Mr. Speaker, I move without notice—

Agreed to.

Mr. Speaker, I move the instruction which is printed in my name on the Order Paper, as follows—

1. (a) of conscience and religion;
2. (b) of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
3. (c) of association, peaceful assembly and movement;
4. (d) to pursue the gaining of a livelihood;
5. (e) from discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, sex or creed;
6. (f) from deprivation of life, liberty, security and property, except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice;
7. (g) which ensures equality before the law and equal protection and benefit of law;
8. (h) which will ensure equal opportunity to the individual in the economic and social structure of the country,
   such freedom to be subject only to such reasonable limits as are prescribed by law to ensure that the individual by the exercise thereof does not infringe on the rights of others to exercise it or endanger the security of the community and as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

Mr. Speaker, this is the first debate on the Constitution Bill to take place during this second part of the current session. It follows upon a lengthy Second Reading debate earlier this year, and also upon a session of a Select committee which sat during the adjournment of the House last month. The whole tone and level of the debate in the weeks ahead of us may well be set by the approach which is adopted by the various parties and speakers today. The test will be whether there is going to be a constructive discussion aimed at improving a measure which is now before this House and which the Committee of the whole House has to consider. Alternatively, of course, this debate could consist merely of a stating of positions in an endeavour to score political points. The proposals in respect of the Bill of Rights which are contained in the instruction I moved, while setting out a political viewpoint, will, in so far as we are concerned, be debated in a responsible manner, motivated by what we believe to be sound research and historically significant reasons. Our motivation will also be based on the grounds which we consider to be important in view of the history of the people of this country and for the future of the people of this country.

It is because of this that I initially moved my instruction before the matter was referred to the Select Committee. It is also for this reason that I presented the evidence in the form of a written document to the select committee, setting out my views. The said document has been made public and there is therefore no reason for repeating what is already stated in that document.

I believe there are three fundamental reasons why a Bill of Rights is important, why I moved this instruction, and why it contains the matters which are in the notice now before the House. Firstly this Parliament is the heir of a struggle which has been carrying on in the Western World for the liberty of the individual, for the protection of the individual against his ruler by whom he can indeed be abused and oppressed. It is also aimed at the protection of a group, in the case of it being a minority group, or in the case of a minority group seizing power and oppressing a majority group. That is a long history. It is a history which is not found only in Great Britain, the origins of which is to be found in the Magna Carta, and even earlier, but it is the history of most of the European countries, where most hon. members of this House indeed have their origins. In so far as this Parliament is concerned it is that historic content that I would ask hon. members of this House to consider when they decide how to vote upon this motion. They are not here by accident. They are not here because they merely happen to be here. They are here as members of Parliament which has had given to it a sacred heritage for which many people have been oppressed and for which many people have indeed died.

The second reason—for which I do not make any excuse—is that this party to which I belong is fundamentally committed to the concept of civil liberties. It has struggled in South Africa to protect civil liberties. It has stood up for the right of the individual and also for the right of groups of people. It has had its voice heard on every appropriate occasion on which civil liberties have indeed been in danger. That is the second reason why I move this motion.

There is also a third reason, however, why I move this motion. That is that I personally have a view which urges me to feel strongly about civil liberties. I happen to be a member of a group which has been the victim of oppression. I happened to be someone who found a haven in South Africa at a time when the group to which I belong was being oppressed elsewhere in the world. I also happen to be a lawyer who has been trained in the concepts of the rule of law and who accepts the concepts of Roman Dutch law. As an individual I happen to believe, by reason of my own personal history and my own personal experience, that the freedom of the individual and the right of the group not to be oppressed is a fundamental matter for which we have to speak at the right time. That is why I moved this motion; not merely because it happens to be a motion on the Order Paper but because I believe it is Parliament, it is the party, and it is I personally who have strong views in respect of this matter.

Whether one agrees with the principles of this Constitution Bill or not does not matter; it is utterly illogical to have a constitution which does not inspire the loyalty of those who are to be governed. It is indeed not desirable, from anybody’s point of view, to have a constitution which is not workable. The task of the Opposition, as I see it, therefore, during the Committee Stage and also during this debate is actually to be constructive, to seek to improve a measure against which they voted in principle, and this motion is indeed moved in that spirit; in a constructive spirit in order to try to achieve something positive in respect of this constitution.

I want to set out the reasons why I believe it is important for this constitution which we are considering to have included in it the concept of a Bill of Rights. Firstly I believe that the Bill of Rights and a constitution which contains the provisions of a Bill of Rights will act as an inspiration to the people of South Africa. What is needed is something which will inspire them to believe that they have here something which is of importance to them as individuals, and something which is of importance to them in the sense that they can feel proud of being able to participate in the creation of something which is important for themselves as individuals and for the country as a whole.

The second reason is that I believe that the introduction of a Bill of Rights into the constitution will be a unifying factor in a country in which the unity of the people is essential for the survival of the country and for the survival of the people as such. If there is no unity of purpose in South Africa, we will have extreme difficulty in trying to solve any problems in South Africa whatsoever.

The third reason I should like to advance is that I believe that the introduction of a Bill of Rights into the Constitution Bill will help to improve the image of the Republic in the Western World in which it needs and can still find friends, as without doubt the major adverse factor affecting our image has been the perceived infringement of rights which the Western World regards as part of its democratic tradition and which in the postwar era of reaction against Fascism, followed by an anti-colonialist period, have become major local and international issues. To give just one example, in a booklet which is produced by the German Government and which I have available, called Menschenrechten in der Welt, one finds set out various conventions, declarations and perspectives. It has a chapter in it on human rights in relation to bilateral relationships between countries. This sets out in some detail that there is in fact this dilemma between, on the one hand, not seeking to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations and yet, on the other hand—and perhaps Germany can speak with greater authority on this issue than virtually any other country this century—the question whether countries can stand aside and allow there to be infringements of human rights in other States of the world. That problem and that dilemma, which is set out in a quite objective manner here, is a problem and dilemma which exist to this day. One need only look at the situation where, when one group of people talk about the conditions in Afghanistan, they consider that they have a particular duty while, when another group of people talk about the conditions in Afghanistan, they consider that they have a different set of obligations. This dilemma of how the world looks at the question of human rights in other countries is therefore a real one in the relationship between States. Here it is set out that, in accordance with the views of the German Government, there is no doubt that that must have had an effect on bilateral relationships. It must be a factor. In a quite responsible manner, I think, they set out how in fact it does not help merely to make declarations, it does not help merely to make a noise about things, but perhaps it is more effective to talk to people on a bilateral basis in a constructive manner.

One of the things one has to understand is that, if one is a member of an oppressed minority and one is being oppressed in a particular country, if one does not find that there is assistance for one from elsewhere in the world or at least a voice raised to speak for one, one finds that one bears that grievance indefinitely. There are examples—one need but look at this document of the German Government—of people who feel they are oppressed while no one in the world takes any notice of them and who feel that they are lost and that there is nothing anybody wants to do for them. Therefore, we ourselves cannot ignore the fact, much as we may believe that our own internal affairs are purely out matter, that in the reality of this century and this age human rights are not purely an internal matter. They are not. People do not remain silent when there are issues involved in other countries in the world. If we want to improve our image, if we want to improve our picture, I believe that the introduction of this Bill of Rights will do much for South Africa internationally in this connection.

The fourth reason I should like to advance is that such a Bill will in reality act as a protector of rights, rights which, as I have indicated at the beginning, many have struggled to gain for themselves both in South Africa and elsewhere. When we talk about the history of the struggle for human rights and the fact that people do not want to be oppressed, South Africa has its own history. South Africa need not only look overseas. Hon. members on the other side of the House as well as hon. members on this side are in fact the descendants of people who a century or more ago in many cases have struggled to assert their human rights and other rights and have achieved their particular situation in society as a result of a struggle for the rights to which they felt they were entitled. We therefore have our own history in South Africa in regard to the struggle for rights. We do not have to look to Europe or America or anywhere else for precedents, for example in regard to the struggle for the freedom of the Press. We have our history here in South Africa. We do not have to look anywhere else in the world for a situation where people were prepared to move out and to go and look for new land and new places to live in because they did not want to be under a form of government of which they disapproved. All of us in this House know in one way or another what it is to be deprived of rights. What we believe, and what I submit, is that a Bill of Rights, entrenched in this Statute, will act as a real protector of rights and will be the fruits which come to be picked and plucked now for a struggle in which many people, including our ancestors, have participated.

Fifthly, I submit that a Bill of Rights will act to protect both the individual and the group against domination. We are a country with minorities, not only minorities as such but minorities both within the majority group and within the minority groups. A vital formula for survival in South Africa is that we need to work out a mechanism to avoid possible domination and therefore possible oppression. There are minority groups in South Africa, not only from the point of view of the White, Coloured and Indian communities in relation to the Black community, but it need also be stated that there are minority groups within the White community, within the Indian community, within the Coloured community and within the Black community. The whole problem of South Africa is therefore really a problem as to how one is going to protect all these minorities to ensure that none of them is oppressed and subjected to majority domination.

The question that I now pose is: Is there not an issue that we need to look at in our community in order to endeavour to ascertain what the fundamental values are of the community as a whole? There are obviously major differences on many matters between the peoples of South Africa. There are major differences between people in this House, there are major differences within the White community and there are major differences between the communities of different colour. Are there not also issues which can be used to bind all those people who differ from each other together in some form or another? Sir, is it not possible that the fundamentals of a Bill of Rights could in fact be the symbol not only of acceptable constitutional change, but that it could become the substance of a common allegiance to common ideals in South Africa?

One can only look at some of the examples that have taken place. One of the most recent examples is the enactment of a Bill of Rights in a Western democracy, Canada, where it is called the “Charter of Rights and Freedom”. That was enacted at the same time as a new constitution was introduced into Canada. The Prime Minister of Canada had championed not only the new constitution and the repatriation of the constitution to Canada from the United Kingdom, but he had also championed a Bill of Rights over many years. The Prime Minister is reported as saying—

The Canadian Bar Association expressed its view in this manner—

This is in a country—Canada—where there are fundamental differences of language, culture, religion, nationalism, politics and where the divisions cut deep into all forms of activity. It may be said that until 1960, when Mr. Diefenbaker, who was Prime Minister at the time, caused the law to be amended, Indians did not have the federal vote in Canada. In only one State—I think it was Nova Scotia—did the Indians have the vote at all after the war. Here one has a country with its own problems, problems which are not dissimilar in many respects to our own, which has decided that a Bill of Rights was an essential ingredient in the process of constitutional change. That is why I say that we need to look for philosophies which unite rather than continually accentuate the matters which divide this country. I believe we need symbols of unity in South Africa. There are some people who can scorn symbols—and cynics, no doubt, will scorn symbols—but in the reality of politics symbols help to shape attitudes of belief and symbols can be unifying factors. I believe that a Bill of Rights can be such a symbol and its enactment can be a historic inspirational event. History has shown that the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were such inspirational documents. However, the particular constitution which we are debating now has created no such firing of the imagination. The debate on it has now dragged on for many years and despite this many people in South Africa still do not understand this constitution. In fact, the public in the main, I believe, are unaware of the historical significance of the current debate. A 19th century German author, Von Savigny pointed out that it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make major constitutional change without a substantial degree of popular consensus in support of the new constitution, and that the will to create a constitution is seldom found in ordinary times but needs a certain public enthusiasm only found when there has been some major social and often cataclysmic event such a a revolution or war. Bearing in mind the remarks of Von Savigny, I want to suggest that there is no feeling of urgency amongst a large section of the White population. There is no great enthusiasm, let alone euphoria, no feeling for a need and no broad consensus in respect of this matter. Whether we agree on the constitution or not, whatever else can be said in the House is that all of us are seeking a constitution to avoid the kind of cataclysmic events that Von Savigny wrote about. We need the kind of “Volksgeist” that he spoke about as an inspiration in a different form. What we are doing, is to try to make a constitution before there is a revolution and it is much more difficult to make such a constitution before a revolution than it is to create it afterwards. I want to submit, Mr. Speaker, that a Bill of Rights may well take us along this path in avoiding this cataclysmic event where even the critics of the constitution could be persuaded by the Government that such an act would be worth while and accept portions of the Bill which they might otherwise regard as unpalatable. In other words, a Bill of Rights may well be the key to the whole question of constitutional reform in South Africa.

No doubt it will be argued by hon. members on the other side of the House in this debate that in some countries there are Bills of Rights and yet, human rights are not protected. The USSR is such a State, Uganda is another and there are many others which can be quoted where there are actually Bills of Rights and where human rights are not, in my view, protected. This argument ignores the fundamental difference in the environment and, particularly, the role of the courts between the authoritarian regimes on the one hand and democratic regimes on the other and the differing roles which the tradition of Westminster and democratic Europe play in such a situation. South Africa is a country—actually it need not be said; we know it—of many races, of conflicting aspirations, of vast differences involved in varying cultures. It is a country, as I have said, of minorities where group and personal rights could be in jeopardy in the future. South Africa is, whatever may be the criticism of its existing laws as I have pointed out, the heir of the tradition of a democratic Europe. A heterogeneous population cannot, however, to my mind rely on the British method of protecting civil liberties but in fact needs codification in the continental tradition.

If we analyse what happens in countries with minorities who have inadequate safeguards, we can come up with some simple examples which illustrate it and some which are very current. Let us look at the recent events in Sri Lanka where it will now no longer be legitimate, if the law goes through their Parliament, to advocate, albeit by peaceful means in the House of Parliament there, an independent homeland for a minority group. It will be a crime to do so. The policy of the South African Government or certain sections of the people can therefore not be advocated in the Parliament of Sri Lanka by lawfully elected representatives of that country even if they do so purely by peaceful means and merely by argument. Therefore, if the hon. the Minister of Internal Affairs were a member of Parliament in Sri Lanka, he would be committing a criminal offence if he got up and advocated the Government’s policy of independent homelands for Blacks. [Interjections.] I think this speaks for itself.

The other example which springs to mind immediately is that in certain countries of the world the advocacy of a multi-party system in a country where there is only a single party, is a crime. Many of the things which we do here in this Parliament, both on Government and Opposition side, which we do with impunity, which we recognize as our right, are regarded as crimes in other parts of the world.

The question of removing the right to advocate peaceful political change inevitably has in the long term the consequence that there is a recourse to violence. The entrenchment of the right to differ without violence, I believe is the best protection against violence. Here I should like to quote an American judge, Mr. Justice Douglas, in a dissenting judgment in the case of Dennis vs. the United States where he said—

He was interpreting the First Amendment to the United States’ Constitution which has stood there since 1791 and in terms of which Congress may make no laws abridging freedom of speech or the freedom of the Press. We believe this is one of the reasons why we need a Bill of Rights to entrench the freedom of thought, the freedom of belief, the freedom of opinion, the freedom of expression.

I concede immediately, however, that constitutions alone and Bills of Rights alone can neither solve the problems of South Africa nor all the relationships between individuals and groups. The context of the society in which a Bill of Rights operates and the existence of the independent judiciary in order to protect rights is a vital ingredient in this formula for peace. I believe that the role of the judiciary cannot be overestimated. Rights in respect of which there is no mechanism to enforce them are of very little value. Pious declarations by the United Nations fall in this category. Often those who propagate these rights most vociferously are the ones who breach those very rights the most frequently. But when you have an independent judiciary which can protect the individual, you have protection. The United States’ Supreme Court is perhaps the best example of this, because that court has shown itself willing to challenge existing vested interests and where necessary to stand up both against the legislature and the executive in respect of the protection of individual rights.

To show how rights develop, I again take recourse to the United States Supreme Court. The development of rights as a result of the interpretation of the statutory constitutional rights is perhaps best demonstrated by the original decision of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896 which approved of separate facilities which were equal, and a subsequent decision in 1954 of Brown vs. The Board of Education, where the interpretation of the same constitution in a different social environment resulted in the view that separate was not equal. It may be said that we were, prior to the advent of this Government, in the Plessy vs. Ferguson development stage, but that as a result of legislation the State has turned its back on that and that we now have laws in terms of which separate need not be equal and yet it can be lawful. Perhaps the most refreshing part of what has happened in recent times is a commitment by the Government that in so far as education is concerned it is now committed to the concept of an equal quality of education for all persons. With that commitment, we really go back to the United Stated judgement of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896. In 1983, this in itself means a degree of progress in South Africa.

