purely in a capacity of making recommendations, as the executive power in this regard is vested in the provinces and the other authorities. In paragraph 10 of this report, the following finding appears—

In other words, here we have a committee appointed by the four provinces and South-West Africa and that committee submitted a report to them in which it stated that the matter concerned was predominantly one of national interest. For that reason it is just as well that the hon. member for Middelburg introduced this motion. It affords us an opportunity of taking another look at this matter.

But in conclusion I want to say in the time I still have at my disposal, that proper human relations, in the first instance, are a basic necessity in road safety. I am pleased that this was mentioned by the hon. member for East London North. I want to give an example of proper human relations. When I was driving up the road this morning, I saw the hon. the Deputy Minister of the Interior in his motor car. The road was very busy and seven Coloured children wanted to cross over. He had the right of way, but he nevertheless stopped and showed the children that they could cross over in front of his car. If we showed more goodwill, more courtesy of this kind in South Africa, we would have far fewer accidents. If we want to have proper human relations it is, in the first place, a task of educating people. It is a matter of what kind of character one has; whether one is (prepared to give other people an opportunity as well. We can go to any city in South Africa and we shall see that if there is a continuous stream of traffic on a road and someone wants to enter that stream from a side street, he is simply not given an opportunity to do so. We are too selfish. [Time expired.]

Mr. Speaker, in the few minutes left at my disposal on this particular matter, I should like to say that the hon. the Deputy Minister of Transport, since the Du Plessis Committee of Inquiry has published its report, should have been well aware of all the points that he has made today in regard to what he calls central control. This is not a new issue that has been raised. It is an issue that was raised some years ago with the hon. the Minister. But the Du Plessis Committee of Inquiry made one specific point which persuaded the hon. the Minister of Transport to accept its recommendation.

That was—

The report then said—

Following on that, if the hon. the Deputy Minister was aware of all the various legislation in the provinces with regard to motor vehicle control, he would realize that all these amendments have taken place to such an extent …

Debate having continued for 2½ hours, motion and amendment lapsed in terms of Standing Order No. 32.

Mr. Speaker, I move the following motion as printed in my name—

I want to come immediately to the gist of what we are envisaging here today. We have had many commissions which were mere political moves in order to afford the Government of the day the opportunity of postponing or evading a difficult decision. This has caused many people to adopt a skeptical attitude towards the idea of a Government commission. There have nevertheless been commissions over the years which have become landmarks in the political history of South Africa. In the 1930s there was the Carnegie Commission into what was called at the time “the Poor White problem”. It was not a Government commission, but grew out of a national congress on the question of the Poor Whites held in Kimberley in October, 1934. The report of that commission in fact became a guide, a manual, for the Government at the time, the United Party Government of Gen. Hertzog, for solving, to a large extent, the Poor White problem. In the 1950s we had the well-known Tomlinson Commission. I think the Government made a mistake in not accepting certain important recommendations of that Commission. But in the 16 years that have passed since that Commission’s report was published, it has in fact stood out as a charter for the handling of White-Black relations in South Africa. In the past 16 years, there has hardly been a debate on Bantu affairs in this Parliament in which the recommendations of the Tomlinson Commission have not been mooted. In the 1960s, the Odendaal Commission on South-West Africa was published. In the course of one and a half years, that commission published a report consisting of 550 pages. It was one of the most comprehensive and far-reaching reports ever tabled in this Parliament. No matter what one thought of the political recommendations of the Odendaal Commission, this report has become a blueprint on which the Government has for years based and is still basing the whole economic and social, as well as the political development of the area, its people and every population group in that area.

We want to request something similar from the Government today, namely a charter for the future of the Coloured population. In the words of the motion “a comprehensive programme for the rehabilitation and development of this papulation group”. In other words, it is programme of national reconstruction for the whole Coloured community. We believe that the best way of achieving this is by means of a competent commission. Not a commission of yes-men or political slaves, and not one which will sit for years and want to read books, but a streamlined commission which will carry out its assignment as rapidly as the Odendaal Commission did and which will consist of men in whom the whole country will have confidence. In the 1930s there was a strong commission which had been appointed by the previous Government to investigate the economic and agricultural position of the Coloured population and other factors affecting their social welfare. Their political position was not then as uncertain as it is now. The chairman of that commission was Prof. Johannes du Plessis, one of the greatest missionary church-leaders South Africa has ever produced. Other members were Prof. R. W. Wilcocks, at that time Rector of the University of Stellenbosh; Dr. Wouter de Vos Malan, Superintendent-General of Education in the Cape Province; Dr. D. P. de Villiers, a health expert; Mr. H. C. Fowler; and—this is important—Dr. A. Abduruhman, a Coloured who was a member of the Provincial Council of the Cape Province, a man who became a legendary figure, and one of the outstanding Coloured leaders South Africa has produced in its history. Sir, it is a tragedy to see how we in South Africa have retrogressed. Thirty-four years ago it was a normal thing for a Coloured leader of the stature of Dr. Abduruhman to serve on a commission of this nature with the most prominent South Africans, the most prominent Afrikaners of the time. Today we have retrogressed to such an extent that a Coloured academic is not even allowed to sit with Whites on the Council and Senate of their own Coloured university. With reference to the commission, I want to say this as well: Unfortunately, Prof. Du Plessis died too soon. He was replaced by Prof. Wilcocks, and the commission was then given the name of the Wilcocks Commission. I have mentioned this because the calibre of men who served on that commission is the calibre we want on the commission proposed here. Immediately I think of a sociologist like Prof. S. P. Cilliers, of the University of Stellenbosch, one of the outstanding authorities on the Coloured community and their problems; outstanding churchmen like Rev. W. A. Landman, Rev. D. P. Botha and others; then there are businessmen like Dr. Anton Rupert, who devotes much of his energy to the development of Lesotho—it is men like these who can be used. Dr. Jan S. Marais, and so many others who can be mentioned. Sir, these are all men who, politically speaking, mainly support that side of this House but who will have the confidence of the whole country and most certainly, I think, of the Coloured population as a whole.

I have not consulted the report of the Wilcocks Commission, because you will concede that population conditions have changed so radically in 30 years that it has now become obsolete. Unfortunately, it also so happened that the report of this Wilcocks Commission was published at a time when virtually all the attention was being devoted to the Poor White problem, which the Government at that time tackled with great success. Shortly afterwards, the Second World War broke out, and apart from the more urgent matters which apply in a time of war, the attention was being devoted at home to an industrial revolution in South Africa which laid the foundation of South Africa’s industrial development.

Subsequently the present Government came into power and for years concentrated more on apartheid than on development; and so, to our sorrow, we have to admit today that we have never developed a comprehensive charter for the rehabilitation of the Coloured community. Sir, I think it will be a glaring injustice, a glaring disservice to South Africa, if we delayed this any longer. I hope Government members will not adopt the same hackneyed approach this afternoon which we have heard from them so often in the past. We know that they are playing a little game of hide-and-seek with the political future of the Coloured people. In the course of this session we shall come back to the political position of the Coloureds many times. But what we will not be interested in this afternoon, is the old story that this Government is doing better than any previous government, that it is spending more money, and that this is enough. Sir, that is completely irrelevant. Technological developments have completely changed. I remember that when I was a boy, it took nine months to build one house; now, if you want to, you can build nine houses in one day. For that reason one cannot make comparisons of this nature; but I am willing to admit two things at once; I am willing to admit that there has definitely been progress in the lives of the Coloureds and that a lot of this is impressive. In addition, I am prepared to concede that there is a team of dedicated officials who are doing their utmost to make some progress.

But the point remains that there is no comprehensive co-ordinated charter according to which every social, economic and political programme for the Coloureds can be measured and tested and according to which it can be seen whether it is not eventually going to become a white elephant which will have to be abolished again. There is no charter available as a guide to officialdom, as there is in the case of the Bantu and in regard to the population of South-West Africa. Our point of view in regard to the Government today is this: Recently the hon. the Minister of Coloured Affairs stood up and appealed to the country to bring about closer association between Whites and Coloureds in South Africa. He did not in fact specify what degree of close association there should be. Shortly afterwards, the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development stood up and appealed to the country for greater disassociation between Whites and Coloureds, in terms of which they would move further and further away from each other. He also omitted to say to what degree and how far this should be taken. Subsequently the Cabinet came and sat itself neatly down on two stools. The result is that today we still have to rely on the political statement made by the hon. the Prime Minister—in my opinion the most unbelievable political statement I have ever heard since Emperor Caligula made his horse a consul. The statement of the hon. the Prime Minister to which I am referring, was made on the 6th February last year, and I shall quote from his Hansard—

Just imagine; he said the road of the Coloureds would end; he did not know where it would end, but “I am constantly indicating the road”. Sir, have you ever come across a statesman in the world who said: “There is a road; that road is coming to an end, but I am constantly indicating the road?” He continued that—“the Coloured people should proceed along their own course”—this is the road which is coming to an end—“and the Whites along their own course and that they can confer to and fro with one another on a friendly basis on their respective courses”.

Mr. Speaker, the problem is this: There are no two roads for Whites and Coloureds in South Africa. Fundamentally the Whites and the Coloureds are travelling the same road; they are inseparably travelling the same road; they are entering the same future. The life and decisions of the one affect the other, and vice versa, and so it will remain, and no government in South Africa will ever change that. Sir, I wonder how many people in South Africa today realize what is happening right under our noses here? I do not want to say anything which may be regarded as being disparaging. We all know there are large numbers of Coloureds who have reached the highest levels in South Africa in their community under the most difficult circumstances imaginable, but the masses find themselves in a position which cries to high heaven and which cannot be attributed to any inherent weakness, but which must be attributed to the unjust social structure which has been built up against it and which is being built up against it day after day. Let me mention a few facts. The total population of the Coloured people in South Africa is more than 2 million at present and of this number, one whole quarter live here in the Cape Peninsula. Its natural increase is one of the highest in the world, and it is calculated that in 30 years’ time, when many of us will still be alive, we will have 800,000 Whites in the Peninsula alone, but the Coloured population in the Peninsula will be larger than the total population of Johannesburg today. In 30 years it will increase from 400,000 which is the number at present, to 1,400,000 in the Cape Peninsula alone. The population of the Cape Peninsula will thus be two-thirds Coloured in our time.