The courts’ role as a protector and a developer has been clearly shown in the United States and even in South Africa where the court has more limited powers. One often asks the question whether a law to desegregate the schools would have got through Congress at the time of the Brown decision in 1954. There are many people who doubt it. In the same way in South Africa there is a role which the courts have already accepted, as the protector of rights, which has to my mind been demonstrated in recent times by the Rikhoto judgment. That case, by its interpretation, opened the road to new developments, which politicians might otherwise have found difficult to initiate. The result is that the courts have a very real role to play in the protection of the rights of individuals in order to get progress where sometimes politicians find it difficult to take the steps that are required. As I have indicated, I believe that this type of legislation, interpreted in the courts which I have indicated, can actually be a very easy and painless method of bringing about reform in South Africa.

However, I want to point out that freedom and the exercise of rights are not so fundamental that they can be enjoyed in an absolute sense. The exercise of freedom by one might well encroach upon the rights of another. There is no exercise of rights in a zero sum fashion. The question is not only what limit’s to freedom are reasonable, but who is going to make the decisions as to what limitations should be effected, not only because the rights of others are affected, but also because the security of the State and the interests of the community are also involved. Nor can one argue that it is only against the State, that is against the government or the ruler, that the individual needs protection. The individual also needs protection against other groups and against economic combines and other forces which can encroach upon his liberty. So too when we leave the field of fundamental freedom and come to the field of how these basic principles are to be interpreted, how they are to be applied, the question is where the line has to be drawn and who is going to be the arbiter as to the norms which should be applied. Then again we must look to the courts to provide that answer. It is quite clear that freedom can be expanded sometimes at the expense of the rights of other persons, and that we cannot allow to happen. The suspected criminal may be so protected that convictions become impossible and crime cannot be prevented and as a result society suffers. The suspect may be so prejudiced that innocents are penalized and free speech may turn into licence and pornography and character assassination become routine, or free speech may be so restricted that the public become utterly uninformed and indoctrinated. Again, the courts can, acting independently, fulfil a vital function in making these decisions. Those in political authority can often not be left to make the judgment as they may do so to entrench their own power and impose their own particular fads and prejudices without objectivity or research upon a community as a whole. Therefore the question is: Who is to protect the rights of the individual? And there is only one answer, and that is the rights of the individual must be protected by law and there must be recourse to the courts in this.

However, the argument goes a little further. If the individual’s rights are to be protected, do group rights also need to be protected? We often hear in this House the question whether group rights need protection. Here it is said that the individual’s rights are protected and his position as a member of the group will also be safeguarded. However, the protection of an individual right means that everyone is to be treated the same irrespective or regardless of membership of a particular group. The protection of a group right is based on the claim of the individual or groups of individuals because the membership of their group. Some individual rights are of no benefit unless they are enjoyed in common with others or are exercised on behalf of individuals who are members of minority groups. Freedom of religious association and freedom of assembly are intended to be exercised by individuals together with others. They cannot really be exercised alone. Freedom of religion is an individual right regardless of the particular religion, but to the extent that there is protection, sometimes of a special nature for religion, it is in fact a group right. In the same way language rights are normally not only the rights of individuals to express themselves, but also of groups to communicate and further their own language. Group rights such as language rights normally require Government sanction, for example in providing a bilingual Civil Service, and normally language rights require guarantees for minority groups who wish their language to survive in a majority culture. Persecution and oppression have not historically normally taken place against an individual because of his personal characteristics, but persecution and oppression have taken place because of membership of a group, be it national, religious, race, colour or culture. The question is therefore not merely one of semantics. I believe that both individual and group rights need protection.

What is interesting here is that any case which may sought to be made out against a Bill of Rights is actually very substantially weakened in that there is already an element of a Bill of Rights in the constitution. If one reads clause 89 with clause 99(2), which, in classic Bill of Rights language, entrenches the constitutional language rights in the same way as they are entrenched elsewhere in Bills of Rights, one sees that in so far as the Government is concerned it itself wants a form of Bill of Rights. It in fact has included provisions which relate to a Bill of Rights, in this constitution. In addition to that, if one looks at the preamble, while that does not have the force of law and while it does not give any rights, it sets out in the form of national goals provisions, some of which, though in very general terms, would be appropriate to a Bill of Rights. If, therefore, the Government contends that these are to be national goals, then I ask: Why not make them enforceable provisions which protect the individual and the group?

As I have indicated one of the most important reasons why we in South Africa need a Bill of Rights is the existence of minorities. One of the reasons why this Parliament, while it still has the sovereign power to do so, should enact a Bill of Rights is that in South Africa as a whole Whites constitute a minority and even within the White group there are minorities. Minorities cannot always look to political bodies to protect them. They need, as I have said, laws and they need to look at the courts. What is significant is that today may well be the last opportunity which this Parliament ever will have, acting on its own, to extend protection to others thereby safeguarding also those who have elected us to be here in this sovereign Parliament. This may be the last opportunity whereby this Parliament may in fact enact a Bill of Rights. It may be the very last one.

Constitutions, Sir, should not reflect temporary public fads or preferences. Constitutions should be permanent. South Africa is in a state of transition, and in the years ahead there will be many changes to the methods of election, to the form of the Chambers and to the procedure for making laws. We are only beginning a period of change. Nobody must believe that we will have reached the end of change when the proposed constitution is passed. So while the rules for Cabinets, for councils, for committees and for elections may all be transient, what in fact should be permanent are the fundamental rights of people. It is this that should be permanent and not the technical rules which are to be enacted in terms of the proposed constitution. There is a far greater case to be made out for a Bill of Rights than there is for a technical constitution at this moment of our history. There is the danger that by entrenching a passing political view in the form of a constitution we will be ignoring the need to entrench fundamental rights. It is fundamental rights that will survive the politician’s present technical preferences in regard to the constitution.

The issue that I want to contrast is what is more important for South Africa: The security of the individual, safeguarding the group against domination and oppression or the technicality on how to legislate and how to govern? There may be little enthusiasm, as I have said, for a new set of technical rules but I believe there could be a new spirit for the protection of the rights and the safeguarding of the individual and the protection of the group against domination. This would give, certainly to the Whites, a greater degree of confidence to enter into a difficult period, because difficult the future is going to be however optimistic anybody in this House is as to the final outcome. We know that a society under pressure and a society in difficulty may well throw up Governments which may make inroads upon the freedom of he individual, history has shown that in periods of stress it is the civil liberties of the individual which are abrogated, and it is against that that, when we are entering a period which may be difficult, I believe we need to have laws which ate entrenched and which make sure that fundamental rights are not encroached upon.

I believe that a Bill of Rights in the constitution will not only give South Africans a degree of confidence in approaching political change in that their rights will be safeguarded, but it will also unify our people through the establishment of permanent common values. It will, furthermore, create a permanent base from which to develop constitutional change, and to South Africans as a whole, of all colours and races, it will be statement of intent to demonstrate that the days of discrimination on the grounds of race and colour are certainly going to come to an end. It will show to the Western World that in the new South Africa that is to come about, civil liberties will be respected and opportunities will be given while discrimination will be eliminated. It will demonstrate this Parliament’s intention not merely to create a new constitution but to do so in safeguarding individuals and groups and offering to those with expectations concrete evidence that negotiations and peaceful purposes will produce results and that violence will be rejected. I ask: Why should our freedom not be safeguarded and our security not be ensured by law? Why should the courts not be there to protect us under a Bill of Rights?

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Yeoville began his speech by making an appeal for a constructive discussion of this important matter. As far as it is within my ability to do so, I should therefore like to comply with this request by the hon. member.

In his speech the hon. member gave South Africa an interesting and important testimonial. We have taken cognisance of it. He said that he had found a safe refuge in South Africa when he came here as a member of a group which had been oppressed elsewhere. We were delighted to hear this testimonial here in this House.

The debate here today concerns the basic rights of the individual. It concerns human rights and the protection of those rights. It concerns the guaranteeing of the basic rights of the individual and the extension of those rights. In fact, it concerns the protection of those rights against the arbitrary actions of a despotic government. That is how I interpret the aim of the motion moved by the hon. member for Yeoville here today. In the motion, as printed on the Order Paper, the hon. member for Yeoville outlined certain rights and freedoms of the individual and he expressed certain sentiments about them. Today I want to state here that it is both my standpoint and that of the NP that we associate ourselves with many of the sentiments which the hon. member has included in his motion. Although we are in favour of basic human rights and the extension of those rights, however, and although we want to give everyone in South Africa that security, we are opposed to a Bill of Rights being written into the Constitution Bill now before this House. Having said this, I want to point out at once that I am not contradicting myself. What the argument today amounts to, however is what is the best manner, the best mechanism, the best way to grant basic rights to everyone in South Africa, to extend and protect them. I feel this is what the debate is, in fact, about.

Trying to write a Bill of Rights into the Republic of South Africa Constitution Bill at this stage is not the correct mechanism to employ. The motion of the hon. member for Yeoville, as printed on the Order Paper, differs in one very important respect from the content of the speech he made here today. In his speech today the hon. member tried to create the impression that he was also in favour of the protection of group rights. In the motion we have to vote on, reference is made only to the individual. The motion therefore only concerns the rights and the freedoms of the individual, no reference whatsoever being made to the group. It is therefore a question of individual rights and not group rights. We have to bear in mind that there is indeed the possibility of a conflict between an individual and a group as far as the exercising of rights are concerned, particularly when the particular individual is not a member of that specific group.

In paragraph (a) to (h) of his motion the hon. member for Yeoville set out the basic rights which he made subject to two considerations. He said that the exercising of those rights had to be subject to the rights of other individuals, should not infringe on the rights of other individuals. That is what he said in the first place. In the second place he said those rights should not be exercised in such a way as to encroach upon the security of the community or the security of the State.

The first statement I want to make today is that quite a number of the rights that the hon. member set out in his motion—and I shall refer to them in detail in due course—are more than adequately upheld by the fundamental legal process in South Africa, subject to the considerations the hon. member himself mentioned, I want to refer in particular to the following: The right referred to in paragraph 1(a) of the motion, namely freedom of conscience and religion, is more than adequately upheld in South Africa today as a right everyone can enjoy. The second right, that mentioned in point (b), covering freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the Press and other media of communication, is in fact, subject to the restrictions the hon. member himself mentioned, more than adequately protected today as a basic right in South Africa. Let me now refer to paragraph 1(d), namely the freedom to pursue the gaining of a livelihood. This is also more than adequately protected and recognized in South Africa. [Interjections.] Freedom from deprivation of life, liberty, security and property is also, subject to the restrictions the hon. member for Yeoville himself mentioned, more than adequately protected in South Africa, as is the freedom which ensures equality before the law and the equal protection and benefit of law, mentioned in paragraph (g), subject of course to the restrictions the hon. member mentioned.

I have not mentioned three of the rights the hon. member has tabulated here. These are the rights contained in paragraph 1(c), (e) and (h), rights which one could argue are concerned with the individual in the group context. If we consider the reference in paragraph 1(c) to the freedom of association, peaceful assembly and movement, let me say that the Government is in favour of this. Because one is dealing with a heterogeneous society and social groups in South Africa, however, the inclusion of this right in a Bill of Rights is certainly not possible at this stage. [Interjections.] Paragraph 1(e) refers to freedom from discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, sex or creed. In this connection I want to say that it is surely not possible for those of us on this side of the House to reach agreement with hon. members on that side of the House about the concept of discrimination. The hon. member quite correctly referred to certain American court judgments which amounted to the fact that “separate” is also unequal. One cannot have “separate and equal”. As far as hon. members on that side of the house are concerned, we have the problem today that they refuse to accept the concept of differentiation, of making a distinction between groups, and because we have this situation, which is basic to the recognition of the existence of different groups, we have a major problem in including a Bill of Rights, focusing on the individual, in the constitution.

May I ask you a question?

A little later.

In paragraph 1(h) reference is made to that freedom which will ensure equal opportunities to the individual in the economic and social structure of the country. I want to put it as the standpoint of the Government, as the standpoint of the NP, that we are totally in favour of this right. This is also a situation, however, in which a person, in the group context, may come into conflict with members of other groups and communities.

Do you agree that “separate” should be “equal”?

Mr. Chairman, if the hon. member wants to ask me a question, he should do so through you.

Mr. Chairman, may I ask the hon. member whether he agrees with the concept, in the original American case, that where there are separate facilities they should be equal? In other words, should “separate” be “equal”?

Mr. Chairman, I agree wholeheartedly with that. Of course it is the absolute point of departure of the Government not to discriminate. [Interjections.] We are not effecting separation in order to bring about discrimination. The point is, however, that in South Africa we are dealing with an historic position as far as discriminating practices are concerned. It has been the Government’s policy for many years now to abolish this discrimination, and the Government has had quite a bit of success in this connection. [Interjections.]

The problem I have with the hon. member’s motion is that it disregards the individual’s group context. I also want to make the point that in disregarding the individual’s group context and the existence of the various groups, we are going to come up against problems in South Africa. [Interjections.] The hon. member has not built any protection of group rights into his motion, and for that reason we cannot accept it. In the Constitution Bill, group rights are recognized and protected. It is quite clear that the Constitution Bill does, in fact, recognize and protect the group rights of Asians, Coloureds and Whites. The hon. member, however, wants a Bill of Rights written into the constitution without any reference to group rights. I do not think this is possible.

In the hon. member’s motion, and in his argument, he sees the only factor common to all individuals living in South Africa as being the fact that they are all citizens of South Africa. We have to remember, however, that the present situation in South Africa is that although there are Black citizens, Coloured citizens, Asian citizens and White citizens, the citizens of colour in South Africa do not have a franchise in the central Government context, whereas the Whites do. The situation is also that every citizen lives in a specific group context. For that reason it is impossible to accept the hon. member’s Bill of Rights. We have to see South African society as it is. South Africa has the most heterogeneous society in the entire world. Whites are subdivided into groups and the same applies to the Coloureds, the Asians and the Blacks. Because we have the most heterogeneous population in the world, the conflict potential in South Africa is also very great. For that reason we have to adopt a political philosophy in South Africa which is aimed at lessening the conflict potential and making the country a safe one for everyone. The political philosophy of the Government is to decentralize power. The political philosophy of the Government is to create homogeneous power bases because the more homogeneous a community is, the less potential there is for conflict. In contrast, the more heterogeneous a community is, the greater potential there is for conflict.

A strategy for entrenching human rights cannot, therefore, ignore the reality of the existence of group rights. It is not a fact of reality to ignore groups which differ radically from each other. The problem with those hon. members, the reason for their inability to make a contribution to the constitutional discussion in South Africa, lies in the fact that they do not recognize the fact of the disunity in South African society. The hon. member for Yeoville’s argument is based on the single fact that the greatest danger to the preservation of basic human rights is presented by a Government. The hon. member adds that a mechanism has to be built in, namely a Bill of Rights which, together with the courts, must protect the individual against the Government of the day.

The greatest danger to the development, recognition and preservation of human rights in South Africa is, however, not the Government of the day, but actually group conflict. One need only consider the situation in Africa. Human rights were trampled underfoot in Africa mainly as a result of group conflict. For that reason we should adopt a strategy which is aimed at eliminating group conflict. Hence the adoption, by this Government, the NP, of the strategy of separate development in order, as far as possible, to divide up power amongst the various population groups and various peoples. The Constitution Bill is a manifestation of what can be done in this regard. One thus makes the greatest possible practical contribution towards eliminating a power struggle. I want to state the following as the standpoint of this side of the House: The rejection of the identification and the protection of group rights is the beginning of the end as far as human rights for the individual in South Africa are concerned. In other words, in order to protect and extend individual rights, human rights, it is necessary to give effective recognition to them on the basis of the devolution of power, the decentralization of power and the self-determination of groups. If one were to totally disregard the right to self-determination of the various Black peoples and groups in South Africa for the sake of a unitary society, one would find oneself involved in a power struggle which would lead to the trampling underfoot of human rights in South Africa. The point is that the protection of fundamental human rights does not depend on a Bill of Rights.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask the hon. member a question?

No, Mr. Speaker. I have already replied to a question by one of those hon. members. My point is that the protection of fundamental human rights does not depend on a Bill of Rights. It depends on far more than that. After all, we cannot have a Bill of Rights while South Africa is constitutionally in a period of transition and when some of its citizens have franchise in the central Government context, whilst others do not. The preservation of human rights depends on the morality, the cultural level and the level of development of the governing party. Just to prove how out of touch with the times the hon. member is, I should like to quote from a speech made in this House on 4 February 1977 by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition—and I am doing so with permission. On that occasion, after having put forward certain standpoints, the hon. the Leader of the Opposition cut across the grain in an attempt to arrive at some basis for a standpoint in favour of a Bill of Rights. He said the following (Hansard, 4 February 1977, col. 859)—

In other words, until such time as the constitutional dispensation in South Africa has been dealt with in its entirety, one cannot have a Bill of Rights. That was the standpoint of the hon. the Leader of the Opposition. He went on to say (col. 859)—

I agree with this. He also said—

That is what the hon. the Leader of the Opposition said. What we have here is an attempt, on the part of the official Opposition, which will be interpreted by the Black people of South Africa as unilateral entrenchment of a Bill of Rights.

They are all in favour of it. All the other groups are in favour of it.

In terms of the philosophy of the official Opposition, the PFP, over and above the objections we have to it, the unilateral declaration of a Bill of Rights is not the proper thing to do. The hon. the Leader of the Opposition went on to say (col. 860)—

That is what the hon. the Leader of the Opposition said. I now want to make the following point: The fact that the preservation of human rights does not depend on a Bill of Rights is proved very conclusively by the situation in a country like Canada. What contribution did the acceptance of such a Bill of Rights make? None! Regardless of whether one has a Bill of Rights in the USA. Germany or England, human rights will still be upheld in the same way.

The other question is of what assistance a Bill of Rights was in maintaining human rights in Africa. The hon. member referred to examples. Here on our borders we had the case of Lesotho. When Leabua Jonathan’s Government lost, he suspended the constitution, Bill of Rights and all!

We on this side of the House, the Government, are totally opposed to the arbitrary or despotic actions of any Government. We are opposed to the diminution of human rights and the rights of the individual. We on this side of the House are in favour of the extending and entrenchment of human rights in such a way as to be permanent and lasting in this heterogeneous of South African society. We are in favour of the individual, every citizen and every person in South Africa, developing to full maturity. We believe that this can only be done if the Government’s policy of separate development were to be implemented, if the Government’s ideals were to be realized. This is the only way in which basic human rights could permanently be established in this part of the world.

Mr. Speaker, this debate is taking place today after the Second Reading debate was disposed of and after the Select Committee, in my opinion, tried to do its duty to the best of the ability of all its members. This debate is really a kind of prelude to the actual debate which we shall have later during this Committee Stage. At that stage my colleague, the hon. member for Brakpan, and I myself will once again have a few special words to say to the Chairman of the Select Committee and about the experiences we had there.

The debate which is now taking place, is really a prelude to a very, very important debate which is being held this year and in this century in South Africa. I do not believe that the last word will have been spoken on the constitutional situation and position in South Africa after this debate and after the discussion during the Committee Stage has been disposed of. I believe that the situation in South Africa is too complex for that. I believe that, in the nature of things, a great deal will still be said about this matter.

I also think that we ought to tell one another that none of us, as individuals or as representatives of our party, wish to consider this debate with anything but the greatest earnestness. Everyone will make his particular contribution to the debate according to the insight he has and his beliefs and his own principles.

I want to tell the hon. member for Yeoville that I have a great deal of understanding for the instruction which he moved, not only for the contents of the instruction as such, but also for him as an individual who, with his own experience of life, arrived at the ideas which he put to this House today. I have a great deal of understanding for the hon. member for Yeoville and also for him as a member of the specific people from which he springs, because the people from which the hon. member for Yeoville springs has a very long history in the existence of mankind, a unique history which in many respects has had a special significance for mankind as such. The people to which the hon. member belongs has also had to struggle for survival over many centuries. In the course of its history that people was confronted with many grave problems. One calls to mind that his people have a place called Masada, a place where spiritual expression was not only given to an attitude, but where a physical event took place in the life a people in its struggle for survival and the preservation of what it regarded as its rights, its cultural rights and its rights in respect of its own country. It had to defend those rights, as happened at the time of that event, against foreign rulers from a foreign country.

I want to tell the hon. member that, having said this, I also have understanding for the fact that he, in particular, will be very sensitive to any form of discrimination and any situation in which another form of dominion or government discriminates against the hon. member and his compatriots in the specific sense to which I referred a moment ago. Consequently the hon. member has a great many reasons to feel sensitive about discrimination. I have appreciation for the hon. member and his people because they were able, after many centuries, to succeed in establishing the State of Israel. There the Jewish people has its own fatherland in which it can live and govern itself according to its own laws. I have understanding for the fact that Israel today is a threatened State and that there are many peoples which do not wish it to have a future.

Having said this, I also want to say that I expect the hon. member also to accept that I am speaking here as a member of a specific people which in its history, albeit a shorter one, also waged a great struggle.

How does the AWB feel about this matter?

I want to tell that hon. Minister that he will have to go and speak to the AWB himself. I think the hon. the Minister will be doing the Committee on which he served and this House a great service if he does not begin the debate with remarks of this kind.

He is being objectionable while we are dealing with serious matters.

If the hon. Minister wants us to conduct this debate in a political vein, we are quite prepared to do so. [Interjections.]

I want to tell the hon. member for Yeoville that I also belong to a specific people, a people which is not as old as the Jewish people, but which had to struggle just as fiercely to survive. The hostile outside world is to a great extent attempting to deprive us of our future existence. That is why the debate on these matters is of such great importance to us.

With reference to the statement which the hon. member for Yeoville made today about the rights of individuals, I accept that the hon. member was also saying these things as a member of a specific political party, the PFP. I am not at all clear in my mind as to what the actual policy of the PFP is in respect of the diversity of people and peoples in South Africa and what the ultimate ideal of the PFP in South Africa is. In South Africa there is a great lack of clarity and a great uncertainty as to the personal view of the PFP on South Africa. Merely to move this motion without spelling out to us in detail what the PFP wishes to establish in South Africa causes the ultimate ideal of the PFP for South Africa to remain very vague to us. What is South Africa really going to look like under a PFP Government?

I have understanding for the hon. member for Yeoville and the statements which he made here today, and I can also understand why a Bill of Human Rights emerged at the end of the ’forties. I can understand this very well, because the history of mankind has in point of fact been written with a pen which was dipped in discord and bondage. The cruel side of the history of mankind is in fact that its climatic moments have always been based on war and strife. The Second World War in particular, from which a Bill of Human Rights emerged, the second world war to occur in this century, not only left Europe devastated, but other parts of the world were also ravaged by this war. One need only think of the events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what the effects were on South Africa and other countries, and the subsequent development of various ideologies. Then I can understand why the leaders who survived the Second World War came together and said: How can we put an end to a history which is written in war and strife? What they learned from the Second World War was that because the world was shrinking it was far easier for human groups to gather together and that with the technological development which was taking place, wars could be fought on an ever larger scale, thus threatening to destroy mankind. Therefore I can understand why a Bill of Human Rights should have emanated from idealistic leaders who asked whether a basis could not be found on which mankind could in future reach a general agreement so that there would be no repetition of the Second World War. I can understand the ideals of the people who drew up this document.

Today we find that almost 40 years have elapsed since that time when the leaders of the time drew up a Bill of Human Rights, and one wonders whether the ideals stated at the time for mankind, for the diversity of countries which we have in the world, have brought about any improvement and whether that Bill of Human Rights has put a stop to strife among people. I think hon. members will agree with me when I say that tension in the world did not diminish after the drawing up of a Bill of Human Rights, but that in many respects the tension mounted and that fear of war and of conflicts between peoples and countries is perhaps greater today than it was 30 or 40 years ago. One wonders why this is the situation. If the most able leaders of that time drew up a Bill of Human Rights, why is the world still in the position in which it finds itself today? I think one could give many replies to that question.

I now wish to dwell briefly on the motion of the hon. member for Yeoville and say that the CP and I have a great deal of understanding for many of the things which the hon. member said to us here. To a great extent we can agree with many of those things. I do not think there are one of us who do not wish to have freedom of conscience and of religion. We believe very firmly in the freedom of the Press and the freedom of other media of communication. We also believe very firmly in the freedom of the individual, his security and all matters of this kind. I do not think that we are, in the constitutional proposals which we have for South Africa, encroaching on the right of any individual to live, to speak or to state his case before a court. All these things are highly important principles, and we can endorse them strongly. What perturbs me about the motion of the hon. member is that every paragraph of his motion uses the word “freedom”, while the hon. member, in the speech which he made, did not define for us any-where what he thought the word meant. What content is given to the concept of “freedom” in the principles of the PFP? What does freedom mean to them? To me it means …

Did your forefathers not also fight for freedom?

Yes, my forefathers fought for freedom, and I attach a special significance to the word “freedom”. But we are now discussing the hon. member’s motion, and I maintain that nowhere in his speech, as far as I was able to follow him, did he furnish a definition of what he, in his personal capacity, understood the concept of “freedom” to mean. In the second place the hon. member did not say what the freedom of the individual would mean if the PFP were to be governing in South Africa. [Interjections.] If the hon. member has perhaps replied to this question already, then perhaps he did so in a way which we could not understand. In South Africa there are individuals like me—together they form a large group—who want to know what freedom we will have according to the views of that hon. member when he refers to freedom. The hon. member did not spell this out clearly.

Another aspect is that, in our view, the moment one speaks of freedom one should juxtapose responsibility as well. In this respect we had a major deficiency in the speech of the hon. member because he did not indicate what the responsibilities of the individual would be within the concept of freedom which he advocated.

Another problem I had with the hon. member was that he spoke throughout of the individual only and at the end qualified the rights of the individual with those of a community without giving us a definition of what a community was, in to his view. I wish to state that one of the problems of mankind today is that the excessive emphasis on the individual has omitted to emphasize the responsibilities of the individual within the social units in which he moves. I maintain that the liberal school of thought of the hon. member encroaches upon the individual in his social, organic units. Here I am thinking for example of the family and ultimately, too, the peoples as they have evolved in South Africa. The concept of individual freedom advocated by the PFP can never succeed in South Africa, nor in other parts of the world either, because it does not recognize the ethnic context, the group context, or the tribal context in which an individual has to operate. One of the major blunders on the part of people who subscribe to the political philosophy of the hon. member is to fail to recognize the group context of the individual.

A Bill of Human Rights is to a great extent influenced from America by the American view of the matter. In respect of these, matters the American influence in South Africa and also in other parts of the world is far too great. If one wishes to make a truly realistic analysis today of the history of America we see that the fathers of the drafters of a Bill of Human Rights in the American sense was what destroyed groups in America. If we consider the history of the indigenous population groups in America, we see that those groups were completely wiped out. That is why it was said of the colonists who came from other parts of the world: “They first fell on their knees and then on the aborigines.” To my mind this is where one of the biggest problems lies. A further aspect, if we wish to take America as an example, is the fact that in America one has to get away from any group ties and allow one’s country of origin to become extinct before one can become part of the American nation. It is those ideas which the PFP, and people who think as they do, wish to introduce in South Africa.

That is not correct.

No. Sir. I know it is correct.

Consequently my standpoint is that although the CP can agree with many of these aspects, with many of the underlying ideas which the hon. member stated here, we nevertheless cannot vote for his motion. Let me also point out to him that this motion of his is quite probably merely an attempt to steer the constitutional dispensation of the Government even further to the left than it already is, and that is futile. Furthermore, I am of the opinion that one cannot write a forward to a specific law or specific book and think that one is able, with that foreword, to rectify the contents of the book or the law. A foreword or a prelude to a specific law means nothing if one does not adhere to the fundamental principles on which that law is based. The CP is not interested in this kind of foreword or Bill of Human Rights, on the one hand because it does not have much significance and on the other because it is based on and situated in a milieu which in principle is completely different from the basic principles in which the CP believes. When one wishes to grant the individual optimum and maximum rights one can only do so if one also grants freedom and independence to the group of which that individual is a member within its own fatherland. In other words, if one wishes to give the individual maximum freedom in South Africa, one should not ignore the diversity of the human groups in South Africa. On the contrary, one should respect this diversity and make provision for it in legislation. Only then can one ensure optimum freedom for the individual. That is why it has been the standpoint of the CP from the beginning that we cannot support the proposed constitution of the Government because it is on the one hand an encroachment upon the freedom and sovereignty of the White man and on the other does not give the other two population groups which the Government wishes to involve in its constitution, full freedom and independence. We see in this not only a fettered individual, but also a fettered people. For this reason we shall not vote for the motion of the hon. member for Yeoville because, as I have said, we think it is based on a leftist liberal political view in South Africa and because, if it were to be accepted, would make no difference to the contents of the proposed constitution.

Mr. Speaker, I find it a little difficult to speak after the hon. member for Rissik in this debate because we have grown accustomed to the storm and stress of the political debates on the Constitution Bill which preceded this debate. The hon. member for Rissik therefore heeded the appeal of the hon. member for Yeoville by arguing this matter in a calm and peaceful way. Here and there I found it difficult to follow the full extent of the hon. member for Yeoville’s reasoning. However, there are two matters which he elucidated and with which I should like to associate myself; aspects which I should also like to emphasize. These are concerned with the absence on the one hand, and the overemphasis on the other, of the idea of freedom. One must after all, couple freedom with responsibility. When a person demands rights, they must go hand in hand with the necessary duties. A person only has rights to the extent to which one does not encroach upon the rights of others, and a person’s rights are also circumscribed by the duties one has to the State. Admittedly it is true that the champions of a Bill of Human Rights always project it so as to imply that the relationship between the individual and the State is inevitably one of tension and that the individual is in need of protection. It is most certainly true that the individual can lay claim to protection. In the course of my speech, as well as in the arguments put forward by other hon. members on this side of the House, I think we shall indicate that there are specific mechanisms by means of which the individual is being protected.

A second matter which the hon. member for Rissik raised, and with which I wish to agree, is his reference to the equilibrium which should prevail between the individual and the group. What made it difficult for me to follow what the hon. member for Rissik meant was the fact that I listened—and I concede this—with a certain degree of preconceived prejudice to his exposition of matters.

Why?

I shall tell the hon. member why. I was of the opinion that the hon. member for Rissik would have to give more attention, as he was concluding his speech, to indicating that this Parliament was a sovereign supreme legislative authority, and that it would therefore not allow that legislative function to slip out of its hands and end up in the hands of the courts or be entrenched in a Bill of Human Rights. I shall also furnish another reason why I expected this to be said. During the past year or two the advocates of the policies of the CP, specifically Prof. Carel Boshoff and others, have been arguing in favour of the insertion in the constitution of a Bill of Rights. What is more, they have been making the flagrant statement that owing to the fact that this Parliament …

Which one of us advocated that? [Interjections.]

I shall in fact indicate that. [Interjections.]

Do it then, and stop beating about the bush. [Interjections.]

Order!

Here in my hand I have a document drawn up by members of Sabra. Serving on the executive committee of Sabra, which drafted this document, are people who assisted the hon. members of the CP in their formulation of their specific views on the Constitution Bill. [Interjections.] In this way, I thought, hon. members of the CP might also pursue that line of argument here in this House. On the one hand the PFP wishes to formulate a Bill of Rights in order, on the basis of certain views, to make it possible to allow Black people to share in the constitutional dispensation in South Africa, as is in fact stated in this motion. On the other hand members of Sabra, who also shared in the formulation of the policies of the CP, are advocating a Bill of Rights in order to exclude those same Black people.

Are you a member of Sabra?

I do not think that the Bill of Rights …

Leon, it seems to me you are afraid to say whether you are a member of Sabra.

I am not a member of Sabra. In fact I terminated my membership of Sabra a long time ago, if that makes the hon. member happy.

When did you retire as a member of Sabra? [Interjections.]

The point I am trying to make is that on the basis of a Bill of Rights one can project and introduce as many things as one may possibly wish to. I would be pleased if any member of the PFP who is participating in this debate would indicate to us whether the person who is living in London is less free than the person who is living in New York under a Bill of Rights. It is general knowledge that the person in London is not living under a Bill of Rights or under specific testing powers such as those which the courts in America have. The fact of the matter is that there are particular matters by means of which he can realize himself and by means of which he is protected.

There has been a Bill of Rights in England for 200 years now.

The hon. member for Yeoville says there is a Bill of Rights. He is not listening to my point. My point is that the Bill of Rights as it has been written into the American Constitution is something one does not find there. To the best of my knowledge the British Constitution has not even been written down. [Interjections.] An individual’s rights are controlled by a diversity of factors. The Bill of Rights is the product of constitutionalism; in truth it is not the mechanism by means of which one promotes it. I think it can be authoritatively indicated that in a country such as Canada, with a recent Bill of Rights, it was not considered appropriate, or advisable even, to put that Bill of Rights into operation when the State was established. In fact, I find myself in good PFP company when I argue that such a Bill of Rights is the result of a consensus that is being ratified. I want to quote that it is a “fallacy that a Bill of Rights confirms a consensus”. This is what the Leader of the Official Opposition said on 4 April 1977.