The nature, the character, the future of the Peninsula—merely to mention one area, and this is going to be the case in many parts of the Cape Province—is thus going to depend to a large extent on the development and the social standard which is attained by the Coloureds here. In fact, this is going to be the case throughout the entire country, because among the Coloureds there is a far more migration to the cities; they are going to become far more complete city dwellers than the Whites, for the simple reason that their territorial area is minimal in comparison with that of the Whites. Children whose parents are working on White farms today, will simply not remain there and in regard to the Coloured, we are going to have the most completely urban population in South Africa. The standard of living of a tremendously large section of the Coloured population is among the poorest and most miserable which one can find among Western people in any part of the world, and this in a country of milk and honey. There is not one single serious sociological problem one can think of which is not present to an enormous degree among the Coloureds. Every nation has its problems, but lack of bread, over-crowding, housing shortages, desperate housing conditions, adult crime, juvenile delinquency, illegitimate births, the breaking up of families, malnutrition and the permanent setback which it gives people, all those problems are present to an enormous degree in the lives of the Coloureds.

†In the field of housing it is estimated that at least one-third of the total Coloured population in the Western Cape are living in non-permanent and sub-standard housing, and it can be safely stated that between two-thirds and three-quarters of all Coloured people in the Western Cape live in overcrowded conditions. Stellenbosch experts have estimated that out of the approximately 130,000 Coloured families in greater Cape Town, 43,000 are in need of housing. With a view to the rapid expansion of the families of the Coloured people it is estimated that by 1980, nine years from now, at least another 54,000 dwellings will be required in greater Cape Town alone. So we see that in order to provide anything like adequate housing for the Coloureds in Cape Town alone we will need an average of 10,000 housing units per year. That shows the enormity of the problem facing the country and the speed with which we shall have to move.

One result of the housing shortage and the overcrowding, coupled with inadequate school facilities, poverty, low wages and poor health is the incidence of crime, which is much higher among the Coloured people than among any other population group in South Africa. It is probably one of the highest in the world. According to the latest statistics, for 1968, 13 out of every 1,000 White people were convicted of an offence, while the figure for the Coloured people was 69 out of every 1,000 Coloureds, five times the rate you find among the Whites. How long are we going to allow in our country conditions to flourish which cause this kind of situation? In this respect I want to quote Prof. S. P. Cilliers. He said recently in a paper—

Sir, that is why we are calling today for a commission, not an ordinary commission but a commission in the tradition of the Carnegie, the Tomlinson and the Odendaal Commissions, to consider the problem of the Coloured people as a whole and to present South Africa with a comprehensive blueprint and a national charter for the future welfare of a population group which is one of the most important real assets that we have in our country.

We need a massive effort to eliminate social and economic conditions which favour crime and criminality, and of course education remains one of the most effective levers to social change. If we want to accomplish anything we should move rapidly, and by that I mean almost immediately, to a system of compulsory education for all. It can be done. There is no valid reason why a modern-minded Government cannot employ educational television and many other means which are employed in other parts of the world to bring the benefit of a decent education to every Coloured child in the country. It is monstrous that in a country like ours one single child under 16 should be allowed to roam the streets while he should by rights be in school. It is appalling to see the waste of human material in South Africa. No White man would allow that to happen to his children. Where we, the White people are the only population group with effective political power in South Africa, we should not allow it to happen to the children of fellow-South Africans simply because they are brown.

Also, Sir, as long as the present rate of natural increase among the Coloured people is as high as it is, it will be very difficult to obtain an improvement in the standard of living of the population group as a whole. There will have to be a bold and expansive family planning programme, and this will have to be given top priority in any plan for national reconstruction. But then I must add that if we want to make a success of this as far as the Coloureds or any other group are concerned, Government leaders will have to stop their infantile political appeals to White people to increase their families. In any case, it is quite senseless. No sensible couple are going to produce a White baby for the Republic, or for anything else, simply because a politician calls upon them to do so. In a multi-racial country it is essential that there should not be two standards. You should not call upon one section to follow a certain set of rules and another section another set of rules. The important question of family planning should be tackled on a similar basis for all. The Johannesburg Health Department reports that they experience fresh resistance to family planning services among Bantu every time a prominent Government politician sends out a call to White people to increase the size of their families as part of a political insurance effort against the Black. The sensible thing to do is to encourage all our people, Whites and Coloureds and others, to plan the size of their families according to their means, otherwise an intolerable burden will come to rest on our country as far as our health and welfare services are concerned, and a proletariat will develop here which we shall ultimately not be able to control.

*Mr. Speaker, in the past 60 years and longer, our politics in South Africa has gone through various important phases. There was a time when it took the form of a political confrontation between Afrikaans-speaking and English-speaking peoples. Then men like Dr. Malan made the appeal: Join together what belongs together. He then united the vast majority of the Afrikaans-speaking people of this country behind him. However, Afrikaner unity was not set as a goal in itself. He said that the time would come, especially after certain targets like the Republic had been attained, when attention would have to be given to a broader unification of what belonged together, without any abandonment of identity. Now we know that the old confrontation between Afrikaans and English speaking is a thing of the past. It will remain a thing of the past. A new phase has developed in the politics of South Africa. A much more serious confrontation is developing, in which South Africa as a whole is involved, and will become increasingly involved. This is the confrontation between Westerner and Communist. None of us here can feel unconcerned about the activities of Russian warships along our coasts, especially against the background of terrorists on our borders and the South-West Africa case. Who knows whether Russia is not planning an adventure which is aimed at harming us, in an attempt to consolidate the whole of Africa behind it with one onslaught. This is the type of confrontation which is developing. For that reason, I say that it has become time for sensible people on both sides of this House to see whether the term “join together what belongs together” should not be given a wider significance again. Let us develop a new relationship between White and Coloured in which each will retain his own identity, so that people who have a common Western background may co-operate with one another as closely as possible. The same perhaps applies to other population groups, but today we are concerned with the Whites and the Coloureds. How can we with any amount of reasonableness expect that the Coloured should devote his attention and energy to positive rehabilitation if there is a government which tells him: “Posterity may decide otherwise, but under me you will remain half-citizens on the road to nowhere?” How must a man feel if he is a Coloured and has worked equally hard in order to obtain his qualifications and then finds that he must do the same work, but is paid only half of what his White colleague is being paid? Do hon. members realize that if a man is paid half the salary he deserves on the basis of his qualifications and his work, simply because he is a Coloured, that he is in fact being taxed on 50 per cent of the income to which he is entitled? Is it surprising that bitter feelings are developing today, as we saw during the last session of the Coloured Council? How can a man develop his personality, and make progress, if all sorts of restrictions are being placed on him, such as labour restrictions, income restrictions and cultural restrictions which prevent him from becoming a full-fledged person in his own country? How can a whole people elevate itself if it is continually being isolated? So often we hear the story that the Coloured should follow the example of the Afrikaner. The Afrikaner helped himself and developed to where he is. This is a fine thought, but the Afrikaner was never subjected to a system of separation and isolation. Where would the Afrikaners have been today if their businessmen and industrialists did not have freedom of contact with businessmen and cultural people from other population groups from whom they could learn? We must start realizing that contact does not mean integration and that co-operation does not mean assimilation. These are serious times. The Prime Minister chose a motto for himself, namely: “Fulfil your calling.” I want to ask the hon. the Prime Minister whether he regards it as the White man’s calling always to remain the overlord of White imperialist over the Coloured people? No, Mr. Speaker, White imperialism in South Africa will have to make way for something better. We shall have to reconsider this matter honestly. We shall have to create a just order for the Coloureds and above all, we shall have to provide them with greater clarity in regard to their political future as citizens in South Africa.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Bezuidenhout went much further today than he went with his definition of “petty apartheid”. With that definition he wrote off separate development completely. He said that every act of discrimination enforced by legislation without the consent of a group, is inadmissable and that it is “petty apartheid”. When he wrote that he did not bear in mind that the colour bar in the mines is being enforced without consent. Many Bantu from other countries are working in the mines. I wonder how he wants to obtain their consent to make legislation to retain a colour bar. That he and his party can go and explain to the mine workers and other workers of South Africa. Today the hon. member went very far. He advocated any kind of thing; he advocated coalition, and in the end advocated a mere conglomeration. Today he advocated full integration. The important point—and these are his own words in this motion—is that a commission should be appointed, but to do what? We know precisely, and the Coloureds know precisely, where we want to go. We know precisely what the deficiencies and what the shortcomings are. The fact of the matter is that it has not even been two years since we commenced a new dispensation for the Coloureds. That new dispensation must first be given an opportunity to develop. There is therefore no reason whatsoever to appoint a commission of inquiry at this stage. The fact of the matter is that 1966-’67 we have a select committee, which was subsequently converted into a commission on the political rights of the Coloureds. They were given political rights, and their representatives were removed from this House to their own council on the basis of the recommendation of a commission.

On the road to what?

We know where we are going. The hon. member said that the Coloureds and the Whites were inseparably travelling the same road. He included them in all the roads. Now I want to ask him and his party why they ran away from the promise they made to the Coloureds when they said to them that they would return them to the common voters’ role. Why are they dangling before their noses the carrot that there will be a separate voters’ role if we are inseparably moving along the same road. This motion puts me in mind of the old saying “bolting the stable door after the horse has fled”. This motion is one which reveals the guilt feelings of the United Party. They have guilty consciences and now they are using the hon. member for Bezuidenhout to free them from their guilt.

This motion talks about the rehabilitation of the Coloureds. What did the National Party get to rehabilitate? What the National Party inherited from them was wreckage and ruin. We are not rehabilitating, we are building. We are building on foundations laid by us. There is not a single foundation for the Coloured population in regard to these matters mentioned by the motion in respect of which any United Party member on the opposite side can stand up and say that they laid those foundations and that we can continue to build on them. We inherited shanties, slums, ruins and wreckage from them. The tactics they are adopting here today are the same tactics they started to adopt before the general election. Every time they try to go through the gap. The United Party has become convinced that the Coloureds, in the same way as all the other population groups in South Africa, i.e. the Indians and the Bantu, are accepting separate development. All the non-Whites in this country are beginning to realize that differentiation is not discrimination. Differentiation is the policy of this party. Differentiation must not be read as meaning discrimination, because differentiation is the work of the Creator. We see this phenomenon not only in His creature, in man, we also see differentiation in nature. Because Coloured leaders are accepting this separate development or parallel development and are implementing it in practice, the United Party have come forward with this motion.

It is cheap propaganda.

Yes, it is cheap propaganda. What they are now requesting, this party announced in 1961 through the mouth of Dr. Verwoerd. These matters have all been transferred to the Coloureds themselves, so that they can deal with them under their new dispensation. They are administering these matters. They are doing so themselves. What the hon. member is actually doing here today is to tell the elected Coloured representatives of the Coloured population how they should govern their own people. These matters are being administered by the Coloured Persons Representative Council. For that reason to move the following amendment—

Sir, the points mentioned in the hon. member’s motion are already being implemented. The late Dr. Verwoerd addressed the Coloured Persons Council in 1961, and at the time it was simply a Council which consisted of nominated members in the Cape. He held out to them the prospect of a National Council being appointed —yes, at the time it was still appointed— for the entire Republic, and that they would gradually be given these matters to administer. He said that they would have it within ten years. That was 1961. They did have it within ten years, in 1969. In 1968 the Coloured Persons Representative Council was elected, and in 1969 they were able to draw up their first budget. It was not for a full year; it was only for nine months. It was only last year that they were able to draw up a full budget.

We kept our word. We kept the promise which the late Dr. Verword had made. In 1967 the present hon. Prime Minister addressed that Council. That was the old Council. And then he was able to announce that progress had been made. He was also able to make the further promise that under his guidance as well his Government would keep its word to uplift and to improve the lot of the Coloured population.

And are they better off now in the flats?

Yes, Sir, they are much better off than they were in Windermere in the time when that hon. member’s party was governing. There they almost drowned every year. The steps which this motion requests, are already in the process of being implemented. All the fields mentioned here are today under the care of the Coloured Persons Representative Council, with its own Executive. All this motion is doing, is to tell those people how they must govern. The fact of the matter is that they have up to now only drawn up one full budget. They have these matters to deal with. All the money they requested, the Government approved. It was accepted by this Parliament. It was their budget, which they drew up themselves.

There has been phenomenal progress in the past few years. Let us take the field of commerce, where the Coloured Development Corporation is taking the lead. In the field of industry, in the economic sphere, more than R6 million in assistance has been granted since 1962 under the guidance of the Coloured Development Corporation. I am thinking for example of loans to businessmen to purchase business undertakings and hotels. There were no Coloured hotels in this Country. Today there are hotels of which the Coloureds are proud because they are theirs. Travellers on the road had no where to go. There are factories as well. It does not stop at commerce, we must always consider training as well. The Landdros Hotel in Athlone is being used for the training of waiters. Eventually it will be used for the training of clerks and people on a managerial level. We must also consider that side of the matter. We cannot merely carry on regardless; the people are not there to do the work. Today businessmen are being trained under the guidance of inspectors from the Coloured Development Corporation. All this is taking place under supervision. The people are receiving guidance. In the Spes Bona bank Coloureds are being trained as clerks, cashiers and eventually as branch managers, because this is the Coloureds’ own bank. This is where they invest their money.

As far as the education of the Coloureds is concerned, we have nothing to be ashamed of. Nor do we have anything to hide, not from those hon. members, nor from the world. Unfortunately, there are no comparable figures. But in the time when that party was in power, Coloured education still fell under the Provinces. That party governed the Provinces for an uninterrupted period from 1910 to 1954. That is why I say, all they left behind was wreckage.

But I want to mention a few figures in this regard. The hon. member requested us to consider education. But the reply is obvious; this has already received consideration. In 1950 there were 203,922 Coloured children attending school. In 1964 there were 366,326 Coloured children attending school. In 1970 there were 504,598.

What about the percentage?

Today more than 80 per cent of the Coloured children are attending school. Let us consider the number of hostels. When they were in power, there was no such thing. In 1964 there were seven State hostels. In 1970 there were 15. Let us consider the number of teachers. In 1950 there were 6,166 Coloured teachers. In 1964 there were 11,783. In 1970 there were 15,942 and in 1971, 16,538. Since 1950, therefore, the number of Coloured teachers has increased more than threefold. In 1964 there were 37,264 high school pupils; in 1969 there were 50,109. Let us consider the number of students at the Coloured university, the establishment of which that party opposed so vehemently. This university was established against their will. They are the people who incited the Coloureds to say that it was an inferior institution. That incitement came from the benches on the opposite side of the House. Where there was still a backlog, there sit the people who committed obstruction when …

Agitators.

Racial inciters.

Order! The hon. member must withdraw the word “agitators”.

I withdraw it, Sir.

In respect of the Coloureds consideration is also being given to differentiated educational services. There are the training colleges for teachers. There is also a technical college for the training of commerce teachers. In 1967 there were 199 student teachers. In 1969 there were 376 student commerce teachers. There is also a technical college for apprentices. In 1962 it was attended by 951 students. In 1969 there were 1,969. As far as the education of Coloureds is concerned, consideration is being given to every sphere. There is special education for the deaf, the blind, epileptics and cerebral palsied children. In addition there are nursery schools for children in need of care. In other words, there is differentiated education for the Coloureds as well. But that is not all, for we are also busy remedying the bungled work of the United Party. What they did not do, was left for us to do. We are also taking care of adult education. As far as adult education is concerned nothing had been done in 1965. In 1966 there were 2,650 and in 1969, 7,569. These are adults who are attending part-time classes. In addition there is occupational orientated training for the Coloureds. They are being trained as seamen, as caterers, garment workers and farm workers. In every sphere there are opportunities for them to receive training. They are also receiving free books, lodging bursaries and transport where there are needy children. Post-school bursaries are also being offered to them for teacher training, social work and librarianship. These bursaries are such that they are able to obtain a degree at a university with them.

However, there is still something lacking. This is the problem of the Government and of the Coloured Persons Council as well. There is a large percentage of Coloureds who are work-shy. Everyone admits it; the Coloured Persons Council itself admits it. This is the most important factor which is preventing rapid progress. It requires money and it requires trouble, but we shall have to establish more centres such as the one at Faure where extremely good work is being done. There is a large demand for people coming from there. If a Coloured has been there for only three months, the private sector wants him. He has then been disciplined to some extent and he is a usable person. We must establish more such centres, because if we can eliminate work-shyness among the Coloureds, we can make very rapid progress. This is the actual task which we must perform today. We are not rehabilitating. We had nothing. We began from scratch and with goodwill and co-operation we have been building. We want to co-operate; we are prepared to co-operate. This party and this Government has already proved its goodwill towards the Coloured population of South Africa. Matters are now in their own hands. They must help; their Council must help to help their own people and eliminate work-shyness among them. The task of family planning which that hon. member wants to throw into our midst here is their task. It is not our task; it is the task of the Coloured Persons Representative Council of South Africa, and I think the hon. member for Bezuidenhout and his party can safely leave it in the hands of the Coloured Persons Council itself to effect future family planning for their own people.

The hon. member for Malmesbury, who has just sat down, said amongst other things “Ons is besig om te bou”. I would just like to ask that hon. member whether he really realizes what they are building up at the present time with regard to this community. Sir, in seconding the motion proposed by the hon. member for Bezuidenhout and irrespective of anything hon. members on that side of the House may say, I want to say that it is a tragic and irrefutable fact that the Coloured people are rapidly becoming a lost community here in South Africa.

Who told you that?

Every Government attempt to persuade them that they are a nation on their own is bound to fail. The only effective cohesive element that these people ever knew was their official link with us as part of the Western community in the Republic. Sir, the Coloured people form a distinctive community. No one will deny that, least of all the Coloured people themselves. A separate nation they are not and are never likely to be, no matter how far-fetched the Government’s thinking on this issue may be. Sir, there is no doubt that attempts of a sporadic nature have been made to apply a programme of socioeconomic uplift to these people by this Government from time to time, but the root cause of the discontent of the Coloured people is the dilemma of their identity and the question of meaning also. They are being steadily cut off from our society, a society from which they themselves originally stem, at least in part. As the mover of this motion correctly stated, the general position of the mass of the Coloured people in South Africa today is one of steady deterioration. There are a number of reasons for that and I think we ignore them at our peril. The Coloured people as a community have been made to feel that they are God’s stepchildren in South Africa in almost every aspect of their lives. The results for South African society may soon prove disastrous unless we deal with this problem now. You see, Sir, for them there is no real cohesive pattern of living. There are very few stabilizing factors in the socio-economic or even in the political fields as there are for the other racial groups. They are not identifiable as the Bantu, the Indians or the Malays are. They represent a kind of twilight community, labelled alternatively “Coloureds” at one moment and “other Coloureds” the next. If anyone can tell me what that means I shall be very glad to know. And the one community with whom they really have the greatest affinity, namely our own, has rejected them out of hand, thanks to the extraordinary insensitivity of the present Government. Moreover, there is a considerable body of evidence to prove that the social structure of the Coloured community—and here I refer to the Coloured family in particular: harassed, largely ignorant, poverty-stricken and in many instances insulted as they are by legislation—is in the very deepest trouble. Whilst it is true that many young Coloured people are moving ahead to unprecedented levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind at the present time. At the heart of this deterioration in the fabric of Coloured society lies the Coloured family itself. The family, after all, is the basic social unit of Western society, and if this is destroyed what do we put in its place? On analysis I would say that the Coloured community is in the process of division between a stable middle-class group on the one hand, which is steadily growing stronger and more successful—that we admit—and an increasingly disorganized, irresponsible, ruthless lower class which represents the mass of the Coloured people and whose birth-rate is higher than that of any other population group in the country. I will deal with that later. There is no need to remind this House of the appallingly high rate of alcoholism and drug addiction—and here I refer mostly to dagga—vandalism and illegitimacy, fecklessness, violence and irresponsibility which characterize that particular element of Coloured society to a frightening degree today. Generations of Coloured children are growing up in our congested urban areas today, urban areas to which the majority of the Coloured people have now been attracted, without education, without discipline, without security, and the ultimate burden of dealing with these unfortunate youngsters must fall increasingly upon our welfare agencies and the State unless other steps are taken. A minority of the Coloured people have reached the top and these reached the top and these have proved to have capabilities every bit as great as those of anyone in this House. But when they get to the top, what do they find? They find the same old prejudices, humiliations and discriminations directed against them as before. The old built-in prejudices remain. Their individual situation, in psychological terms, is, if anything, even worse than before. Their educational achievements, often very hardly earned as we know, must often, I think, have the taste of gall in their mouths when, as the hon. member for Bezuidenhout has correctly said, no single one of them is permitted, even with the qualifications of a senior lecturer, to sit in on the deliberations of the Council or the Senate of what is supposed to be their own university. And what must they think of a society in which their teachers, their doctors, their nurses and other professional people who have qualifications identical with those we set for ourselves but whose remuneration, set in the first instance on Government instructions by the Public Service Commission, is one-third less than we receive for the same work? What possible justification can there possibly be for that? There are many urgent reasons why the whole system of White-Coloured relationships should at this period of our history be reviewed. Attitudes to date on the part of the White community have been largely paternal. They have been based on fixed ideas of the role of the Coloured people in our society, with the conviction that they would always remain in one way or another, slightly inferior to us. Do not let us make any bones about it. That has generally been the attitude of hon. members opposite. But circumstances in South Africa have greatly changed in the last two or three decades, and if there is to be a change of attitude, and change there must be, then I would say that factors other than colour must be taken into account, factors such as degrees of sophistication, education, responsibility and character. Ironically enough, in terms of this Government’s own policy, there are more direct contact situations with leaders of the Coloured community today, particularly at Government level, than at any other time in our history. Just look at the Department of Coloured Affairs, which is being turned over increasingly to senior Coloured officials.