There are numerous examples, in South Africa as well, on the basis of which one can indicate that the individual does not find that he is helpless in the face of violations on the part of the State. One of the most recent and relevant court cases was reported in 1976, volume II. I am referring to the case of Simonbanga and Others vs. Masinga and Others. Here it is important to note that in terms of the National Education Policy Act Whites are statutorily entitled to freedom of religion, but that this is not written into the 1953 Act regulating educational matters in the Black communities. Here we have a classical example of a group of school-children who were expelled from a school because they did not, for religious reasons, wish to participate in the singing of specific religious songs at that school. They had recourse to a court, and in this regard no less a person than Mr. Justice Van Wyk De Vries had the following to say—

Now the question is in what sense a provision such as that contained in paragraph (a) “Freedom of conscience and religion”, would have offered this group of school-children a better remedy than the relief which they found through the courts. It is absolutely wrong to imply that we in South Africa do not recognize or protect fundamental rights at all.

Of course it is also true that there is a specific formulation of individual rights and freedoms with which we do not agree. I refer hon. members to the debate on internal security held some time ago. In that debate this side of the House adopted the line of reasoning of the present Chief Justice and we decided that owing to specific circumstances which were applicable in South Africa it was not possible to give the individual an absolute right. In that way we qualified and restrained absolute individual freedom owing to the circumstances in which we were living. [Interjections.] I hear someone on the PFP side mumbling something. Would he not like to do it louder so that I can see who it is and debate the matter with him?

It was I.

Very well. The hon. member for Green Point and his party piously claim that they obey the verdicts of our judges, but then they only do so when it suits them. In this case we allowed ourselves to be guided by no less a person than the Chief Justice of South Africa, and the hon. member for Green Point is muttering about it. [Interjections.] It was Calvin, after all, who said that a country should arrange its affairs according to the nature of its own circumstances. He qualified that by saying only that it should be done fairly. We find traces of this in article 29 of the Bill of Human Rights of the United Nations and in the German and the French Bill of Human Rights. Many restrictions curtail the freedom of the individual.

I have just debated the issue pertaining to security matters. However, there is another very interesting case to be made out. In the basic Charter of Human Rights as tabulated in the German Constitution one of the most sensitive matters we can possibly discuss in South Africa, the freedom of the movement of people, is also dealt with. In this country we adhere to the standpoint that we wish to control the urbanization process in as humane and sympathetic a way as possible. This is a debate which has been conducted in the council chambers of South Africa for a long time. In the Charter of Human Rights of Germany one finds that if specific circumstances should apply which were to place an unbalanced pressure on other members of the population, that right of movement is curtailed. Our standpoint is that we do not have the infrastructures such as housing and natural resources to allow uncontrolled urbanization in South Africa to continue unabated.

Finally I wish to make two observations. Extremely exciting things are happening in South Africa. Anyone who would simply allow himself to relax and take note of what is happening in the country will have to conclude that exciting things are happening here. In umpteen debates already the rights of the South African workers have been spelt out. They have been outlined in legislation and also formulated as Government policy.

Recently there was a commission which investigated certain matters pertaining to sport and in its report the commission made the interesting observation that a sportsman had the right to practise his sport regardless of intervention by the authorities. Consequently there is an ongoing debate in this connection in progress in South Africa.

The hon. member for Yeoville spoke about human rights and legal figures in America and Europe. Admittedly it is exciting to listen to the suppleness which American courts introduce into their specific dispensation, and to how interesting the constitutional court is and the part which it plays in the Karlsruhe in Germany. However, one matter is of cardinal importance. We are devising a constitution for the Republic of South Africa and we are seeking a mechanism which will best serve the inhabitants of South Africa. I believe it would be a bad day if we as members of Parliament ceased to guard jealously those values which are to be found in so many Charters of Human Rights. Consequently we must keep on looking for methods of maintaining and upholding those values. We must couple rights with privileges, as I have indicated. We must constantly be searching for methods, as we are doing in this case with the Constitutional Bill, to accommodate the aspirations of people. This must be associated with the feeling of security of minority groups in the country. Consequently when one discusses the American Constitution, which is already several centuries old, then one knows it is correct, and it is fit and proper for the American circumstances. However, we must make a projection in respect of what our goal is and what we wish to achieve. I foresee that in years to come this Parliament and the people living under this constitution will be senior partners in a confederation of States which we shall collectively cause to be established on a voluntary basis. In that way there is so much room for manoeuvre that we will not be stalemated at all. I am also referring to the aspirations of the Black people living outside the national States. Then we can argue with one another once again on the system of values which should be contained in Bills of Rights. Then we can follow in the footsteps of any constitutional convention which functions properly—and I am referring here to the European Convention of Human Rights—and in the footsteps of the Lusaka Manifesto by formulating a Pretoria Manifesto on which we can reach an agreement with our participating partners in that confederation. Then we can talk to one another about the basis on which we are going to treat one another’s workers. This can take place on a basis of trust, consensus and reciprocal agreement. Then we can truly formulate a South African Bill of Rights.

Mr. Speaker, in the course of my speech I shall deal with certain aspects raised by the hon. member for Krugersdorp. I do not want to do so now. That might wrest my speech out of context.

†Mr. Speaker, at the outset I want to pay the hon. member for Yeoville a very sincere compliment. I give him full credit for the fact that he is a master platitudinarian, a master at assembling ringing phrases which everyone agrees with and which everybody accepts as being correct. He assembles and puts them over in such a way that if one listened only to the words one would say that he was absolutely right.

You had that speech typed before you even heard what I said.

It simply goes to show how well I know the hon. member for Yeoville I can anticipate his every word and his every action. After all, I am complimenting the hon. member. [Interjections.] We had already had his speech on the Select Committee in the form of a memorandum.

Ah, but, you see, it is a completely different speech. That is where you make your mistake.

The point is, Sir, that very few people look beyond the sound of the hon. member’s words to the implications behind them. However, the hon. member for Yeoville is not so naïve. He understands only too well the implications of everything he says and he is prepared to court the consequences, to court the implications and the consequences of what he is advocating.

In his qualification in respect of the rights and freedoms of the individual which he has set out in his motion, the hon. member says that such freedom should be subject only to reasonable limits prescribed by law.

Read it properly.

I shall be quite happy to because I think it will make the position even clearer. Inter alia, the hon. member has this to say—

I want to repeat the words “does not infringe on the rights of others”—

But you have just agreed with that.

No, I say taking account of that, taking due account of that, I can find nothing in the objectives which are set out in (a) to (h) with which most people, certainly not I, would disagree or oppose. These are the idealistic freedoms which everyone believes are right. Unfortunately they do not exist anywhere in the world, not even in America which has a Bill of Rights. This is the ideal, this is the dream that people dream about, the goal at which they aim. Nothing I have said or which I shall say means that we should not strive to achieve that goal, strive to achieve those objectives. However, the hon. member knows full well that put in the absolute terms of his instruction, incorporated into the constitution as a Bill of Rights enforceable by law, it would plunge South Africa into a series of interpretive litigation which would flood South Africa’s courts.

Because they have no rights?

No, because of the history of South Africa—I shall deal with that in a moment—and because I accept that there are many laws on the Statute Book which I believe should not be there and which I should like to see removed. There are many others which I should like to see amended and changed.

Give us a few.

The mixed marriages legislation and the Immorality Act, I think should go. I should like to see the Group Areas Act replaced by a system of local option. I could go on naming many others which I should like to see go.

However, if one should now, with the stroke of a pen, introduce a Bill of Rights, one would have an orgy of litigation because every person charged with an offence under any of those Acts would take recourse not to his own defence, but to the Bill of Rights and one would find that the courts would be drawn into the central core of political controversy.

So what?

One would in effect be making the courts … [Interjections.] I have not missed that interjection. One would be making the court the supreme authority over the elected Parliament of South Africa because the courts would then have to test the laws made by Parliament against a broadly worded Bill of Rights to interpret whether every law in fact infringes one of the points in the Bill of Rights. It could to a large extent paralyse the day to day administration of South Africa. The hon. member for Pine-town, I think it was, interjected “so what” when I said the courts would be flooded. He does not care if the courts are flooded; the more cases there are, the longer the roll is, the more he can charge those who consult him …

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order: Is an hon. member entitled to say that the reason for another hon. member’s interjection is that he may benefit himself financially while it was not even that hon. member’s interjection?

Mr. Speaker, I withdraw that remark. I was not meaning it as a personal reflection on the hon. member. I was simply making the point that the courts could be flooded in a situation which pleased the hon. member—I should not have mentioned that hon. member; perhaps I was wrong—and caused people to be busier at the courts. While each of those laws was being tested, that issue would be sub judice. If the courts were flooded—the hon. member asked “So what?”—it could take years to get decisions on many of those cases. If you want an example, you can look at America where cases on the Bill of Rights or human rights can literally go on for years and years.

Name one.

I want to make the point that the day to day administration, not only of justice but of the country, could be placed in an extremely difficult situation. [Interjections.] I intend to make the speech I want to make and not the speech the hon. member for Hillbrow would like me to make. However, I can answer him. On the conscientious objection clause his party quoted decisions in the American court which had been before the courts for years and where amendments have been effected after years of litigation. One of his members quoted those cases during this session of Parliament. It is common knowledge that litigation is a lengthy business, even in South Africa. When it is about a matter of such delicate interpretation as testing a law against a Bill of Rights, it will become an even lengthier business, particularly if this takes place on a large scale.

However, I agree and I repeat that many of our laws should be changed and amended. Some have been. Some of our labour legislation, which was discriminatory, has been amended. We in this party are all for that as I believe the official Opposition is for it. However, there will be chaos if everything is suddenly thrown into the courts and you have to wait for final decisions. I am not talking about the merits of certain laws. Let us take influx control. Forget the merits. If the court suddenly found that influx control was against a Bill of Rights and that squatting could not be stopped because it would infringe upon a man’s rights, imagine the chaos you could have in all the cities of South Africa before that could be corrected.

Perhaps you could build houses in anticipation.

Perhaps you should build houses. That is an answer. Perhaps you can create jobs. That is another answer. However, you do not say, with a stroke of a pen, that there are no more restrictions and that we are going to let “Gods water oor Gods akker loop”. We cannot say that we are sorry but the courts cannot handle all the cases, and so we must take whoever comes. The point is that this is a fundamental difference between the approach of the PFP and the approach of the NRP. They do not care what happens as a result of their policy. They do not care if there is chaos, they do not care if there is a shambles, as long as it conforms to the beautifully phrased ideals, the high moral principles and platitudes of which they are masters, together with the hon. member for Yeoville.

This does not mean that we have to take no notice and that we have to close our eyes to the things that are wrong and have to tolerate discrimination or unjust laws. What it means is that we must seek another method of achieving the objectives set out in this instruction, other than a Bill of Rights entrenched in the constitution. This party believes that what is needed is a “declaration of intent”. If it had been competent I would have moved as an amendment to the instruction that such a declaration of intent be incorporated as part of the preamble to the constitution. However, because it is not competent we have no option. We have either to support or oppose the instruction. What we would like to see is all these points incorporated into the preamble to the new constitution as a commitment by this Parliament to certain national objectives which we believe should be striven for. Parliament is elected to make laws. This commitment would then be a guide to Parliament which hopefully would be without some of the tongue-waggers who every time they open their mouths let the wind blow their tongues around and make a noise. This would be a guide to the new Parliament as to what the future objectives should be for South Africa. This party will move an amendment to the preamble when the time comes to deal with that matter. It will be a preamble which we believe will be far better than that moved by the hon. member for Yeoville. It would be better balanced but it would contain the same principles and sentiments as a guide to Parliament.

Would you entrench that preamble?

No, it would be the goal at which Parliament should aim. Then the implementation of that objective by the elected members of Parliament, the members of the three groups—and, in whatever future dispensation comes, for Blacks as well—by specific legislation, the repeal of laws, etc., would be done by consensus and agreement. However, hon. members of the PFP want to reverse the role. Parliament is elected to legislate, to make laws. The role of the courts is to interpret and apply those laws. It is not their role to determine the political merit of a Bill. We shall deal with that matter when we discuss the next notice of instruction.

Let us now look at what the hon. member for Yeoville asks in terms of his notice of instruction. Some of these points are already covered in the preamble, specifically in so many words, others are covered in general terms and those that are not covered would be covered by the amended preamble as will be moved by this party in the Committee Stage, a preamble which I believe would be better. Nevertheless, and I say it again, there is nothing in these eight points which I believe should be unacceptable to this Parliament as a yardstick for Parliament to use to judge and review old laws and by which to judge new draft laws. Let us look at what the hon. member for Yeoville asks for. He firstly asks for freedom of conscience and religion. In effect that is already contained in the preamble. It speaks of freedom of faith and worship.

The hon. member then asks for freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression. That is also contained in the preamble except in so far as it is limited by law. We can argue for weeks over whether that limitation is necessary for the security of the community. The hon. member then asks for freedom of association. Is “freedom of association” the right to force yourself on others who do not wish to associate with you? Is it not a two-way right? Does it imply compulsory acceptance or does it include the right of the members of a society to choose for themselves their associates, those with whom they want to associate? This is where the hon. member for Yeoville speaks in terms of individuals and in terms of groups. In his motion, however, he provides only for individual rights.

Nobody will associate with you any way.

I believe that a community has as much the right to decide that it will have nothing to do with—that it will not even sit in the same room—with the hon. member for Greytown, for this, that or the other reason. [Interjections.] I would not blame them. It should be their right to decide they do not want to associate with the hon. member. I do not want to associate with him and I believe it is my right to say I do not want to associate with that rowdy hon. member. [Interjections.] That right of mine is as important, I believe, as the right of the individual to decide whether he wants to associate with me or not. In the end it will come back to what this party has repeatedly told this House. This House will have to recognize the need for an option. It will have to recognize the right of groups and of communities to determine whom they will accept, with whom they will associate, with whom they want to live, etc. This House will have to acknowledge that right as a group right and not as an individual right in terms of which an individual can impose himself on a community, demanding to be accepted by that community.

It went even further with the PFP. I challenge those who were involved to deny what I am saying now. It went further. When we once had discussions with them on this issue they stated in writing that in terms of their Bill of Rights no club could refuse to allow a person membership on the grounds of race or colour. They stated that no landlord would be able to refuse anyone a flat in his block on the grounds of race or colour. In other words, it was a one-way option—a one-way option of the individual, and the rejection of any alternative rights or alternative option on the part of either the individual or the group who did not want to accept that option. This brings me to the basic difference in our approach to these acceptable objectives. The difference is that the PFP sees itself as protecting the individual in one integrated society, while the NRP recognizes that South Africa comprises a plural society. Whether that is right or wrong, good or bad, is not an issue to be discussed in this debate. It is, however, a fact of life in South Africa.

I do not know what the future holds but our policy is that if two groups want to merge that is a matter to be decided by those two groups themselves. The fact is, however, that there are groups that are identified by law; groups identified in the population register and living in group areas. I say again that I am not discussing the merits of it now. I am merely stating the facts of the situation. There are groups that are self-identified; groups who look upon themselves as groups, and …

And nobody else does, like the NRP. [Interjections.]

Mr. Speaker, I am sure that if the hon. member for Greytown wanted to be seen as a Zulu, the Zulu would not accept him. [Interjections.] They would not accept him because the Zulu have pride. [Interjections.]

We accept the fact that there are identified and self-identified groups in South Africa, and that any progress must start with the recognition of that fact. One cannot simply start somewhere in the air. One has to start with what exists today. One cannot, by passing a Bill of Rights, wipe out overnight legislation passed over more than a century, in favour of a Bill of Rights worded in the most general terms possible; worded in the widest possible terms and open to the widest possible interpretation. Simply by passing one measure and putting it into the constitution, one puts at risk a century of legislation and one creates an individual right which takes no account of the rights of any others in South Africa.

If one looks at the amendments to the Preamble on today’s Order Paper, one finds that party wants to make three changes. The first is to omit “Christian values”. Secondly, they want to add “the freedom of thought, opinion and expression”. With that I agree and, in fact, a subcommittee, of which I was chairman, of the Select Committee originally agreed on that. Thirdly, they want to omit “To respect, to further and to protect the self-determination of population groups and peoples”. So, even in one of the three amendments that party wants to introduce to the Preamble, they want to remove the right of self-determination of groups and peoples. The difference is therefore a fundamental one.

This Bill of Rights is not designed to provide glamorous long-term security and happiness for everyone, but is aimed at destroying group rights. Therefore, since it is not competent to move the sort of amendment I would have liked to move, we have no option but to oppose the motion.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Durban Point gave notice of an amendment which his party is going to move to the Preamble of the new Constitution Bill and we shall debate this matter with him in due course. In addition, the hon. member conducted an argument with the PFP. He will therefore pardon me if I leave it at that.

The concept of a Bill of Rights as part of a constitution is something which people all over the world have tried, since democracy began, to introduce as a watchdog to reconcile the authority of the State on the one hand and the rights and privileges of the citizenry on the other. I find it surprising that the hon. member for Yeoville only concentrated on the one leg this afternoon, namely the rights and privileges of the citizenry, and conveniently disregarded the State. According to history, however, certain specific circumstances served as motivation for the establishment of a Bill of Rights elsewhere in the world. The example of Britain was bandied about here. The Bill of Rights there was introduced after the revolution in 1688 in which James II was dethroned, Charles II was crowned in his place, and the sovereignty of Parliament was for the first time established over that of the monarchy. It is interesting to note that after the introduction of that Bill of Rights, the executive authority continued to be vested in the king and his cabinet. It was only later, in the eighteenth century, by way of convention, that this power of the executive authority finally devolved upon Parliament. In the USA there was also a specific motivation. When they introduced their Bill of Rights in 1791, they did so merely to ensure the constitution of all the states which together formed the USA, precisely in order to ensure that the central authority would not dominate the separate states. Here we had two definite motivations for a Bill of Rights. There is the one in Britain which in fact forms part of an unwritten constitution and basically rests on conventions, and there is the one in the USA which certainly has a constitution which is defined to the finest detail and which is still today subject to tremendous problems when it comes to its application. Subsequent Bills of Rights, particularly in Africa, had serious deficiencies, to say nothing of that of Soviet Russia. The protection and recognition of the rights and privileges of the individual or community as opposed to the sovereignty of state authority, and vice versa, the protection and recognition of the sovereignty and authority of the State as opposed to the rights and privileges of the individual or community is consequently no new idea. On the contrary, I maintain that South Africa in particular has been dictated to by certain conventions, certain civilized norms and certain Christian values which have been developed and cherished in this country. I am of the opinion that these constitute the best Bill of Rights which any country can conceive of having. All the sentiments expressed in this instruction are stated clearly and unequivocally in the Preamble to the Constitution Bill. Owing to the diversity, individual rights must also take group rights into consideration, otherwise the PFP is living in a fool’s paradise.

The hon. member for Yeoville emphasized individual freedom—“civil liberties”—this afternoon. Inter alia he said that he was moving this motion because he was part of a community which was subject to oppression elsewhere in the world. He even dragged in the Afrikaner and said that the Afrikaner people in South Africa had over the years been subject to oppression. I want to say at once that since 1910 the Afrikaners have managed perfectly well without the help of a Bill of Rights. What is more, I believe that the Afrikaans-speaking people in particular in South Africa are so attached to these conventions, civilized norms and Christian values that they will ensure that justice is done to others without any need to be ashamed of them.

I also maintain that the PFP, but in particular the hon. member for Yeoville, has produced this instruction, as well as the other instructions appearing on the Order Paper, as a last-ditch effort, cloaked in sanctimoniousness, to save themselves from the embarrassment caused by their boycott of the President’s Council. The hon. member for Yeoville produced absolutely nothing new. In the old days of United Party politics, that party saw no need for a Bill of Rights. On the contrary, the old United Party abandoned that idea as long ago as 1958.

You supported the Act of Dedication.

That hon. member knows what it is all about. The idea of a Bill of Rights was, since the days of the inception of the old blue-blooded Progressive Party of Dr. Jannie Steytler, a purely Prog idea.

The hon. member for Yeoville and the hon. member for Bryanston—I do not know whether he played any part in the drawing up of this instruction—began as long ago as 1973 to peddle the idea of a kind of Bill of Rights, but because it did not suit the politics of the party to which they belonged, they simply called it an Act of Dedication. Those hon. members peddled this idea wherever they could, starting in the Transvaal Provincial Council. They even went as far as Chief Buthelezi and signed the Mahlabatini Declaration. What became of it, goodness only knows. [Interjections.] I maintain that the hon. member for Yeoville merely came forward with this instruction as a lightning conductor for the embarrassing situation in which he personally finds himself as a result of their boycott of the President’s Council. He has now come forward with this instruction to drag a Bill of Rights into the Constitution Bill. It consists of a lot of words and clichés with which no right-minded person can differ. These are wonderful words with which one cannot find any fault. But this kind of motion should have formed part of the activities of the President’s Council. The question to be asked now is this: Where were those hon. members when they had an opportunity to make a positive and constructive contribution, a contribution which that hon. member presented here this afternoon in a sanctimonious way as a positive and constructive approach? Why did he not at the time display the courage of a Japie Bason and a Dan Neser? No, Sir. Instead of doing that, the hon. member, together with the Boraine-Progs, boycotted the President’s Council, and this motion will not improve his political image. I would say that party has found itself in a political dilemma. They can scurry about as much as they like. The voting public, including their own voters, have lost confidence in them entirely.

Mr. Speaker, I want to suggest that many of the sentiments expressed in this motion are very clearly contained in the preamble. I want to suggest that, with the conventions we have built up in South Africa, we do not need a policeman in the form of a Bill of Rights to preserve the rights and privileges of individuals and groups in this country. The ballot box is the watchdog over the Government and will ensure that the preamble to the new Constitution is upheld. That is all we need in South Africa.

However, there are also a few unnecessary and obscure sentiments in the motion, while a few other very important sentiments have been omitted—I do not know whether this was done deliberately. In the first place, I wish to confine myself to those sentiments which have been omitted. I wish to appeal to the hon. member for Yeoville’s own Act of Dedication. This has a very attractive border around it; almost as though it were in mourning. There are two fine sentiments contained in this Act of Dedication which I note have been omitted from the motion of the hon. member for Yeoville. I wish to quote them, because I think they are sentiments which ought to have been included in the motion. The first sentiment is—

Surely this is a wonderful sentiment, yet it has been omitted from the motion of the hon. member for Yeoville. The second sentiment, which I also find very interesting, is this—

Now I ask hon. members of the PFP: Were these two wonderful sentiments deliberately omitted or have they already forgotten completely about this approach which they once had? What has become of the maintenance of law and order and of the building up of military strength to combat terrorism in South Africa?

I also spoke about a few unnecessary sentiments. For example, there is the freedom of opinion and expression and the freedom of the Press and other media of communication. What he hon. member for Yeoville is telling us, in other words, is that we should have freedom of speech and freedom of the Press in south Africa. Now I want to ask the hon. member: Where in Africa is there more freedom of speech and more freedom of the Press than we in fact have here in South Africa? Where are the international reporters for Southern Africa based? The other day they were expelled by Mr. Mugabe and they returned to a haven of safety in South Africa, for there is still freedom of speech and freedom of the Press’ in this country. The statements of the Tutus, the Boesaks and the Terre’ Blanches are frequently permitted, even though they are not always conducive to better race relations in this country.

I also referred to obscure sentiments. I want to ask the PFP what freedom of movement means. Does it mean that influx control should summarily be lifted or that every person who is subject to influx control measures in South Africa should be able to go to a court for a decision as to whether he may or may not be here? There are so many restrictions even on Whites in South Africa which are imposed by ordinary legislation. A White person cannot go wherever he likes. Why are the hon. members of the PFP again making this plea for freedom for the Black people? These are all vague, wishy-washy sentiments. I maintain, and I believe that each one of the most important sentiments is very clearly contained in the preamble, and for that reason we reject this instruction in its entirety.

Mr. Speaker, I should like to reply to some of the points raiseaker, I should like to reply to some of the points raised by previous speakers. Most of the hon. members who have spoken raised points relating basically to three matters. The first of these was the role of groups. This point was raised by all the speakers, and I think it was the hon. member for Rissik who asked the PFP to spell out where it stands in regard to the rights of groups.

The second point which was an interesting one was that virtually everybody seemed to acknowledge that we do have these rights already, despite this there is actually tremendous reluctance in elucidating them in law. The third point that I want to cover, is the question of the limitation on individual freedom.

To come back to the first point, it has been suggested that the PFP tends to ignore the existence of groups in South Africa. However, that is not correct. When on looks at our blue book which sets out the constitution of the PFP …

But the motion ignores it.

Very well, I shall come back to that point.

Tell us about it.

Let us just take one point at a time. As I say, it is sometimes suggested that the PFP ignores the role of groups in South Africa. That is incorrect. When one looks at the constitutional proposals of the PFP one finds that they acknowledge the fact that—

We go even further. The idea behind the basis of proportional representation is that it is a political system of representation that tends to give more representation to groups than any other system of voting.

Do those groups have any rights?

Therefore, the whole system of proportional representation is there to give group representation in the decision-making bodies of South Africa. However, the PFP goes even further. I should like to spell this fact out to the hon. member for Rissik. We acknowledge the existence of groups. In fact, we go even further.

Including ethnic groups?

Yes. [Interjections.] We go even further. In terms of our constitution we would allow the establishment of cultural groups or cultural councils and moreover, those groups would be given representation in the Federal Senate of South Africa.

You threw that out two years ago. [Interjections]

To say that the PFP does not acknowledge the existence of groups in South Africa is in fact incorrect.

Will you give them rights?

I am asked whether we will give them rights. I should like to quote once again in this regard from the constitution of the PFP. It reads as follows—

Those who would like to get a copy of this publication which makes very good reading can contact me after I have finished with my speech, and it is free too.

The second point that was raised was: How does one exercise one’s rights if one cannot exercise them on a group basis? If an individual is a member of a group and his group is being threatened, the group has difficulty in exercising its rights; it is the individual who has to go to the courts of law to get a judgment taken.

There was a conflict between the hon. members of the NP and the hon. members of the NRP. The hon. members of the NP were inclined to argue that we have these rights in South Africa already, that the rights which the hon. member for Yeoville wanted to introduce by means of his instruction apply in the common law and the conventions of South Africa already. The hon. member for Durban Point, however, felt that if we should introduce this instruction which seeks the introduction of a Bill of Rights, then we would have an orgy of litigation in South Africa. Were one to take that argument to its logical conclusion, it would mean that we should have no laws at all because they would keep the courts terribly busy. The NRP’s argument boils down to this: They like the standards, but they should like them to be made ineffective.

The last point which I should like to come to in so far as the arguments advanced until this stage are concerned, is that the hon. members for Pretoria Central and Rissik asked us to spell out: Where do we limit freedom? The point I want to make is that freedom is not licence; in other words, the freedom of one particular individual or of a particular group can limit the freedom of other groups. We see freedom as a balanced concept. If one goes back to the discussions of Plato and Aristotle, one notices that this is central to the great themes of Western political philosophy: How does one balance the freedom of the individual with the rights of the State and the rights of the group? On the question of responsibility it gave rise to that very famous expression: No taxation without representation.

I should now like to come to the particular aspect that I should like to raise concerning the instruction moved by the hon. member for Yeoville. If one looks at the Constitution Bill, one asks oneself what message it is sending out to the people of South Africa. I think one would acknowledge that the message it is sending out to the Coloured, Indian and White groups is different to the message it conveys to the Black group. For them there is no positive message conveyed in the Bill. Indeed, exactly the opposite is the case. The message that it conveys is one of exclusion and inferiority. This exclusion and inferiority is perpetuated constitutionally.

This is dangerous. I can think of few things that are more likely to create instability in South Africa than to say to the majority of the people who inhabit South Africa that there is no place for them in the central decision-making process of Government. It is therefore not surprising that the Constitution Bill is becoming a unifying factor among the Black people of South Africa. This Bill, need not necessarily send out a negative message to the people of South Africa and the Black people of South Africa in particular. It can also contain a positive message. It could do it if this House extended the provisions of the Bill so as to provide for a Bill of Rights which would guarantee all South Africans, irrespective of their colour, language or religion, those basic human rights and freedoms which are the hall-marks of civilized society. People often talk about this sort of right …

Give us examples.

I will come back to this. They often talk about economic rights, for example the right to work and the right to own property. These are what I would call, in the economic sphere, certain fundamental human rights. I will elaborate on them a little later. People often say, and we have heard it here today, that a Bill of Rights is useless and they then refer to the African states or the USSR. They talk of a Bill of Rights with scorn, saying it is not worth the paper it is written on. This ignores one of the fundamental aspects of a Bill of Rights, namely that it is a reflection of the values that a particular society holds. What I find interesting, is that virtually everybody in this House today, and I do not necessarily agree with them, say that we hold those values but that they are reluctant to entrench them in South African law. Those who say that a Bill of Rights will not work in South Africa, are in effect saying that they do not feel that those liberties and rights which one associates with a democratic society are applicable to South Africa. This point of view is not unique to South Africa. Indeed, it is as old as history itself. One need only to think of Socrates demanding the right to think in the Athens of his day, or to use the words ascribed to him by Plato in The Apology “the right to be a kind of gadfly attached to the State by God”. He said that the State is like a horse and often needs to be given a prod. We have been talking about, the rights of groups, but one only need to think of Thomas Beckett who died defending the rights of the Church against one of the most powerful monarchs in mediaeval Europe. One need only think of the Magna Carta of 1215, extracted by the nobility of England from King John so as to restrict his ability to do as he pleased. It is significant that those people realized that the rights they demanded from the King they had to extend to others if they were to have any value at all.

When discussing Bills of Rights the emphasis is normally placed on the political and civil rights. However, I would like to concentrate on those rights which are more applicable in the economic sphere. I do this because I believe that economic issues are particularly relevant and important to South Africa. Indeed, I would suggest that for many South Africans economic rights or the lack of them affect their daily lives more intimately than anything else. If you look at the instruction, in answer to the hon. member for Durban North, there are economic rights in this instruction, for example the right to pursue the gaining of a livelihood, the freedom from the deprivation of property is a very fundamental economic and human right.

If you look at the preamble to the Constitution Bill, it states that one of the goals of the Bill is to further private initiative and effective competition. I think all of us will agree with that. What the Bill is saying, is that the country wishes to practise an economic system which is based on the free enterprise or capitalistic system. But if one is to have such a system, there are certain basic rights which are essential for the operation of that system. For example, the first and fundamental right is the right to own property, which is covered in this instruction. If one looks at the creation of the United States of America, one notes that the founding fathers placed a high premium on property rights. One can understand this, for often you derive your political rights because you have property rights. In some cases the ownership of property was the one which allowed you to exercise political rights. You often find that where people do not have the right to property, they demand political rights because this eventually gives them the right to property. I read in the week-end Press with interest that the Government is to change the existing 99-year leasehold system for Black home-ownership by allowing the lease to revert back to the start of the 99-year period when it is transferred from one lessee to another. I do not know whether in fact that report was correct, but if it is correct, it shows that the Government has accepted the permanence of the urban Black in so-called White South Africa. However, what I cannot understand is why one does not allow Blacks to own land in urban South Africa on the same basis as Whites. Why have a policy that says to Blacks that they cannot enjoy the same property rights as Whites?

Does that apply to Edenvale as well?

Yes. I have no problems with that in Edenvale. We often speak about the free enterprise system in South Africa, but we forget that not all the people of South Africa enjoy the benefits of this system. This is important. Consequently the way a Black perceives capitalism is often completely different from the way that you, Mr. Speaker, and I perceive it. I think one of the great dangers in South Africa is that we are beginning to undermine this system because we are not ensuring to people the rights that they anticipate and expect under a free enterprise economic system.

Some years ago a study was done by UCT’s Graduate School of Business, BP Southern Africa and an advertising agency called Bates Wells Kennedy, into Black feeling about their lives, their community and their future. It was restricted to urban Blacks in the age group of 18 to 40. What it showed was that for them capitalism was associated with greed, selfishness and exploitation. They felt that it could offer benefits, but benefits not for Blacks. They felt that the benefits only applied to Whites. Those who did express a preference for the capitalistic system did so with the proviso that all have equal opportunity to practise. Sir, if we talk about a free enterprise economic system but do not give people the right to enjoy the benefit of the system, we weaken the support for such a system. In fact we may even end up destroying it. I would hate to see the argument for a free enterprise economic system in South Africa being lost because we failed to allow all to enjoy the benefits of that system.

That is a generalization.

I shall try to make it a bit more specific. The study that I referred to showed that to these people communism seemed attractive. They tended to think of it in utopian terms, as a system under which everyone would be equal and everything would be shared equally. They disagreed with the description of a communist as someone who does not believe in private or individual ownership, but in ownership of everything by the State. Yet, when those same people were asked what sort of future they wanted in South Africa, they spoke of such things as equal rights before the law, equal sharing of wealth, equal freedom to go anywhere in South Africa, equal opportunities in all spheres, especially employment, and an end to discrimination. In other words, what they wanted were those basic rights which one associates with the free enterprise economic system and which are included in the instruction moved by the hon. member for Yeoville.

And which they are voting against.