What is wrong with that?

The hon. member asks: “What is wrong with that?” Let me say that, coupled with that, the country now has more stringent and far-reaching segregation laws to separate us from the Coloured people than at any other time in our history. This apparent contradiction, of course, applies to a great many other aspects of the relationship between Whites and Coloureds. Economic integration is not just a policy; it is a fact. Their religions are the same as ours. Their cultural background is a mixture of Afrikaner and English, the same as ours. Their standards of education, which are set for them by this Government, are in fact the same as ours. The languages they speak are the same. The key question here is: Do we keep them as friends or do we turn them into bitter opponents?

Sir, when it comes to patterns of community living I believe that ethnic groups are essentially happier on their own. There is a positive side and not merely a negative one to these arrangements. All we hear from this Government are the negative aspects.

You are just patronizing them all the time.

No, I am not. This was certainly the case long before this Government came into power and placed legally enforcable residential segregation laws on our statute book. Hon. members know that many Coloured, Indian and Malay communities were for instance scattered about amongst our suburbs and city centres. In every instance, as hon. members know, they voluntarily formed their own ethnic enclaves, just as we did, and followed their own individual patterns of community living. The first real signs of hostility and conflict in this field became apparent as soon as the Government set about their forcible removal, usually without bothering to consult them, to areas outside the cities. More important still, they were given little or no incentive in the process to get together and rebuild their old communities in happier and healthier surroundings. The usual pattern was and still is for the Government arbitrarily to proclaim an area White and thereafter to think about how to provide alternative accommodation for those to be shifted out. They thought merely in terms of housing units, and not, I want to emphasize, in terms of real community development, because real community development places the emphasis first upon people and their lives and not merely upon bricks and mortar. I believe that because of the manner in which these so-called urban renewal plans have been carried out, with the emphasis always upon group areas, rather than upon slum clearance and the rehabilitation of communities in the genuine sense, the Government will now never be able to catch up on its housing programme, no matter how much it may protest that it can. Removals or slum clearance arbitrarily carried out, particularly in an ideological context, without adequate consultation with the people concerned, without adequate compensation and without systematic case work to ensure that people so moved find themselves in a community with whom they have something in common, I find unnecessarily harsh. It encourages the latent hostility which is so obvious amongst large sections of the Coloured population today. The disastrous thing is that no effort is being made in the course of these removals, deliberately and with the help of social workers, to inspire those who have been moved to recreate the cohesive community life which they knew before.

I want to say that a city, or any new township, anywhere in the world, whatever the colour of the people living in it, must allow for some kind of communalism. After very much experience they are deeply convinced of this in America today, because community interests within a large metropolitan area, such as we have here in Cape Town or in Johannesburg, make their own distinctive and vital contributions to city life. Without adequate community life the concrete jungles or the rows of stereotyped houses in townships remain depersonalized and meaningless, somewhere from whence one simply joins the ranks of the daily commuters to and from work, and little else. It does not matter what colour you are. That applies to everybody. Here I want to issue a warning. The alarming phenomenon of ethnic groups deliberately withdrawing and uniting in order to establish an identity, not on a positive basis, but for the purpose of forcing home their demands in a variety of fields because of a sense of deprivation, appeared for the very first time in South Africa recently. In fact, it appeared for the first time in the Cape in 1969, when Coloured students at the University of the Western Cape, struck out against White liberals in particular and Whites in general, refusing contact with White students at a particular university on “White” terms.

This year the newly formed all-Black South African Students’ Organization stated its objects with great clarity through its 25 year old president, Mr. Barney Pityana. This is what he said and I think we should take note of it:

Hon. members should note that sovereign independent homelands are not at issue where that statement is concerned. This student leader was undoubtedly referring to those who have become part of urban, industrial South Africa for whom no plans have been made and for whom no bright future is promised by this Government. It concerns the Bantu in this context. But we are concerned here with the Coloured people, who have no homelands, who have been virtually rejected by this Government and who have no clarity as to what their future status in the Republic is to be. It is very significant that two weeks after the Black student leader’s call to action, the deputy leader of the Coloured Labour Party, Mr. David Curry, issued a Press statement endorsing Mr. Pityana’s views. This is what he said:

To anyone familiar with developments in the United States during the 1960s, those words must have a familiar and, possibly, even a somewhat ominous ring, for it means the beginning of confrontation politics and a perpetually overheated situation. That, I submit, is the danger. We have exercised our option to reject these people without thought for anyone but ourselves so often—and this Government continues to do it—that we must not now be surprised if they, in turn, reverse the position and reject us.

And you are enjoying it.

No, Sir, if we are intelligent we take note of these things. The consequences of such a decision can prove alarming for the Republic. All that their attitude really reveals, in essence, is the Nationalist Government’s own obsession with race in reverse. That is all it is. So, in place of dialogue and co-operation this type of movement, to which I have referred, always envisages, anywhere in the world, a racially based quest for political power as a prerequisite for achieving economic power, and ultimately, for achieving a radical transformation of South African or any other society. Who can blame them? Coloured and Black nationalism is the very thing this Government has taught them all and encouraged from the start.

What, for instance, is to happen to all the resolutions rejecting apartheid, which were passed at the last session of the Coloured Representative Council? Are they going to pile up on the hon. Minister’s desk? Are they to be ignored? For too long we have sat m the seats of power, telling everybody else in this country just what the pattern of their lives shall be without seriously bothering to consult them on any of the major decisions we have made in the process. Let us be frank about it. This heavy and at this stage in our history, arrogant form of paternalism will no longer do; not because of outside pressures, not only because we might be afraid, but because circumstances in South Africa itself have changed. In this context, it might be as well for us to remember the Biblical text: “He who loveth his life shall lose it.”

If one scans the debates in this House, and if one studies our history through the years, it is an appalling thought that hon. members on that side of the House are producing much the same type of argument today with regard to our non-White people and our relationship towards them as were produced 40 years ago. No one will dispute the wisdom of maintaining civilized standards nor that of group identity within the nation. However, when our one-time wards themselves achieve those standards, as an increasingly large number of Coloured and Indian people have done today, what then? Surely the time has come, and it is in our country’s interest and not merely in terms of party-political divisions, for us to re-assess this situation. The right place and the right community with which to begin is that of the Coloureds. They are a known and not an unknown quantity. They have always been a stable and a loyal group and there has been the very minimum of racial conflict between us and them. Human and economic adjustments in this field are required of us and there is no doubt that they will need much careful thought and careful handling. These adjustments must be made and they must be made pretty soon. I think the worst thing we can do, and the greatest disservice to South Africa, is merely to be evasive on the one hand or to take a tough, intractable line on the other, where such adaptation really needs the careful, balanced and steady consideration of us all.

Words, words!

These are not just merely words, they are very significant issues. In the meantime the prime need is to look at our social services and how these can best be utilized to rehabilitate those sections of the Coloured community who are most in need of them. At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Coloured society, as I said just now, is the Coloured family itself. This is the fundamental source of weakness of the Coloured community at the present time. Unless this damage is repaired, all the efforts to deal with poverty, alcoholism and crime will come to very little. The role of the family in shaping character and ability, especially of young children, is so pervasive as to be easily overlooked. The truth is that the family structure of lower class Coloured people in our urban areas is highly unstable today and, in many instances, it is approaching complete breakdown.

Do you want to bring in the Bantu amongst them?

No, I am just going to refer to some statistics. No statistics appear to be kept anywhere as to what proportion of Coloured husbands or fathers of children are absent from these homes. According to the 1969 report of the Medical Officer of Health for the greater Cape Town Municipality, 30.4 per cent of all Coloured live births were illegitimate in 1969. Hon. members talks about the Bantu. Hon. members on that side of the House will not allow the Bantu to live an ordinary family life in the urban areas. Let me tell hon. members that according to the Medical Officer of Health’s report in 1969 there were living in Langa township, which borders on several Coloured townships, 24,320 most of them males living as single men and 4,508 women. In other words, some 20,000 Bantu men are today living in Langa at such close quarters with these Coloured communities, without their wives and families.

Hon. members know very well what has been happening as a result of that. A great deal of the illegitimacy is caused by this situation. This in itself is another off-shoot of Government policy. A lot has been said about family planning. I want to tell the House that great progress is being made in the area of greater Cape Town with family planning clinics, although there is still much to be done. Hon. members should know that between 1965 and 1969 the figures showed a drop in the Coloured fertility rate from 45.5 live births per 1,000 of the population in 1965 to 40.6 per 1,000 in 1969. This means that the municipality is doing what it can in this area, and that it is making some progress.

Low education levels in turn produce low income levels, which deprive children of many opportunities and so the cycle of poverty, ignorance and either unemployment or inadequate employment repeats itself. Housing conditions are another contributory factor to the social demoralization of the Coloured people, as the hon. the Minister knows very well. I would say, and hon. members certainly know, that the incidence of crime amongst the Coloured people today is nearly six times that among the Whites, a lot of it in the lower age group. There are no grounds for any easy assertion that the Coloured people are inherently more inclined to lawlessness than any other group. The fact is that their living conditions at the present moment encourage this type of behaviour. The conditions and the setting are amenable to crime, the bulk of which takes the form of drunkenness, disorderly behaviour and acts of personal violence.

I submit that this is because, as Professor S. P. Cilliers from Stellenbosch University has said, of the marginality of their position. They do not really know what they are. They are neither fish nor fowl. On that basis and with no clear future set out for them by this Government it is not surprising that there are deteriorating standards among them.

There is another point. The present generation of Coloured children growing up in these distant townships has probably less personal contact with the world of White South Africa than any other generation in our history. The loss is as much ours as theirs. In a word I would say that any national effort towards solving the problems of the Coloured community must initially be directed towards the question of the Coloured family itself.

In conclusion, let me say that our present Department of Community Development is a complete misnomer. It never develops a community of any kind—it only breaks them up. A proper department worthy of the name should be equipped with a staff of qualified social workers, social science graduates, statisticians, psychologists, dieticians, health educators and medical personnel. As matters stand, there is no single Government department that takes responsibility, in a positive sense, for dealing with community development. There is no adequate liaison among those concerned with health, education, employment or welfare. When faced with the frustration and the growing discontent amongst the Coloured people, no single Cabinet Minister is prepared to accept responsibility; and understandably so, because the situation in many ways looks frighteningly out of control.

The point of danger in all these matters will be reached once the mass of Coloured people become convinced that they have been and are largely being excluded from their legitimate place in the community as a result, very largely, of our own selfishness. Once that happens, they will certainly follow similar examples throughout the world and come to define themselves almost exclusively in terms of their disabilities. That is the danger point. At that point in our history no one can predict what the outcome will be. The object of this motion today is to plead with the Government for far-seeing action to be taken now in relation to these problems, before both Coloured and White societies in South Africa reap the inevitable whirl-winds of neglect.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Bezuidenhout had an opportunity today of making a contribution to the development of the Coloured community, and of giving guidance which could be stimulating to the bodies to whom the progress of this community has been entrusted, as well as to the leaders of the Coloured community themselves. Unfortunately I can only say that his speech here tried to introduce a note of political commotion into the relationships between the Whites and the Coloured population. What is more, I find it striking to note the extent to which that hon. member and the hon. member for Wynberg, who has just resumed her seat, contradicted each other in regard to the contact which the Coloureds today have with the Whites. According to the hon. member for Bezuidenhout they do not have this and that is the reason why they cannot progress, and according to the hon. member for Wynberg, the Coloureds have this to a greater extent now than they ever had before. The hon. members must discuss these things more thoroughly in their caucus and try to understand each other better before making such statements. At the outset I do not think I can make any better comment on what the hon. member said than to quote just a few sentences from a letter by a certain Mrs. Lydia Pienaar, who for years was a social welfare worker among the Coloured population in the days when the United Party was still in power. In a discussion of the book by Dr. Barnard, she said, inter alia, the following—

Hon. members on the opposite side must listen very carefully now to the following. This comes from a person who did not sit on the soft cushions here, but who moved and worked among these people and did something for them. She went on to say—

I think that this woman, in a few sentences, has commented on what hon. members on the opposite side said here today, by referring to the former conditions and what has since 1948 been done in regard to the Coloured community and the progress they have made. I want to tell the hon. members for Bezuidenhout and Wynberg that in their outlook on life they only view the Coloureds as happy beings as long as they are the underlings of the Whites and are privileged to live in the backyard of a White person instead of on their own piece of land and in their own homes. What service are the hon. members for Bezuidenhout and Wynberg doing the Coloured community here today by emphasizing malnutrition, poor housing, illegitimate children, inebriation, poor family life, etc.?

These are realities.

The hon. member must listen. In regard to the White people of South Africa I can also mention certain areas and talk about malnutrition, inebriation, of children being neglected, of illegitimate children, etc. I want to ask the hon. members for Bezuidenhout and Wynberg what service they are doing the Coloured community by walking around in their residential areas and pointing out these deficiencies? Why do they not also draw our attention to the wonderful family life of thousands of Coloured families? Why do they not point out the financial and economic achievements of many Coloureds today who have become prosperous and rich people, or even ordinary artisans? I want to tell the hon. member for Bezuidenhout that there are ordinary Coloured artisans who are earning more than he and I am earning. There are not one or two of them, but thousands. I want to ask hon. members on the opposite side what assistance they are offering the leaders of the Coloured community by referring to the Coloured population and trying to create the impression that the vast majority of the people are living under the most reprehensible conditions, on a very low moral level, etc.? In addition to that, their charge is also that it is in fact the fault of the Whites that conditions are as they are. In the first instance, this is a completely distorted picture. Hon. members on the opposite side are not aware of the development and progress which the Coloured community has made, and which they are making every day. And if these things are partially still the case today, then it is precisely as a result of the lack of policy in regard to the Coloured population of the United Party for many years. For the Coloured population there was no place of its own in South Africa. There were no opportunities for it, except, as I said, in the backyards as the underlings of the Whites. To what extent was Coloured leadership developed during the time of the United Party Government? None whatsoever.

The National Party, also according to the evidence of this woman who saw, knew and remembered the conditions, began inter alia in 1948 with a general programme of development for the Coloured community. To help the Coloured community realize itself, provision was in the first instance made in urban areas for Coloured group areas. Now I want to admit to hon. members that the housing provided by the State was in general sub-economic housing of a relatively low standard. But in by far the most cases it was better housing than these people had hitherto known. What is more, the National Party Government did not tell these people that they had to live in sub-economic houses for all eternity. As they improved their own economic position, mobilized their own savings, it was pointed out to them, the opportunity for them was there and the land was made available to them to build their own economic houses. Many of them are in fact already doing so and building societies and other bodies are helping them to do so. What is wrong with that? The National Party commenced a general programme of development for the Coloured community. I have just referred to housing. Let us consider a few other matters now.

It is the National Party which established a general educational development programme for the Coloured population. When it suits hon. members on that side of the House, when they are addressing people in our rural areas who are a little conservative in some places, they use as an argument against us that so many Coloured schools and all kinds of other facilities are being established for the Coloured population.

I say that the National Party has for many years been engaged in a general programme of educational development, and the creation of opportunities. That is why, as the hon. member for Malmesbury has already said, there is a university for the Coloured population. No, as far as hon. members on that side of the House are concerned, they should merely have gone on attending the University of Cape Town and other universities. Then they would have been happier. Then they would have realized themselves.

The hon. member for Bezuidenhout stated that they had no opportunities and contacts in the economic sphere. But they have all the contacts in the world. When the recently established Coloured Persons Representative Council needs advice to make a start with certain matters, the best economists in the White community are at their disposal, the Coloured Development Corporation, with its advisers and its money, is at their disposal. That is more than a White person had in our time.

In addition to that managerial and administrative opportunities are being introduced, which these people longed for and of which they had so little experience in the past. Today they are still lagging behind in this respect, precisely because they did not have the opportunity before. But that opportunity has been created. It is open to them in the Department of Coloured Administration; it is open to them in regard to the opportunities for their own businesses in Coloured areas where the business undertakings of these people are protected. They have the opportunity to develop in the business world. Their professions are being protected. Those hon. members are not aware of these opportunities. They do not know to what extent these people have already developed. I also get the impression that the Coloureds are no longer inclined to believe these hon. members and the stories they are still spreading today.

Sir, the policy and the development programme of the National Party for the Coloured population have opened opportunities for this population group which it has never had before, and if there is a road the end of which we cannot see, then it is the political road; then it is the road of the development of these people. We are right at the beginning and they are right at the beginning. A tremendous future lies ahead for them. Let us accept the figure of the hon. member for Bezuidenhout of 400,000 Coloureds in the Cape Peninsula who will in thirty years’ time number 1,400,000. Can you imagine, Sir, what opportunities there will then be for the Coloured population within the framework of this community? If they are there, then they will be properly accommodated, even better than today. Can you imagine what opportunities there will then be for the Coloureds in trade, in the professions and in every possible sphere within their own community? I say that the hon. members on that side do not know and do not understand what opportunities have really been opened for this community. They are utilizing these opportunities to the full, and they will continue to do so to an increasing extent in their own interests, and in the interests of their own people.

But I want to come to the thought with which I want to conclude, which is that it is continually being suggested to us—this was also the tone of these hon. members’ speeches—that the Whites and the Whites alone, are responsible for what will happen with the Coloureds in future, and that the unfavourable conditions which may exist today is the fault of the Whites. I want to emphasize here today that the hon. members must understand and realize that we have placed the Coloured population on the road to self-development.

To where? Where are they going?

That hon. member must just try to make certain where he is going. The Coloureds will determine their future themselves. Sir, we must get away from the idea that what will happen with the Coloureds is solely dependent on what the Whites do for them. The Coloured population has reached the stage where they are definitely doing things for themselves. If I may refer to the discussions and the work of the Coloured Persons Representative Council, then I should like to say that those Coloured leaders should place greater emphasis on this point, i.e. that these people are now in a position to promote their own affairs themselves; to determine their own future themselves; to ensure their own progress themselves.

With nominated members.

There are tremendous opportunities. Sir, allow me now to mention only a few things in order to enlighten the hon. member for Wynberg a little. There is for the Coloured leader a very good opportunity, for example, to mobilize the savings of the Coloured population for their own development, whether through insurance, life insurance or other insurance, savings banks, etc., in order to create an even better future for the Coloureds. The Coloured population today has that opportunity. They are earning money which will enable them to do so. Thirty to forty years ago the Afrikaansspeaking sector of the White population was poorer than the Coloured population is today, and handled less money. They rose from the ashes; they created for themselves the necessary economic bodies to work out their own future, and that is what the Coloured population is able to do today. The Coloured population in the social sphere, in the political sphere, and in the economic sphere has that opportunity, and I am convinced that they will in the future come to realize this to an increasing extent, and that they will utilize that opportunity.