Yes, Mr. Speaker, which everybody in this House except the PFP is voting against. For example, let me give hon. members some idea of those rights. There is the right to pursue the gaining of a livelihood and the right to equal opportunity to share in the economic structure of South Africa. These are important and essential rights. Without them political and civil rights cannot be enjoyed to the full. The inability to work and to provide for one’s family restrict the liberty, freedom and dignity of any person. We in this House may differ on the political solutions to the problem in South Africa. I hope, however, that we are agreed that we should have an economic system which encourages and rewards private initiative.

The only question is how.

I must tell hon. members how I think one can actually achieve it. It is by giving everybody in South Africa the opportunity to do any job they are capable of doing. That is what we have got to ensure in our constitution. It is not enough to talk of intentions. One must ensure that those intentions can be achieved by writing into the constitution those individual rights which are necessary for achieving these intentions. One cannot protect free enterprise if one does not give all people in South Africa the right to own property and the right to do any job they are capable of doing. We have to ensure that those rights are available to all who inhabit South Africa because a system is judged by how it works and not by fancy words.

Mr. Speaker, could the hon. member for Edenvale make quite clear to us what he is saying? In terms of his party’s envisaged Bill of Rights, will I be able to insist on obtaining property on freehold title in, for instance, kwaZulu or anywhere else? Will that Bill of Rights entitle me to do that?

Mr. Speaker, I shall answer the hon. member’s question. In the tribal areas one can accept that if it is the will of those people, and if it is also their custom, we will not interfere with that.

That means they can have that right but we cannot have it. [Interjections.]

In other words, it is a one-way option. [Interjections.]

If somebody wants to adopt freehold title in order to have a freehold system, why can he not do so?

In other words, a local option. [Interjections.]

Mr. Speaker, if people want to enjoy the fruits of a free enterprise system, is it then surprising that they look at the system with distrust as long as a large number of the inhabitants of the country are excluded from enjoying those rights? That is when the very existence of the system itself is being jeopardized. We have been talking of groups’ rights. This brings me to what, I believe, is a fundamental truth about South Africa. That is that the only way in which I can ensure that I as a White English-speaking South African will enjoy those rights that are important to me is by allowing others to enjoy the same rights. This is, I believe, where we differ very strongly from the CP and NP in that we do not believe that we protect White rights unless we extend those same rights to all other people. I cannot guarantee my own rights by denying others those very rights, except for a short period. Indeed the very act of denial jeopardizes my own future enjoyment of those rights.

It is one of the most fundamental laws fostered by Christ himself—do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The rights that we talk of here today might not be relevant to us today but maybe they will be relevant to us tomorrow. This is what I want to point out to hon. members of the CP. I am quite sure that since they have been in opposition they do indeed have a new idea of the value of the freedom of the Press compared to what they had while they were still sitting in the Government benches. [Interjections.]

Therefore, if I want to protect my rights I must realize that there are certain basic rights to which I am entitled, not as a member of the group but as a individual because it is as in individual that I exercise those rights. Indeed it might be that the individual has to be protected from the powers of a group as much as it needs to be protected from the powers of the Government.

I believe that if this House was to accept the instruction moved by the hon. member for Yeoville, we would be sending a message of hope to all South Africans, even to those who have been excluded from participating in this constitution. That message is needed now, for as was pointed out in The Federalist, those series of articles by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John May, which preceded the creation of the United States constitution, justice is the aim of government; the aim of civil society. “It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained; or until liberty be lost in pursuit”.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Eden vale referred to certain rights in detail. He omitted, however, to mention that we are here today occupying ourselves with the granting of constitutional rights to Asians and Coloureds, which they have never had before. I believe that when one talks about rights constitutional rights should be in the forefront of the rights people should be given.

The hon. member referred very briefly to the fact that Black people were looking at this Bill of Rights suggested by the hon. member for Yeoville, waiting to see what was going to happen to it. As regards the constitutional development of Black people. I want to say that the potential of progress to absolute freedom and to reach a position where they can conduct their own affairs is available to them, while the Coloureds and the Asians have not had those rights up to now. What we are therefore doing today is attempting to give the Coloureds and Asians comparable rights to those to which the Black people could aspire. When considering the instruction moved by the hon. member for Yeoville, it behoves us to look at it very carefully in view of the seriousness of the matter. One should analyse very carefully the motion put by the hon. member.

On a close reading of the motion of the hon. member for Yeoville, one finds three things. The first is that there is a certain imprecision in the wording of the concepts used. Firstly, therefore, I think that the wording in the motion is very imprecise. Secondly, there is a lack of logical exposition of where we are going should we accept the Bill of Rights as indicated by him, because a Bill of Rights cannot simply be grafted on to an existing system. I would argue that it is necessary that a national convention should be held first before one could graft a Bill of Rights on to a system such as we have. Thirdly, I would argue that the disadvantages accruing to us should we accept this particular motion of the hon. member for Yeoville would be disastrous for South Africa.

I should like therefore to start off by having a close look at the motion as put by the hon. member for Yeoville. The first thing to which I should like to refer is that he said that the rights and freedoms of the individual are to be guaranteed. The point has already been made that there is the glaring omission of the rights of groups. He went on to say that these rights should be looked at without detracting from “the generality of the a foregoing”, which is a very vague way of putting something which should be cast in the form of law. The hon. member for Yeoville on 4 February 1977 moved a motion in the House and, in introducing it, said, inter alia, that rights should also be guaranteed to minority groups. The hon. member now omits the very cardinal aspect of minority groups. One can then come to one of two conclusions. Either the hon. member is arguing that there are no minority groups or he is arguing that they are sufficiently catered for. The argument of the hon. member for Yeoville, as I understand it, is indeed that he does not accept that there are minority groups. That is how I understand the argument. If that is true, then obviously this is so glaringly in conflict with the realities of South Africa that one need not even look further at the hon. member’s submission because it can only lead us astray from reality. There would then be no advantage to us in following his motion.

Secondly, the hon. member puts a certain limit on freedom. He says such freedom should be subject to such reasonable limits as are prescribed by law. If ever there was a vague and imprecise notion, it could only be the words used in the motion, namely “such reasonable limits as are prescribed by law”. What are “reasonable limits as are prescribed by law” and what are unreasonable limits “as are prescribed by law”? How does one find a norm for this? The point is actually that in the case of subordinate legislation one can measure the reasonableness or unreasonableness against the empowering enactment. As I have said, this is applicable in the case of subordinate legislation. I could understand that argument if we were dealing with subordinate legislation. That is, however not the situation here. I would therefore say that there is a confusion here of legal concepts when a concept such as “reasonable limits” is used, a concept which is not applicable to any enactment of Parliament. If a judge should be able to decide the reasonable limits of a law in terms of an inviolate Bill of Rights, I would say he would have to be superhuman, he would have to be endowed with superhuman gifts. It is just not possible. It is for that very reason that we have a preamble in the Bill in which we dedicate ourselves to and take up a commitment towards Almighty God, who is the Supreme Being whose laws takes precedence over all man-made laws of any Parliament.

The hon. member goes even further. He concedes that a Bill of Rights should be reasonable. He concedes therefore that there are boundaries to be set to a Bill of Rights. What the hon. member then in effect is saying is that there can be no inviolate Bill of Rights. As soon as one sets a limit to a Bill or Rights the concept of a Bill of Rights, which is inviolate, goes by the board. The third point which I should like to mention in regard to the hon. member’s instruction relates to the fact that he says that rights should not be infringed save “as can be demonstrably justified …”

Read on.

That is sufficient to undo the hon. member’s argument.

You are quoting out of context.

When can one demonstrably justify an infringement of rights?

In a free and democratic society.

Yes, in a free and democratic society. How can one demonstrably justify such a thing? Towards whom should this be demonstrated? By whom should it be demonstrated? How is it going to be demonstrated? To whom should it be justified? By whom should it be justified? These words used by the hon. member are beautiful words but they have no meaning whatsoever in law. For that very reason I do not see how this could possibly be incorporated in a Bill of Rights. I suggest the hon. member should consult a legal draftsman. Perhaps he can make something better of this.

The problem the hon. member has is simply that we are dealing with concepts which are difficult to define. That is the basic problem. That is the problem of defining a human right. There have been attempts at defining human rights. Not so long ago Bentham said all this talk about nature and natural rights, about natural justice and injustice proves two things, namely, firstly, the heat of the passion, and secondly, the darkness of the understanding. That is the problem we are having here. It was Jeremy Bentham, a great constitutional lawyer, who said that. I am quoting him, with approval.

[Inaudible.]

I will still come to the American constitution. When we are dealing with human rights then necessarily we have something which is imprecise and necessarily that is the problem of the hon. member for Yeoville. That is why he has so drafted this instruction. It is not in accordance with his nature and it is not meticulously and legally drawn.

What the hon. member for Yeoville has refrained from saying is that a national convention is a prerequisite to a Bill of Rights and that a Bill of Rights would of necessity politicize our courts. I should like to quote what Mr. Justice Corbett, a Judge of Appeal, said in 1979. He said—

A prerequisite for a Bill of Rights is therefore some form of national convention. The corollary is also true, namely if one does not have a national convention there is no point in even attempting to discuss the hon. member’s instruction.

[Inaudible.]

The hon. member must listen closely. I want to go further. Mr. Justice Corbett also said—

Therefore, if one keeps a parliamentary sovereignty as a principle in South Africa, a Bill of Rights can be changed as an ordinary Bill by any amendment thereto and the concept used in the United States of an inviolable Bill of Rights goes by the board. The hon. judge continues and says the following—

This means that a curb is put on the legislative power of this Parliament. He goes on—

Therefore we have two distinct disadvantages in considering a Bill of Rights. Firstly, we definitely have to have a national convention, which is going to take time. Secondly, we are thrusting our courts into the forefront of political controversy, which is something that I think all of us would want to avoid at all costs.

Inherent in the motion of the hon. member for Yeoville is then that a national convention has to be called and that a federal structure should be envisaged. That is basically his motion. We have argued this matter of the national convention ad nauseam in this House. However, I would like to add another reason why it is not acceptable in the South African context. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was commenced with in 1948 by the United Nations. It took them 18 years to cast it in the form of a charter and, I think, another 10 years to have the signatories put their names to it so as to formalize the document. It took 28 years to move from a Universal Declaration of Rights to something like a charter. If we should go to a national convention exactly the same thing would apply. The timespan would be such that before we could draw up a Bill of Rights, the rights of the Coloured, Asian and White people would have to be left in abeyance for a very long time. That is not a view of the NP. We are now in the process of giving these rights.

Mr. Speaker, there are certain disadvantages flowing from the hon. member’s motion. This reminds me of an Arabian proverb which an hon. member in this House has often quoted. This proverb says that a fool can be known by three things. Firstly, it is speech without profit. Secondly, it is change without progress and, thirdly, it is trusting a stranger. On the basis of these three wisdoms by the Arabian gentleman to whom these proverbs are ascribed, I would like to address the hon. House.

I was looking at the speech of the hon. member for Yeoville as well as those of other members of the PFP and I could not find any profit in those speeches. Mr. Speaker, I can tell you why: It is because what we find immediately is that the judiciary is becoming politicized; we have a federal structure thrust upon us and we have to hold a national convention. From my point of view, there is absolutely no profit in that sense to be derived from the speech of the hon. member. Secondly, we find that the hon. member is advocating change and I cannot see that any progress can be derived from that change. The basic principle of freedom, I think, was summarized in a book called The Federal and States’ Constitutions of the United States of America by a gentleman called Stimson. He says—

He says that the principal reason that England has been called free is that the Government itself and the King and his officers can be called to account for their actions in an ordinary court of law. If one uses this as a yardstick, then I want to say that South Africa is as free a country as Britain is and can ever be and that there is no advantage accruing to us to incorporate a Bill of Rights in our constitution because it will not give us any more freedoms.

What is the difference between ourselves and the USA as far as the constitutional position is concerned? There are two basic differences and we must realize that they are basic differences. Firstly, we find that in America the people are sovereign while in England we find that Parliament is sovereign, here we have the two basic differences. In the USA the people are sovereign while in Britain we have parliamentary sovereignty.

There is another important difference between the British constitution and that of the USA. In the main, the British constitution is composed of limitations on the executive while as far as the American constitution is concerned, there are limitations on the legislative assemblies as well. The constitutional structure is completely different. To graft a strange Bill of Rights, which could be quite opposite in the American system, onto the South African system, would be doing an injustice to our system as we have it. It would be a stranger in our midst, I want to say, therefore, that apropos the Arabian proverb, we must reject the suggestion of the hon. member for Yeoville.

The following was said in 1934 by the Rector of St. Andrews University, namely—

That was said by the hon. J. C. Smuts.

Let us have the courage to go ahead with this particular constitution for the wellbeing of all the peoples of South Africa and, especially at this stage, of the Whites, the Asians and the Coloureds. I therefore call upon all people of goodwill outside this House to follow the lead of this Government and ensure a bright future for south Africa.

Mr. Speaker, if this instruction in regard to a Bill of Rights is to be incorporated in the Constitution Bill, then by way of analysis, and with regard to the arguments advanced, I want to single out four points. The first is the rights and freedoms of the individual that are to be guaranteed. Secondly there are several of these rights that affect the human factors and circumstances of life that have been tabulated and that comprise the guarantee. In the third place this guarantee of the rights and freedoms of the individual are in a certain sense subjected to reasonable limitation by laws; and finally, they are subject to reasonable limitation by laws in order to achieve something different, which to some extent is in conflict with the first point, viz. to ensure that the rights of others are not infringed and that the security of the community must be ensured. I now wish to proceed to express a few ideas with regard to these four main points.

In the first place I contend that every person, every individual, has freedoms and rights. There is not one of us that disputes rights and freedoms of the individual, but I say that the true right of a person and the true freedom of a person must be limited by rules. Outside of rules, freedom is no longer freedom, and outside of rules, rights are no longer rights. The highest freedom is in restraint.

When I evaluate these four main points in this instruction, it is absolutely clear to me that the emphasis is on the first one, namely, the freedom and the rights of the individual. It is true that in their speeches the hon. members for Yeoville and Edenvale considered the group or the community, but an analysis of this instruction shows quite clearly that the emphasis is on the individual, on the human being as against every other human being, and not on the human being and every other human being as against a group or a community of people.

When we consider the tabulated list of human rights and freedoms mentioned here I want to debate that in this table the rights and freedoms of the individual are absolutized, so that the final point made as regards the assurance of the protection of the rights of others or of the community, is actually obscured by this absolutism that is built into this.

The issue here is the right of the “I” and the freedoms of the “I”, while to a large extent the rights and freedoms of the “we”, of the community or the group, are ignored. The individual rights and freedoms are demanded to such an extent in regard to every imaginable circumstance of life in which the individual lives and moves. Therefore I want to say to the hon. member for Turffontein that the two points he added, and which included very fine ideas, in fact contain binding ideas. Because they are specifically binding ideas I do not believe that they belong in this table of absolute freedoms and rights that are being incorporated here. That, too, is probably why they are left out of this. When it is a matter of commitment with regard to absolute freedoms and rights then in fact one destroys the idea of absolute freedoms and rights as worded in this instruction.

Without giving it a political connotation, but in an effort to argue from a purely philosophical point of view, I wish to contend that this approach of absolute rights and freedoms for the individual that is incorporated here is a libera list point of view that does not take into account the group and the community which surrounds the individual. That is to say that no account is taken of the sum total of fellow men, of fellow individuals and against each individual as such. In my opinion this becomes a totally untenable situation in a community or in a country in which there is more than one people or community. Say for example a specific community is comprised of a million individuals and that each of these million individuals demands rights and freedoms for himself, as against the other individuals. Then one has the situation of a million individuals, each of whom are demanding rights and freedoms for himself at the expense of the others. When one demands the rights and freedoms as worded in this instruction, one necessarily demands them at the expense of every other individual.

Oh no!

The hon. member for Greytown protests, but he will have every opportunity to try to refute this argument of mine. I repeat that when the freedoms and the rights of the individual are tabulated and worded in this absolute sense, in which all the emphasis is on the individual every individual who demand these rights and freedoms is faced with every other individual, and makes his demands at the expense of the other individuals.

These tabulated rights and freedoms in the instruction are to be found, virtually word for word, in the 1948 Bill of Rights of the UN. When one analysis the Bill of Rights one sees that each of the points, considered and assessed individually, in fact represents a striving for an elevated and idealistic aim. One finds this in this instruction as well. If these elevated and idealistic aims are intended for the individual then it is equally true that they are elevated and idealistic aims for the sum total of individuals, viz. the community. Thus it is equally true that they are important, in an elevated and idealistic sense, to the community and not only to each separate individual within that community.

These tabulated rights and freedoms that are demanded for the individual, and which we are being asked to guarantee, are regarded as the most fundamental human rights. However, I also wish to argue that it is equally true that they are the most fundamental rights of the community in which the group of individuals find themselves. Therefore one cannot argue that because they are fundamental humans rights, the individual can demand them for himself at the expense of the community, because they are the fundamental rights of the community as a whole, too, and therefore the community, as a community, can demand them for itself.