Mr. Speaker, to return to the unfavourable conditions which the hon. members emphasized to such an extent: It is also a task, and it is also a problem for the leaders of the Coloured population in the first instance. But these are not things which can be established in one or two days, and that is why it is not fitting for us continually to be reproaching these people about these conditions which exist here. We must give them a chance. The responsible Coloureds are aware of this; they are painfully aware of these things, but you must give them a chance, with the aid of church societies, welfare associations and others, to educate and to train their people to improve their standard of living and their moral level and to clear up the unfavourable conditions. Sir, I say that these are not things which can take place in one or two days. But one fact is quite clear, and that is that the Government of this National Party, more than any other government, has given these people a place to live and a position in South Africa, not only in regard to land tenure, but also in regard to living space in the economic life, living space in regard to the development of their social life and living space in regard to all possible professions today. [Interjections.] I have just mentioned this now; the hon. member for Wynberg must read these things for a change and do her homework, then she will be reasonably conversant with these matters. Mr. Speaker, we are on this road. It is the National Party that will in future be given the credit by the Coloured population for having laid these foundations. As the educational level of the Coloured population increases and its social sense of responsibility develops and grows, they will be better off and they will have a richer and fuller share in the prosperity of South Africa.

Sir, I think that the House is indebted to the hon. member for Bezuidenhout for this motion that he has introduced today. One would have expected from the Nationalist ranks, in view of the attitudes outside of this House amongst the people of the country, an approach to this problem and to the motion before us other than one of expressions of smug satisfaction about what has been done by the Nationalist Party. We had nothing else from the hon. members for Malmesbury and Piketberg. Sir, it is an extraordinary thing that the one hon. gentleman on that side of the House who has not spoken in this debate, is the one whose words I would now like to quote to those hon. gentlemen who have spoken against the suggestion that it is necessary to appoint a commission. On the 22nd May, 1969, the hon. member for Moorreesburg said in this House—

Sir, I want to say to the hon. member for Moorreesburg that in those sentiments he not only has the support of this side of the House but he has the support of most right-thinking South Africans who are concerned about the Coloured people.

What is this road that this Government has set them on? The hon. member for Piketberg said “hulle is op ’n pad”. Where does that road lead to? According to the hon. the Prime Minister that road has a dead end. Sir, speaking of that, may I say too what a disappointment it will be to the country that the hon. Prime Minister himself who wants to relegate this problem to future generations for solution, is not sitting in the House today to give us the benefit of his contribution to a discussion of this sort. Sir, when we talk about the building that should have been done for the Coloured people, the one foundation about which this Government has done nothing, was the foundation which should have been built upon. That was the decision of the Cape Provincial Administration in 1946 to introduce compulsory education for Coloured children. It was done on the basis of a realistic approach that there would be demarcated centres and children within eight miles of that centre would be subjected to compulsory education. In fact, the motion was introduced in the Provincial Council by the hon. member for Sea Point. It was started. Then there was a change of control in the Provincial Administration and all thought of compulsory education for the Coloureds was pushed into the backwaters by the Government and by the Administration. Similarly, why is it that the Cape Provincial Administration, which in 1964 stood against the rest of this country to see that there was justice in regard to salaries for professional staff employed by the Administration, and who were prepared to stand up and to reduce the disparity between White and Coloured to a 10 to 9 ratio—and the hon. member for False Bay will know that that was the attitude which was adopted—have now surrendered, just as the hon. member for Moorreesburg has gone back to his little corner and is no longer prepared to fight for what he believed should be fought for.

The hon. member for Malmesbury made one interesting reference. He referred to the late Dr. Verwoerd’s guide lines, the essentials for the development of the Coloured people, as set out in his statement made in 1961, when he indicated the four elements which were essential to the separation of the Coloured people on the road of self-development. He said the first was the development of urban residential areas, the second was economic development aided by the Coloured Development Corporation, the third was local self-government and the fourth was an elected Coloured Representative Council. Those were the four elements that he felt were essential.

Now let us examine what progress has been made. In the time at my disposal I can only deal with some of these things, and I will confine myself to the first three of these elements which are regarded as basic to any progress in separate development for the Coloureds. But they must be viewed in the light of the divergence of the guide lines as provided by the Nationalist Party on the one hand and by the United Party on the other hand. But even when it comes to the Nationalist Party, we had as recently as 1959 the Cape Nationalist Congress, on the motion of Dr. Malan, then M.E.C., rejecting out of hand any suggestion that there should be the adoption of parliamentary voters’ rolls for municipal elections in the Cape Province. In fact, Dr. Malan at that congress said we must stop treating Coloureds like lepers, and he was cheered. What has happened to the Cape Nationalist who now sits back and does not stand for that policy which was adopted by his congress? I go further and I ask any member of the Nationalist Party in this House to tell me when a congress passed a resolution which was contrary to the 1959 resolution of the Cape Congress? No, while we have on the one hand these statements like the resolution of 1959, and while we have the statements of the hon. the Minister of Defence and of the hon. the Minister of Coloured Affairs about bringing us closer with the Coloured people, as was mentioned by the hon. member for Bezuidenhout, we have on the other hand the Minister of Bantu Administration saying that we must go wider and wider apart.

He never said that.

Sir, if the fact that separation must increase over the future years, does not mean going wider apart, then I do not understand the language used by the hon. the Minister. But let me look for one moment at local self-government and at this direction which was taken by the Government a year ago.

To revert to the hon. member for Brakpan, I have here a report from Die Burger of 1st December, 1970, with the heading “Kleurlinge moet Verder Weg van Blankes”. If that does not mean wider separation, then I do not know what it means. But to revert to the question I was dealing with, namely local self-government, this Government decided to pursue local self-government. It decided to pursue it in the face of the Rossouw Commission which was appointed in the Cape, by the Nationalist Provincial Administration. It was a course embarked upon without any thought as to the financial implications or the practicability of establishing local self-government based on our traditional laws by which such local authorities are established. What do we find after nine years? What progress, progress which seems to give such self-satisfaction to the members who have spoken in this debate, have we had? After nine years, there are 22 management committees of which only six have partly elected members. The rest of the so-called management committees are all nominated by the Government. For the rest, we have 53 consultative committees. This is the great progress towards local self-government for the Coloureds, nearly 2 million people.

That is much more than you could offer.

That is the progress which has been made, this limited progress towards local self-government, while the Coloured person, no matter what the value of his property is, will have no vote except in one of these six local areas. This is the case irrespective of where his property is and what municipality receives the benefit of its taxation. This local self-government has not developed, because this Government did not heed the Nationalist appointed Rossouw Commission.

I want to remind hon. members of some of the findings of the Rossouw Commission, before this stupid impractical course was set upon. In paragraph 31 the Commission reports: “The Committee is not prepared to recommend that Coloured be deprived of municipal franchise”. In paragraph 40: “The Committee is convinced that there is yet no area in the Cape Province which can immediately be proclaimed as an independent local authority in terms of existing provincial legislation”. In paragraph 66 the Commission found: “The Coloured areas referred to at present do not possess the means and capital resources to exist as separate municipalities”. Finally, in chapter 5 the Commission recommended the establishment of metropolitan authority to deal with services, before there was any step towards the establishment of Coloured local authorities. How correct that Commission has been proved to be! Sir, there can be no objection whatsoever to the establishment of local authorities based on viable geographic areas, whether they are White or non-White in the majority. Every hon. member will be aware that no local authority can survive unless it encompasses commercial and industrial rateable buildings of an appreciable value. It therefore is essential that industrial and commercial development is a pre-requisite for local self-government by the Coloured people. But there appear to be no signs of co-ordinated planning as far as this Government is concerned.

This brings me to the question of housing for the Coloured people. Housing in the Western Cape Province is dictated primarily by resettlement which has been made necessary as a result of the Group Areas Act and, to an extent, for slum clearance to be effected. This has resulted in tens of thousands of Coloured families having to be or having been resettled. What do we find occurring, for instance, on the Cape Flats? This area will by the end of this century have approximately a million Coloured people living in it. I must concede that, if the basic necessity and the sole responsibility of the Department of Community Development is to put a roof over the heads of Coloured families, then there has been commendable progress both by the local authorities and by the National Housing Commission in the support which it has given to local authorities. But is this the end of resettlement, merely to put a roof over the heads of the Coloured people? Coloured people today have a substantial number of qualified professional and skilled persons. They have numbers of persons who have qualified to enter into activities related to commerce and industry. There are a large number of members of, what one might term, the untrained labour force of the Coloured people. They also have amongst them their quota of aged and infirm people.

Culturally, we know as far as the Coloured people are concerned, they cover the whole spectrum which is common to any Western people. There is the highly educated and sophisticated group amongst the Coloured people. There is the traditional responsible middle-class family people and then there are the unattached and the unambitious as there are among any other Western race. Socially they equally cover the same normal range of the human race, from firmly established families, family units, to their own permissive society within their own ranks. They are no different from any other Western nation. I do not believe that these facts are taken into account at all in the resettlement schemes. I do not believe that we are contributing one iota to the development of economic or social advancement or of local self-government, by creating sprawling townships of single-storied dwellings as are cropping up in various parts of this country and particularly in the Western Cape. They are characterless, soulless housing estates.

We certainly need more planning. We need more planning for a viable Coloured metropolis of the future and particularly so in the Western Cape. On occasions I am shocked to find that even in the allocation of homes to Coloured people who have to be resettled, no investigation whatsoever is done into the status, standing or background of the families who have to be moved. Once the population register has been completed and once they are issued the K-card, the person becomes a digit as far as community development is concerned. I would like to show to some members of this House some Coloured persons who have been told to move next door to some of the squatters from the Valley of Plenty. They are people who have entirely different backgrounds and education. I have taken some of them to the department so that they can see the people they are dealing with. These are things that we on this side of the House believe need investigation.

Does the hon. member want class distinctions?

This shows the complete ignorance of the hon. member for Brakpan. If I could only have the attention of the hon. member for Brakpan, I will tell him that it shows his complete ignorance of the Coloured people. He does not realize that they are like any Western race except for their colour and he does not realize that they have their social standards and social gradings amongst themselves. It exists and we cannot deny it. They are a Western race and I wish the hon. member would realize that. There are social differences among the people. When they become the responsibility of the Department of Community Development for rehousing, as I say, they become digits, they become units who have to be rehoused and not human people.

I believe that rethinking and more determined planning is necessary. The mere provision of houses is not enough. There must be locality development, planned development, and that is what needs attention. I do hope that in spite of what has been said by the two members on the other side who have taken part in this debate, the hon. the Minister will realize, when he speaks in this debate later, the urgent necessity for, as has been suggested, a Tomlinson-type commission. The infrastructure for family life, for economic life, for economic progress and for social development of the individual must be provided. Provision must be made for the industrial and economic development of the group as a group, and for the financial viability of the townships. No local authority can run a town if its sole income is what might derive from sub-economic housing. That is what we are expecting the Coloured people to do.

This requires the application of principles which are required in Europe. The hon. the Deputy Minister is probably aware of what is being done in Sweden. There they are redeveloping areas and in the redevelopment they are providing for higher population density areas with communal facilities, swimming baths, sports-fields or parks which are maintained by the local authorities. That is provided in certain areas and in other areas the separate dwelling type of housing is provided. The high population density areas with multi-storied flats are necessary. One also needs reasonably sized plots for home-ownership. Is sufficient attention given to those Coloured people who desire to have their own independence respected by being able to buy or to build their own homes when they are being resettled? Is there sufficient—and I suggest it has not been attempted—community, business and civic facilities for industrial areas with even the elementary necessity of planting trees in order to create parks for future generations, if not for the present? If one of those hon. gentlemen would fly over the Cape Flats and look down, they would see what horror there must be to these people if they have any love for nature, because there are vast areas without a single tree and without any attempt being made to create an atmosphere in which we ourselves might like to live.

Unless we are prepared to face these requirements and unless we are prepared to recognize that separate development will syphon off Coloured initiative, know-how and spending from the White areas into the new Coloured metropolises, we must reject the whole concept of economic separate development and look again at what is being asked for by the Minister of Defence, namely a closer liaison and a closer future between the Whites and the Coloureds in South Africa. The cost, the effect in the ultimate are at present unknown. What we do know is that on the course on which we are set now, we are fast losing the co-operation of the Coloured people. If this trend is to continue, if we are to be driven further apart by compulsion of law, we will be creating both for ourselves and for future generations problems which might well be disastrous for the well-being and peaceful co-existence of both Whites and Coloureds in South Africa. In other words, in supporting the hon. member for Bezuidenhout’s motion, I want to say that the time has come, and I believe that the whole of South Africa is ready for it, to accept a new approach for this problem—not the problem, but the fact—of the co-existence of Whites and Coloureds. I believe, in the words of my hon. leader, that the time has come for a more compassionate society in which the dignity and the aspirations of the Coloured people are respected and also advanced in all spheres of our national life. Without the investigation and without the program which had been suggested by the hon. member for Bezuidenhout, I can see us stumbling on in the years ahead with relationships deteriorating, rather than improving. For these reasons I support this motion.

Mr. Speaker, all that this black picture which has been presented to us here this afternoon of the position of the Coloured people, reveals to me is the whole approach of the United Party to this question. They come and ask us for a commission of inquiry, a study commission, or whatever they want to call it, but there is one very good reason why we cannot debate the matter of such a commission with them. The reason is that they refuse to accept our premise. Our premise is that the Coloureds are a people-in-the-making. They are not prepared to go further than that. They merely say that the Coloureds must in future remain part of the Western group. They will not go any further than that. How then can we discuss this community? Then they tell us that this is a community which lives in the most distressing conditions. If time had allowed, I would have given a few examples of what the real position is in regard to that community. I ask the hon. member for Wynberg in particular to study the editions of Alpha. Then I would ask her just to have a look at what is contained in that publication. She will see there how the Coloured lives today. Why does she now come and tell us about the thousands who are living in misery? That is the whole purpose of the motion of the hon. member for Bezuidenhout. He wants to sell something to the world. He uses the words “serious handicaps” to try and prove to the world abroad that this Government is responsible for the extremely serious handicaps which are being experienced by these people. Then he uses a second word, and this word is a word which is purposely designed to mislead people. That word is “rehabilitate”. What must we rehabilitate? This Government has removed nothing from the Coloured community. Just listen for a while to what Mr. Bergens, a member of the Executive of the Coloured Council, has to say in connection with education. He says (translation)—

But in another connection this same man said—and that is why those words of his are so important—(I am quoting from the newspaper of his party)—

Sir, that is what the leaders of these people say. When mention was made just now of the re-settlement and housing of these people, the hon. member for North Randmade a snide interjection and asked if they were happy there on the flats. The hon. member for Green Point also made a derogatory reference to those areas where there was not even a tree to offer shade. Is that party prepared to bring those people back to where they were? Do not tell me it is no argument. A tree does not grow in a day; a garden is not laid out in a day. We know that in every situation of resettlement there must necessarily be some disruption.

Much has been said about the terrible suffering these people endure, those people who are now so poor and so neglected. Sir, in 1965 there were 56,000 Coloureds in South Africa in receipt of old-age pensions. In 1970 the figure was 61,000. But now there is another interesting figure. Unfortunately, the hon. member for Durban Point is not here. He can go and use it in Marico. Although the Coloureds number only half of the White population, in comparison they have more pensioners than the Whites. In regard to disability grants, more than 18,000 Whites receive them. In 1965 17,000 Coloureds received them. Now it is 22,000—4,000 more than the Whites, while they are only half the size of the White population. These figures can be misused, but we are not afraid to make them known. We do these things because we want to show the world that on the one hand we are helping the middle groups, the stabilized Coloureds, of whom the hon. member for Wynberg spoke. We are giving that stabilized group an opportunity to govern themselves eventually. To the other group, which is still backward, through these and countless other welfare measures, which we will no doubt discuss further under the Vote of the Minister, we offer the chance to develop to autonomy. What the Opposition will not do is to accept the Coloured community as a developing people.

Mr. Speaker, we have arranged that because of the time factor I will not speak any longer, but I just want to say this to the United Party, that if they think this afternoon that through this motion they can win the sympathy of the Coloured people, then they are doubly misleading the Coloureds. All that they are doing is to say that they, the United Party, now want to help “rehabilitate”. The National Party says: No, we will “build”, because we have demolished nothing; we can only build further from here.

Mr. Speaker, on first seeing this motion I thought it had rather strikingly altruistic motives. But because I had come to know the hon. member for Bezuidenhout, I knew it would degenerate into, and if I may not use the word “degenerate,” then boil down to a political discussion and a denigration and at the same time a prophecy-of-doom debate about the poor conditions of the Coloured people and eventually the question where we want to go with them.

And a misrepresentation of the position.

I am not using the word “misrepresentation”—I think it is so clear from the debate that I need not even say it. As far as making proposals is concerned, very little has been said about the implementation of a comprehensive programme for the rehabilitation and the development of this population group. We had to learn here this afternoon that the hon. member actually has in mind a kind of Tomlinson or Odendaal commission. When we consider their attitude towards the Tomlinson commission at the time, perhaps to a lesser degree, but certainly towards the work subsequently done by the Odendaal commission, I would rather like to ask him whether he would accept the findings of such a commission, should the Government now decide to appoint one.

If I would have a say as to who would serve on it, yes.

In other words, he now first wants to stipulate who is to serve on that commission. After that he will decide whether he will accept the findings. He mentioned, inter alia, the name of the man he would like to see on it, namely Prof. S. P. Cilliers. He himself and others spoke of the particular social discrimination against the Coloured people. Does he know that it is the same Prof. Cilliers whose words he now uses and whose information and paper he now invokes against the National Party policy who said the following—

This is now the relationship between White and non-White—

I think this is where the National Party comes in—

Now I want to ask him, bearing in mind his definition of “petty apartheid,” whether he is prepared to give up this tradition. Is he one of those who will first set us an example in respect of what is said by this man, whom he wants to serve on the commission, Which must then give us a blueprint? Will he be one of the first to set us an example, he and his friends on the opposite side? Just give us a reply to this question, please, then we could discuss matters better and understand each other better as well. I think we could then exchange fruitful ideas. I would very much have liked to conduct a constructive debate on what has been done as a result of the announcement of a socio-economic programme for these people as far back as ten years. This is a programme for people about whom we do not need a Tomlinson commission, because they are more compact and mainly concentrated in the Western Cape. It is therefore much easier to come to a conclusion about which direction we want to follow with them. There may be some merit in certain aspects of the hon. member’s motion, but I have the gravest doubt whether it is still necessary at this stage, after ten or eleven years of purposeful rehabilitation, which, incidentally, is not acknowledged by hon. members on the opposite side. Hon. members opposite spent most of their time emphasizing in a negative way the desperate position of the Coloured people. They have torn them apart as a people. But whose side have they really chosen? We know that there are two parties in the Coloured Persons’ Representative Council today. On the one hand there is the Federal Coloured People’s Party, which is co-operating with the National Party on the basis of separate development. They say we are building a people.

Those are the nominated members.

Some of them may be nominated, but with them there are 14 who were elected. They agree. Together with them 158,000 people voted in favour of separate development and only 137,000 voted against it. So much for the moral aspects about which hon. members on the opposite side made such a fuss. Over against them there are others such as Mr. David Currie, who was quoted here by hon. members on the opposite side. He says, for instance, that “we do not accept that we are a nation”. Of course not. If I wanted to live with the Whites and be incorporated with them, it would hardly pay me to talk about a nation if I felt that I belonged to that class which could be easily incorporated. After all, that presupposes responsibility towards the people of my own group who are less privileged and to whom I must extend a helping hand.