This brings me to the next question. If the fundamental rights of the community are not to be endangered, how far are the rights and the freedoms of the individual to extend? They can only apply within the confines of rules that limit them, to the point at which they will effect the rights and the freedom of the next individual, viz. they only apply in so far as the rights and freedom of the individual do not make inroads into the rights and freedoms of the community. Therefore, before they endanger the rights of the community it is already assumed that limits to the rights and freedoms of the individual must be set. If one does not set limits in advance to those rights and freedoms of the individual, then they will make inroads into and detract from the rights and freedom of the community or of the group. When that happens one is prejudicing one person at the expense of someone else.

It is said in the instructions that a reasonable limit must be prescribed by way of legislation. I want to associate myself with the hon. member for Pretoria West and try to take an idea he put forward, a little further on the basis of this reasonable limitation. In the instruction a number of freedoms and rights are tabulated from (a) to (h) which, when carefully analysed, cover virtually every possible life situation. One could, perhaps, if one really tried, think of one or two more, one which has not been included here, but as far as I can judge, virtually every situation in life is covered by these eight points. Now, however, this instruction goes further by saying that in spite of these things that are mentioned specifically, “the generality of the a foregoing”, i.e. the generality of the rights and freedoms of the individuals, remains. In other words, points (a) to (h) do not limit the rights and freedoms is retained. Therefore a great deal more than has in fact been tabulated can be read into these tabulated rights and freedoms. Now, my point is the following: If these rights and freedoms, which are general and which, according to this wording, can be, and are, totally absolute, may be subjected to reasonable limits by the law, who determines what is reasonable in this situation?

The law.

In the first instance, reasonableness is a relative concept. What is reasonable to one person is not reasonable to another. The hon. member for Greytown has put his foot in it. He says: “The law”. Now I want to ask him: If a law were to be made that were to impose reasonable limits on this freedom and these rights of the individual, and the individual were to argue, in terms of his definition of reasonableness, that the law in question were unreasonable, of what force and effect would that law be? Then it would not be a question of a law that was reasonable or limiting; it would be the case that every individual could say what his view of reasonableness was with regard to any law and he could say that in his view a specific law was not reasonable but limited his rights and freedoms. Therefore I believe that no mention need be made here of a reasonable limitation in the law. As far as I am concerned it is of no value whatsoever here. It is a factor that is determined by reasonableness, and reasonableness is relative, because the concept is dependent on how each individual interprets it. Therefore, as far as I am concerned, there is inherent in this instruction the element of tension between individual and individual and the element of tension between the individual and the group of individuals, or the community itself. This tension, which is inherent in the instruction, is necessarily contained in it in such a way that when each individual demands his rights and his freedoms, this must inevitably lead to clashes and to conflict; not only to clashes between individual and individual, but also to a clash, a conflict, between the individual and the community.

This brings me to the factual issue. Every time an individual has laid claim to such rights and freedoms, in regard to every matter that has been taken so far as to infringe the rights and freedoms of other individuals in the community, it has been necessary to impose restrictions on those individuals by way of legislation. The moment one imposes a statutory limitation on the freedom or right that the individual claims for himself, one inspires resistance in the individual. He begins to complain and to regard the community and its laws, the laws of the State, that have to regulate law and order within the borders of the State and the community, as unfair and unjust.

As long as the individual enjoys his freedom and rights to the full within the confines of the law, there is never a complaint and he is content to live within those confines, and enjoy the freedom and the rights he possesses. However, the moment the individual exceeds the confines of that law, when he acts in conflict with the law, he begins to complain and to contend that it is the law that is unreasonable, and that it is never the individual himself who is unreasonable; that it is always the law, and not the individual, that is unreasonable. Therefore it is clear to me that to insert this instruction, not only into this Constitution Bill, but into any other constitution, would certainly not be worthwhile, because ultimately it could serve no purpose to do so.

I am convinced that no Government with a Bill of Rights—whatever the provisions of that Bill of Rights may be—can, if it also has to take into account the community and the State, grant and guarantee those rights and freedoms asked in terms of this instruction without doing so at the expense of the State and the community. Therefore it cannot make the individual happy with such a Bill of Rights because when it tries to do so in respect of one individual, it will make millions of individuals unhappy.

I also wish to say that with regard to the State, with its community and its individuals, for example, we encounter contradictions in this Bill. I contend that there are inherent contradictions in the tabulated points. I want to give an example. Let us consider for a moment the freedom of association. The freedom of association has a built-in contradiction, because in South Africa, with its diversity of peoples and communities, one has the situation that one individual may lay claim to freedom of association. He can therefore be convinced that he can associate freely with whomever he wishes. In contrast, there is within that community a group of individuals that believe in freedom and the right of association, within limits. When this individual, who lays claim to absolute freedom of association for himself, encounters this restrictive community, his freedom of association is limited by them, because they do not want him within their community. When they do not want him within their community, then surely he cannot argue that he has an absolute right, and that he can lay claim to freedom and rights for himself, whereas the community that does not want him, does not have the right and the freedom to say to him: “We do want you and we do not want to associate with you”.

I want to ask: What exactly do we mean by “freedoms”?

You need only give us the titles of the books. Then we can go and read them at home in our own time.

How far does freedom go? [Interjections.] I want to say to the hon. member for Welkom that if he can find what I have here, in any book in Existence, then I shall come to an agreement with him. It does not appear in any book. Unfortunately for him and fortunately for me all this is the product of my own brain. [Interjections.] If he has underestimated me, the embarrassment is his, not mine. I want to ask: How far does freedom go?

How many brainchildren do you have?

The Bible says: Answer not a fool according to his folly. I want to ask how far freedom goes before it reaches the borders of abuse and licence, and how far rights go before they destroy entirely the duty of the human being. I say that freedom goes only as far as the rules that it involves. Beyond those rules it is abuse and licence. Rights only extend as far as the duties they entail. After that they are no longer rights.

In conclusion I want to deal with a few of the freedoms tabulated here. In the first place I want to ask whether there is really any freedom among the freedoms tabulated here which is not already guaranteed for the individual, but also for the community, in South Africa. Allow me to refer to the freedom of religion or the freedom of belief. We in this country have a Government which professes the Christian faith. We in this country have a Government that professes the Christian religion. We in this country have a State that is ruled according to Christian norms. The majority of the citizens of this State profess the Christian faith or religion. I personally am in favour of the Government incorporating in its constitution its profession of faith as a Christian Government. It must not be done in vague terms; the Government’s profession of faith with regard to its concept of God must be included in clear terms. By doing this one does not restrict or limit the freedom of religion of anyone who professes a religion other than the Christian religion. That is the situation in South Africa. This has been the case for many years. What does the hon. member for Yeoville foresee for the future with regard to religion and belief in this country that makes him plead so urgently for the insertion of the freedom and rights of religion and belief in a Bill of Rights? Does he foresee something that worries him?

Yes.

If that is the case, I want to ask one of the spokesmen on that side of the House to spell it out to us so that we can debate it later during the Committee Stage.

As far as religion, religious freedom and religious rights are concerned, are we prepared to say that Satan worship too, is a form of religion for the Satan worshipper? To what extent will one give this individual or group freedom of religion? [Time expired.]

Mr. Speaker, I am sorry that this House must now listen to two sermons in succession. I do not know whether this sermon is going to be as inventive, but in any event, I undertake that it will be shorter.

I do not really wish to cross swords with the hon. member for Koedoespoort about the fact that the rights spelt out in the instruction in fact amount to absolutization of the rights of the individual. I shall not cross swords with him in that regard. However, I shall cross swords with him about the aspect that he only touched on in part and in regard to which he has submitted an amendment to clause 2.

Do you differ with him?

Wait until the clause in question comes up for discussion. We can exchange ideas about it then. There is no one in this House who will not concede that freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and freedom of belief are essential components for a democratic system of government. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether there could be any question of a democracy in a situation where these components are totally lacking or where some of these components are lacking. By saying that I do not imply that one can place a stamp of approval, without further ado, on a Bill of Rights, the contents of which can be enforced by the courts, and I shall mention why. I think that any request for a Bill of Rights is based, consciously or unconsciously, on the assumption—basically, this is the point to which the hon. member for Koedoespoort referred—that the rights and freedom of the individual are absolute and apply in all circumstances. The best example one could use to illustrate this point is the universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. With the exception of section 29, which does give a vague definition of the limitations on the rights and freedoms of the individual, what all the articles virtually amount to is that the rights and freedoms of the individual are absolute. In my opinion, however, this is a faulty assumption arising from the philosophy of John Locke, with his view that in fact there is a basic natural law that precedes all other legal rules.

Nor is the plea for a Bill of Rights such as that contained in this instruction, any exception to the rule. Several speakers have pointed out this afternoon that in this regard, too, the real issue is the intention that the rights spelt out here are to be applicable for all times under all circumstances. If that is not the intention, it would be meaningless to accept this instruction and, moreover, to want to make it enforceable by the courts.

The fact of the matter is that freedom of conscience, of religion, thought and belief can never function in the absolute sense in all circumstances in the South African context. In the time at my disposal I just wish to point out a few examples. The freedom of conscience, for example, can never function in the absolute sense in the South African context. If this were to be so, and if this were to be incorporated in a Bill of Rights, then, for argument’s sake, every second national serviceman could refuse to perform national service on the basis of a conscientious objection to a specific war on the basis that war was supposedly an unjust war. This matter was debated at length in this House earlier this year. Therefore if freedom of conscience—I do not even wish to elaborate on the reasons why this would have grave consequences not only for the system of national service as such but also for the Republic as a whole—were to be incorporated in a Bill of Rights, it would in fact be impossible to agree to the type of legislation relating to defence that was passed in this House at the beginning of the year. Even freedom of religion cannot apply in the absolute sense in all circumstances in the South African situation. When deliberate use is made of religion to prepare the way for the take-over of this country by a power which also aims to free people from religion, then the State cannot sit back and twiddle its thumbs without taking action against this specific religious practice. Nor can freedom of thought function in the absolute sense in the South African set-up, because it would then be difficult in the extreme to combat any communist activity by way of legislation. The same goes for freedom of belief. This cannot apply in all circumstances in South Africa because then it would be impossible, for argument’s sake, for the State to take effective action against a movement like Satanism—which has already been referred to—which is gaining ground world-wide.

The point I want to make is just this: There is no sense in seeking to entrench certain rights and freedoms of the individual in a Bill of Rights that is enforceable by the courts if those rights and freedoms cannot apply absolutely in all circumstances at all times. The rights and freedoms advocated in this instruction are, it is true—and various speakers have referred to this—made subject to a condition. They may not infringe upon the rights of another individual, nor may they endanger the security of the community. However, this exposes the practical problem surrounding the feasibility of a Bill of Rights. In any community, not only the South Africa community, there are, in my opinion, too many exceptions to the rule of those things spelt out in ideal form in the Bill of Rights, for it really to be effectively enforceable. A good example I want to refer to is the European Convention with regard to human rights. The first right clearly spelt out there is the right to live, but this right is immediately made subject to the right to impose a death sentence. This, in turn, is immediately made subject to the right to kill in times of emergency and in times of rebellion. These very exceptions made with regard to the rights spelt out in the Bill of Rights in fact render the Bill of Rights impotent. However, the fact that freedom of conscience, of religion, of thought and of belief does not apply absolutely at all times and in all circumstances in the South African situation does not simply mean that there is no question of those freedoms in the South African situation. Indeed, the contrary is true. In South Africa there is at present under this system of Government freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and freedom of belief, despite the fact that a Bill of Rights has never formed part of our constitution. Indeed, there are few countries in the world that can hold a candle to South Africa as far as freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and freedom of belief are concerned. Although freedom of religion and of belief are not spelt out or entrenched in a single section of our constitution, and despite their not even forming part of the South Africa Act of 1909, South Africa has established a tradition in regard to religious freedom that would be difficult to better anywhere in the world.

In any country with religious groups that differ with one another one encounters major problems. One has these problems in Ireland and in Lebanon. However, in South Africa one does not encounter these problems, not because we do not have different religious groupings here, but precisely because the principle of religious freedom applies here. Although the South African law gives preference to specific Christian principles—and we make no apology for that; indeed, in the preamble and in the proposed preamble this is declared a national objective—one religious group or religious grouping is not placed in a superior position to any other in terms of the law. I think that this, too, speaks volumes for the South African context, particularly when we bear in mind that according to the 1980 census figures, 77% of the total population are Christians and 5% belong to other religions. The others are not known. In spite of that, one religious grouping is not placed in a superior position to any other by the law. I just wish to elucidate this in practical terms. As far as Whites, Coloureds and Asians are concerned, 146 religious groups, the ordained clergymen of which are entitled to perform marriage ceremonies and which are recognized as such by the State, are registered with the Department of Internal Affairs. As far as the Black peoples and population groups are concerned, there are 4 800 different denominations or churches in the RSA alone that may follow the religion of their choice without State interference. I do not think that there is a single group in South Africa that can say that it is persecuted or prejudiced by the State due to the contents of its creed. It can therefore be said without fear of contradiction that anyone in South Africa is free to follow the religion of his choice at the moment, whether or not we have a Bill of Rights. If that is not religious freedom, then I do not know what religious freedom is.

Nor, under the present dispensation, is there a single restriction prohibiting anyone from taking part in the decision-making processes of the country due to his religious views. Therefore no one is discriminated against, on the basis of his belief or his religion as far as participation in the decision-making processes is concerned. Apart from these two main components of religious freedom—the fact that one can follow the religion of one’s choice without interference or persecution by the State, and the fact that one can participate in the decision-making processes, whatever one’s religious views—there are other factors, too, that clearly indicate the religious freedom and freedom of belief in South Africa.

Let me refer to education. Although there is no doubt about the demand that education in South Africa must have a Christian character, no child is obliged to attend a religious tuition class if his parents have applied in writing for the child to be absent.

This is also evident in legislation relating to publications control. In section 47(2) of the Publications Act, any publication or object, film or a public entertainment that is deemed undesirable or offensive to the religious views of any section of the population, is prohibited. Once again no religious grouping takes precedence before any other religious grouping under the law.

Nowhere is religious freedom more obvious than in the defence structure. This very year legislation was passed by this House which will make it possible for bona fide religious objectors to perform their national service in an alternative non-military capacity. This concession exists in South Africa, while the followers of the denomination which is chiefly involved in this regard are persecuted in other parts of the world where they have even entrenched religious freedom in their clauses, because they are regarded as subversive to the State.

Another good example to indicate that freedom of belief and of religion and of conscience applies in the South African set-up is partly to be found in the Public Holidays Act and partly in the various ordinances relating to shopping hours in the various provinces. Although according to the Public Holidays Act, the Sabbath must be set aside as a workfree day, the view of the Sabbath adopted by other religious groups is also taken into account. The ordinance relating to shopping hours in the Cape, Ordinance 16 of 1976, makes an exception to this rule. In terms of this ordinance, anyone who closes his butchery from sundown on Friday night to sundown on Saturday night and sells kosher meat may sell that meat on a Sunday morning before 09h00. Therefore this is another instance of due account being taken of the view of the Sabbath of a certain group that is represented in this country.

Finally, I am of the opinion that a Bill of Rights, the contents of which are enforceable by the courts, is not an essential addition to our constitution because the inevitable limitations in regard to the basic rights and freedoms that such a document would have to contain would be any event render it ineffective. Moreover, I believe that such a Bill of Rights is unnecessary, because those things for which it makes provision are in any event very clearly worded in the preamble to the envisaged constitution.

If anybody wants to know why there has been no magic in this debate, they must just concentrate on the people who are speaking against this instruction and on what they have to say. The subjective perception of the impact of a Bill of Rights comes through very clearly. It is quite clear who makes the laws. Nobody has explained how group rights—the last three speakers concentrated on group rights—can be in any danger whatsoever if individual rights are catered for, particularly in the light of the way the instruction has been presented to the House. It says very clearly “subject only to such reasonable limits as are prescribed by law to ensure that the individual by the exercise thereof does not infringe on the rights of others to exercise it.” I must admit that the cake goes to the hon. member for Koedoespoort. One wonders where he has been sleeping. He asked whether any freedoms mentioned in this Bill of Rights were not adequately looked after in the present circumstances. That is a most extraordinary statement and I do not know how somebody could make it.