Furthermore I want to tell the hon. member for Bezuidenhout that it is easy to read the quotations of our leaders out of context here in connection with the road of the Coloured people in the future. The hon. member said that the hon. the Prime Minister was leading the Coloured people along a road without knowing where it would end. Here is what the hon. the Prime Minister said on 22nd September, 1966: “My reply is that I am leading the Coloureds along the road of self-realization.” Do hon. members opposite want to deny that the Coloured people had not yet realized themselves in that year, that they are now struggling to realize themselves and that hon. members on the opposite Slide are prompting them not to realize themselves? The Prime Minister continued and said—

I shall not repeat it, because we all know too what the late Dr. Verwoerd’s view of this matter was. The hon. member has forgotten what the present hon. Prime Minister said subsequently and I shall come to that presently. One thing which he did say and which he also emphasized here and in subsequent speeches is that we are now laying the foundation. He said: “It is the duty of this generation, if it can do nothing else, to lay a foundation.” Then he emphasized the goodwill of one human being towards another. He said: “We accept that these people are not the same as we are in the sense that they are a separate nation. We will in future have to do with a separate Coloured nation and a separate White nation.” Whose opinion does the hon. member for Bezuidenhout represent when he stands up here? Is he satisfied that he represents the majority of the White population when he says that the Coloured people are part of the White group, that they are an appendage?

I never said that.

On whose behalf does the hon. member speak then? Is this not the purport of what the hon. member wanted to say here today?

He has said so before.

You definitely did not listen.

He did not say so today, but he has, in any case, said so umpteen times. I know the hon. member says something new every day and I wonder whether he still adheres to his definition. It has been said that the hon. the Prime Minister also said once that he did not know where the road would end. What other great leader has also said this? Shortly after the First World War Gen. Smuts said: “As regards the non-European problem, my mind is full of Cimmerian darkness. Our children will have to find a solution”, but 17 years late he too began to see the light, and became the first man to preach apartheid in London. This is a road which hon. members opposite have now lost again.

We heard a great deal here today about moral approaches to the Coloured people. I now want to put a question to the United Party. After all, they attack us on our differences of opinion on the Coloured people and their future. The United Party has a policy in terms of which it wants to give the 700,000 Coloured voters in this country six representatives in this House. The Whites are then to decide later on whether they are to get more. Has the United Party never taken cognisance of the decision given by the Whites over the past 23 years, namely that we cannot get them here? If the voters were ever to become so confused or to wander so far off course as to put the United Party into power, and the six representatives were to sit in this House, what would the United Party then recommend? Are the Whites then to decide whether their number should be increased? The Whites decided long ago. The United Party, as a minority party, now wants to decide for them. They want to give 700,000 people six representatives in this House. Is this morality in politics, or is it a kind of Realpolitik with which they want to catch the voter and tell him that they will never be able to come into power? “We are placing a wall in front of them. They will never be able to come into power. We shall make sure of that.” I am not at all sure that the United Party is being quite honest with the White electorate in that respect. But hon. members on the opposite side now want to discuss politics and not the content of the motion. The hon. member for Bezuidenhout said precious little about the content of his motion. Since the hon. members sometimes speak of six representatives in this House, I want to ask him what the United Party’s policy is at the moment, after having spent 90 minutes on discussions held behind closed doors with the Coloured Labour Party a few weeks ago. What did the United Party decide there? Tell White South Africa this. I have a report from the Cape Times here which reads as follows—

What is wrong with that?

I am not saying it was wrong. I am only asking whether the United Party perhaps came to a new agreement there on what they want to do for the Coloured people. White South Africa would very much like to know this. The United Party has had so many Coloured policies that we would very much like to know this.

Why don’t you reply to his speech?

The hon. member for Bezuidenhout talked nothing but politics and I am also talking politics now. I want the United Party to answer just this one question. On which policy has the United Party now agreed with a party which is known for not wanting to co-operate with separate development? Why cannot White South Africa and the Coloured people know this? The United Party is not being honest with either of these groups. I think the hon. member wants to get us off his back, because he felt it was getting hotter and hotter, especially after having made the blunder with that definition of his which he cannot live up to. I think that is the reason. Now the hon. member has suddenly acquired kindred spirits outside this House. Now he has also conceived the idea of a Tomlinson-type commission. He thought he could put us off course with that and steer our thoughts in a different direction. We have been working under a Tomlinson commission assignment for eleven years now. Hon. members heard what was being done for the Coloured people in the educational field. None of the hon. members on that side of the House referred to what can and has been done for the Coloured people in the rural and agricultural spheres.

You tell us now.

If hon. members wanted to discuss that, the hon. member for Bezuidenhout could have mentioned it in his motion.

I referred to it.

Referred? The hon. member might have referred to it, but he said nothing about it. I am sorry, but hon. members on that side of the House completely forgot the matters which they pretended they wanted to discuss. Then they came and talked politics to keep us off their backs. Those hon. members will have to tell White South Africa and the Coloured people whether they agree about this petty apartheid. I want to tell them that the Coloured people do not agree with them at all in this connection. The comment in the Cape Herald is that there is only one kind of apartheid: petty apartheid and big apartheid are all the same. Those hon. members would do well to read it. Even the Coloured people do not believe the United Party. It will be of no avail to the hon. members on that side of the House to come forward with cunning tricks (jakkalsstreke) such as these. They will not get these people on their side. And if I may not talk of cunning tricks, then I say it will not do them any good to twist and turn like this. But now they have been taken by the wanderlust again.

I have to conclude by half-past six, but I want to say, firstly …

You have only two minutes.

I know, but that hon. member devoted only about three minutes to the real problems of the Coloured people. For the rest of the time the hon. member discussed their supposed problems. The hon. member disparaged the Coloured people as a people and for the rest only preached prophecies of doom.

In the educational field there has been fantastic growth as far as the Coloured community is concerned. Where were the Coloured people and where do they stand today? Let us look at the position in 1960. In 1960 only 241,000 children attended school. Last year the number was already close to 400,000. This is as far as primary schools are concerned. In 1960 fewer than 10,000 attended high school. This number increased until there were more than 50,000 last year. Last year there were 15,000 teachers already. The hon. member for Malmesbury mentioned this.

That side of the House talked about salaries and attacked us on that point. They said we were utterly insensible to the pleas of these people. This is not the case. All salaries have increased; those of the Whites and those of the Coloureds. The salaries of the Whites and the Coloureds fall under separate departments. Now it can easily happen that salaries in one department increase more rapidly than those in another, but if the hon. member for Wynberg alleges that we are unsympathetic in this regard, the hon. member does not know what is going on. The Coloured Persons Representative Council made representations in connection with salaries. These representations were received by the hon. the Minister and he said that he would put the matter to the Public Service Commission. It is a matter which is constantly receiving attention. We are moving towards a narrowing of the gap between the salaries of Whites and non-Whites. This is very clear.

This is the first time you have ever said that. You are taking over our policy.

The hon. member is quite wrong in that respect. I am just telling the hon. member what has been happening in the past two months, something of which she is completely ignorant, or she does not want to know about it.

*This is accordingly a matter which is at present receiving attention. Hon. members will just have to wait and see what happens. However, I can give the assurance that the sympathy is there. The person who has equal qualifications and does equal work, who carries equal responsibilities and is equally productive in every respect, to a large extent has an argument when he compares his salary. But we also have to take the financial aspect into consideration. Hon. members on that side of the House made a fuss here today about Coloured housing. This falls under the Department of Community Development. However, I do not merely want to say that hon. members should discuss the matter with that department, but it is in actual fact a function of the Department of Community Development. I think the hon. the Minister of Community Development is quite capable of answering hon. members in that regard if they put their case to him in due course.

As regards the salaries, these are a question of finance, just as they are a question of finance as regards teachers, just as it is a question of finance as regards the introduction of anything. One has to go to the tax-payers. Now I would like the hon. members of the Opposition to ask during the Budget debate this year that we spend much more and make much more money available for education for the Coloured people. They should then ask for it openly and frankly. Then we will have it on record here and then we will be able to tell the people in the rural areas, where those hon. members spread the idea that we do too much for the Coloured people: No, what we are doing and what the United Party wants to do is what we all regard as the right thing to do. The hon. members should not keep quiet about these matters when they have the opportunity to refer to them.

We are asking for it right away.

No, wait a minute. The opportunity will be there during the Budget debate. Hon. members talk about community development and all the problems in that connection and how little is being done. But they can put those questions to the relevant hon. Minister during the Budget debate.

In the short time at my disposal I just want to return to what I have been asked. Hon. members on this side of the House referred to the upliftment of the Coloured people in the industrial sphere over the past 10 years. For the information of hon. members opposite I just want to say that such a thing as the Coloured Development Corporation does exist. The hon. member for Maitland has asked questions about it. The Coloured people have already received R5½ million from the State by way of a corporation. This corporation has already granted loans amounting to more than R3 million to Coloured businessmen in the past 10 years. In 1960, however, there was nothing of this nature yet. Not only have loans amounting to this enormous sum been granted, but this corporation has also initiated their own enterprises where the Coloured people could not do it themselves. The value of these enterprises is about R2½ million. I just want to tell hon. members that undertakings such as Superama and Spes Bona Bank are concerns that were started by the corporation itself. As far as the bank is concerned, the savings by Coloured people themselves already amount to R1½ million.

How much are the withdrawals?

Approximately R727,000. The hon. member heard it this morning, did he not? Why has he forgotten it again so soon?

There is not much left.

It does not matter how much is left. The fact remains that it is a turnover. It shows that these people trust the bank. The hon. member knows how much those withdrawals can be. He should not pretend to be stupid now. The hon. member just wants to waste my time.

He does not pretend to be stupid; he is stupid.

Yes, I think so too. Of course, the Coloured Development Corporation is also helping the Coloured people with business training. It is helping them with the creation of facilities. There are factory sets. There are a number of fields at present in which the Coloured Development Corporation is helping the Coloured businessman to find his feet in the business world and to serve his own people. At the same time he can become a small capitalist, someone with free initiative. In addition to all this, other forms of training are also being provided to the Coloured people in order that apprentices, about whom hon. members opposite have so much to say, can become qualified. A few years ago only 900 Coloured artisans completed their training. Last year 2,834 Coloured artisans were trained.

Business interrupted in accordance with Standing Order No. 32 and motion and amendment lapsed.