Can a country’s representatives ever have gathered together to construct a constitution to control and to co-ordinate their Government in a perilous period with less enthusiasm? We have sat here and watched the authors of this Bill present their case in one pedestrian speech after another while hon. members on that side have sat and gossiped or snoozed. I cannot believe this is the atmosphere in which the American constitution, the South African constitution or any other great constitution was born. This should have been a dramatic and historic moment, one of those rare occasions when a nation reaches for the stars, when idealism sets a standard which generations to come will remember with pride. Someone who had a vision of a new order capable of capturing the imagination and loyalty of all South Africans has seen it so compromised and so pared down by the political expediency that the CP describes it as a “klugspel”. The Labour Party states that it is playing along, but has the firm intention of smashing it at the first convenient moment and replacing it with a system of one man, one vote in a unitary State. The NP, the parent of this child, pleads as a final argument, when all the shortcomings have been exposed, that we have to humour it for a while, because it cannot live for long.

The instruction moved by the hon. member for Yeoville is an opportunity to reaffirm an ideal and to make it an essential ingredient of the South African constitution. An analysis of the proposals which show our commitment to a Bill of Rights will automatically involve the rectification of those aspects of the new constitution which will otherwise definitely ensure its failure. It commits us to the establishment of a just and non-discriminatory society. A Bill of Rights can almost equally, and perhaps better, be described as a Bill of Responsibilities. This is because each clause which confirms the rights and freedoms of an individual conversely imposes the responsibility to preserve those rights and freedoms.

In supporting the instruction I want to ask the House to concern itself with the mobility of labour, specifically the basic right of the Black worker to move about his country and to negotiate the sale of his labour on free market principles in a free enterprise society. The following paragraphs of the instruction would guarantee the Black worker these rights. Members should also consider the beneficial implications of these paragraphs if the constitution is ultimately to develop the legitimacy which comes from majority support.

Paragraph (c) of this instruction establishes freedom of movement within one’s country. Paragraph (d) establishes the right to pursue the gaining of a livelihood. Paragraph (e) ensures that the worker will not be discriminated against. Paragraph (f) guarantees him justice and paragraph (h) will give him, as far as is possible, equality of opportunity. I shall attempt to deal with labour mobility from the point of view of the Black worker, but also as a fundamental human right within one’s own country. I shall consider the Government’s policy in this regard and some of the political and economic implications of the denial of that basic right.

How does the Black worker see his enforced immobility, his inability to respond to the pressures of the market mechanism to which we all pay lip-service, particularly that side of the House? He finds himself caught up in a problem of enormous dimensions. Recent Government statistics quote Black unemployment at 9%. We are told it is 470 000. One Minister remarked this session that our statistics compare well with those of industrialized countries in the Western World. Are we trying to fool somebody else or are we trying to fool ourselves? The Central Statistics Office figures first of all do not include anybody who has worked for five hours in the last seven days. Secondly, they do not consider someone unemployed unless he has actually applied at the labour bureau in the past 30 days. Who is going to go to a labour bureau, spend money to get there when he has hardly any, when he knows that there is no work available? Finally, they exclude the independent Black homelands. A more objective calculation was done at the beginning of this year by Prof. Keenan and he finds that this Black worker is one of an army of between two million and 2,5 million unemployed.

I think this is another example of the fiction of the independence of the TBVC States. The Government realizes that it has responsibilities in respect of these States which it cannot shed. This is shown clearly by its efforts for drought relief, its decentralization policy and its recent sortie to prop up a tottering puppet. These States are a very convenient magic carpet under which one can sweep limitless dust. The Black worker is prepared and in fact he is desperate to play his part in our market oriented economy. He wants to respond to the market pressures and look for a job, and he wants to do it in exactly the way that the Government economists say we should respond to market pressures, but he is caught up in a system of labour bureaux, contract labour, permits, restrictions and bureaucratic entanglements that render him completely immobile. This type of situation can only be countenanced for foreign labourers. We therefore create quasi independent States and declare all labour to be foreign. It is very simple. If the House has read what Dr. Crocker has said on this subject it will appreciate that ally has not been fooled. The recent meeting that Black leaders of independent homelands held at which they declared that South Africa was one political entity in their view indicates that they too are not misled. We have belatedly accepted that the whole of South Africa is one economic entity. We have chosen a free enterprise economy and we have declared in the Preamble to the new constitution that our purpose is “To further private initiative and effective competition,” but we refuse to recognize that such a system is quite impossible without the geographic mobility of labour, one of the fundamental factors of production. The effect on a worker community made immobile in this fashion does not have to be guessed at. It has been spelt out very clearly by Dr. Schlemmer after careful research. He found that migrant workers were far more dissatisfied with the political situation than the permanent workers in an African township. He also found that the support for socialist economic policies was far greater among migrant workers than amongst city workers. The rural Black sees opportunity in the city. He sees the opportunity of earning money, of acquiring a steady job, of training, of educating his children, of being near health services and, like all immigrants, he sees an opportunity of re-joining his family who have moved to the city ahead of him.

What is the incentive then to remain in a destitute self-governing Black State, which becomes increasingly overcrowded as South Africa packs more and more people into it? He lives in the hope that he may be able to get a six month contract with a labour bureau, to work for an employer he has never seen, doing a job about which he knows nothing, for a salary of which he has probably been given only the sketchiest idea. Nevertheless, what he makes is indeed in his circumstances a logical decision. For the first time he now has an opportunity of alleviating the oppressive poverty of his family by sending something back home. The chance is that once in the city he may be able to remain there. He knows that even as an illegal, even if he spends half of each year of the time he is away in gaol, he will still be better off than if he had remained at home. What he has not yet grasped, of course, is that he is not going to get illegal work so easily because new measures will fine the employer of an illegal worker.

We are told that section 10 Blacks will be far more mobile in future, that they will be able to move between the various urban areas quite freely, and this we welcome. The proviso, however, is that there must be housing. This sounds very reasonable. If housing is to become the criterion for labour mobility the Government is giving itself an indirect method of control, and we must examine its bona fides, particularly as a result of its appalling record in this regard. It must not be forgotten that it has deliberately restricted the construction of houses in urban areas for many years in order to discourage Black influx. The figures speak for themselves. The number of housing units erected for Blacks in urban areas during the five years from 1976 to 1981 averaged only 7 000 a year. The Government spent only R33 million a year on the construction of those houses. The result is a shortage of 200 000 housing units in urban areas alone, and probably something of the order of R1,6 billion is required in order to wipe out this backlog. It is obvious that the building programme was pure tokenism. The policy of the Government was simple. It was a policy not to build houses, and it was carried out quite ruthlessly.

When the mobility of section 10 Black workers depends on housing, will the policy then be to make available as much housing as possible, or as little housing as possible? This we will have to see. For the present, however, we must reserve our judgment. A Government undertaking in the Eastern Cape to execute the Louis Rive plan would assist us in making that judgment. The Government has been forced to come to terms with the permanent Black population in the so-called White areas of South Africa. All its wishful thinking in this regard was proved wildly wrong. Its most optimistic projections point to a Black population which will outnumber Whites in the White areas by at least 4:1 in a generation’s time. What is the Government’s reaction to this? Its reaction is a doubling of its efforts to anchor the rural Blacks in their traditional areas and to press on with the policy of Black removals, come drought, famine or disease. The policies that prevent the mobility of labour flow directly from the basic principles of grand apartheid and the belief that permanent rights will ultimately lead to political rights. To this end the Mulder statement that there will be no Black South Africans is still believed, and this becomes a guiding principle. All Blacks with the remotest connection to independent States will willy-nilly become members of those States. If convenient, they may be returned to those States, whether they have ever been there before or not.

There is no more devastating condemnation of this policy than is contained in the findings of the Human Sciences Research Council itself. It reported on Blacks in urban areas and stated that 57% of African men in White areas in 1978 were born in the areas where they lived, 80% had neither children nor parents in the homelands, 60% had not visited a homeland in the year before the survey, and only 55% still had relatives or friends there.

The Government, therefore, attempts to control the flow of workers to developed areas, firstly by a system of contract labour and the centralization of recruiting through the labour bureaux; secondly, by arrests and prosecutions under the pass laws to the degree that these offenders have accounted for 40% of the South African average gaol population of 100 000; thirdly, by keeping workers’ families in the homelands and by the grossly inadequate provision of housing in urban areas; and, finally, by the policy of physically removing people from White areas and dumping them, frequently in circumstances of the greatest privation, in the Black homelands. The mind-boggling figures removals are of Russian proportions. The number affected is in excess of 2 million. All these, and other measures, have not been able to stop the influx of Blacks into the cities. The Government has, therefore, decided to reinstate the failed border-industries policy and put behind it the total resources of the nation. It amazes me when people say: “But has the Government not moved away from its apartheid policy? Is it not now moving in the right direction?” So determined is the Government to stabilize Black migration to White areas that it is offering the most extravagant incentive packages to any industrialist who will establish his plant in some such border area. They make an offer that it is almost impossible to refuse, particularly when it is the declared intention to reinforce the incentives offered with disincentives applied to metropolitan areas.

An aspect of the incentive schedule is that the areas most unsuitable to industry are given the highest degree of incentive. This can amount to the total subsidization of the wage bill, and will result in a distortion of the economic laws of comparative advantage which should normally influence industry to locate itself in the most suitable place. It is important to comprehend the scale of this programme for the decentralization of industry. In the last 15 months there have been more than 800 applications that have been considered and approved and the amount of capital employed totals something in the order of R3 000 million. This is spoken of by the hon. the Prime Minister and the hon. the Minister of Co-operation and Development with childish delight as a tremendous success. It will not be a success until those factories, without the aid of a subsidy, are at least breaking even. They should, of course, be showing a profit. My belief is that the Government is seriously prejudicing the ability of South African manufacturers to export effectively and to compete in the export market. Its injudicious interference is causing a massive misapplication of the country’s scarce resources to areas where production costs will always be high. The purpose is to counter Black urban migration. Because of its political implications to the apartheid policy, the cost is of no consequence. In fact, no cost-benefit analysis of this has ever been done. Its protagonists will admit, when you drive them into a corner and when it is proved that the creation of a job there can cost up to five times the cost of creating a job in a developed area, that the rationale behind this is not economic at all but political.

Business suspended at 18h30 and resumed at 20h00.

Evening Sitting

Mr. Speaker, when proceedings have suspended I was discussing the fact that in regard to labour, especially its ability to move around the country in search of work, people virtually have no rights at all because there is no Bill of Rights, none at least that the Government is not in a position to negate. We must also remember that it has been the deliberate policy of the Government to negate labourers’ rights and to keep them in a position of servitude.

I have discussed the mechanisms by which the Government controls labour. I have referred to the pass laws, the labour bureau system, the creation of independent States, the loss of citizenship etc. These are aspects of government policy of control which would be effectively countered by the instruction before the House were it to be accepted.

What we are doing in our domestic economy is quite unnecessarily building into it all the problems that at the moment bedevil the international economy. Because of its multinational character, we are creating States which never existed before and are not necessary, we are creating boundaries and imposing restrictions just in order that the work force should become immobile and remain impotent. We do this because Blacks are Blacks. It is flagrant discrimination that does not apply to Whites from Noupoort or Kakamas or for that matter from Greece or England. We flout an economic law and a moral law, and neither of these things can we afford to do. We delude ourselves that we can achieve our objectives when a glance at the President’s Council’s report on demographic trends in South Africa should immediately convince us that we cannot do so, not by oppressive measures such as job reservation and pass laws, not by devious means such as co-opting the employer in the control of influx, not by the deliberate neglect of matters such as housing or by positive strategies such as homeland independence and decentralization policies. The instruction before the House recognize that fact.

Manpower 2000 spells out the rights of workers. It says these rights are to work for fair remuneration and conditions of service, to have access to training, to organize and to belong to an employees’ organization, to negotiate and bargain collectively, to enjoy the protection of safety and health and to have security and protection against unfair labour practices. I suggest that it is highly significant that the most elementary right, the right to move around the country in search of work, is not amongst these specified rights. Without this the Black remains in chains. The proposed constitution helps him not one little bit. He can be kept from work. The proposed constitution does not help him. He is in no position to demand fair remuneration. The proposed constitution will not help him there either. No employer is going to spend money on his training for he is temporary in his position. His stay in South Africa is so tenuous that he cannot be a confident union member. In that respect one only has to remember what happened to the SATS employees in Port Elizabeth who had the temerity to decide that they would like to belong to another union. They were shunted back to their homelands so fast that they have never been heard of since. Such a worker is in no position to query safety and health conditions or seek protection against unfair labour practices. Security is something that he has never even heard of. Do you wonder why the Blacks are cynical about reform? The Bill of Rights proposed by the hon. member for Yeoville would change all this. It could not be adopted without a reconstruction of the constitutional proposals because it is a commitment to precisely those basic human rights the violation of which will inevitably cause the proposed constitution to be rejected and ultimately to fall into disrepute.

Mr. Speaker, at the very start let me state unequivocally that I have little, if any, fundamental objection to any of the rights or freedoms mentioned in the hon. member for Yeoville’s motion. In fact, most of them are fundamental to South African society.

Mossel Bay goes PFP.

I am referring, for example, to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, thought and belief and expression. In this connection I want, with permission, to quote the following words—

By way of an example I also refer to the freedom to try to make a living. In this connection I quote the words of John D. Rockefeller Jnr. which have been engraved on a block of granite in the Rockefeller Centre in New York—

I also wholeheartedly endorse this principle.

By way of an example I also refer to securing one against deprivation of life, liberty, security and property, except in accordance with the fundamental principles of justice, and to freedom which ensures equality before the law and equal protection and benefit of law. In fact, it is part of our rule of law and legal tradition in South Africa. In all my active years within the legal framework I have never come across an infringement of this principle of equality before the law and equal protection.

I have no quarrel with the sentiments contained in the hon. member for Yeoville’s motion, but merely want to point out that several of the rights and freedoms to which the hon. member refers in his motion are contained in the preamble to the Constitution Bill.

Not all of them.

I said “several” I am referring, in this connection, to the freedom of religion and worship, the independence of the judiciary and equality before the law, the protection of the human dignity, life, liberty and property of all—and I emphasize “of all”.

But you know that the preamble does not grant any rights.

I do not think there is any difference of opinion, in this House, about the sentiments contained in the hon. member’s motion, but what there is indeed a fundamental difference of opinion about is the interpretation and presentation of some of those rights and freedoms which the hon. member for Yeoville advocates and which he wants entrenched in the form of a Bill of Rights. In saying that there is a difference of opinion about this, I need go no further than to refer to the speech made by the hon. member for Walmer just before the adjournment for supper. That interpretation the hon. member attaches to the freedom of movement is an illustration of how far hon. members of the official Opposition are prepared to go as far as such a freedom is concerned. All the hon. member for Walmer was doing was endorsing the correctness of the hon. member for Durban Point’s argument earlier this afternoon. With this Bill of Rights the hon. members of the official Opposition merely want to ensure that there is virtually no law on the Statute Book in South Africa that they would not be able to call into question on the strength of the Bill of Rights, as formulated by the hon. member for Yeoville. In the hon. member for Walmer’s speech we have an illustration of how far those hon. members are prepared to go as far as these rights are concerned.

Let me ask the hon. member for Yeoville: When he speaks of freedom of association, peaceful assembly and movement, does this also imply the legalizing of the Communist Party?

You know very well what my attitude is.

I am not asking what the hon. member’s attitude is. I am asking the hon. member for Yeoville a specific question. If this right is to be taken to its logical conclusion and one is forced to allow absolute freedom of association, as advocated in the proposed Bill of Rights, does this not also imply the legalizing of the Communist Party in South Africa? [Interjections.] Let me put a further question to the hon. member for Yeoville: Does the peaceful assembly, which he mentions too, also imply peaceful assembly in accordance with the communist model? As you know. Sir, the communists have all kinds of freedom campaigns, freedom marches and freedom offensives, but that is the freedom of death. Let me ask the hon. member for Yeoville once more: Is that also implied in these fine-sounding phrases? [Interjections.] If not, what restrictions does he place on it? The hon. member for Yeoville does not want to reply, but the hon. member for Houghton may reply if she wants to.

I am quite prepared to reply to that.

Let me also put this question to the hon. member for Yeoville: What are to be accepted as such reasonable limits as are prescribed by law to ensure that the individual by the exercising of his rights does not infringe on the rights of others to exercise their rights or endanger the security of the community and as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society? What precisely is implied by that?

You were not listening.

No, Sir, I was listening very carefully. Those are fine-sounding words and fine sentiments that we can all agree with. The question, however is: What does the hon. member mean by it all?

If you agree, give us your interpretation.

I maintain that in this debate it is not a question of the acceptability of the sentiments contained in the motion. It is a question of whether the relevant rights and freedoms should be entrenched in the form of a Bill of Rights or not. That is fundamentally what it is all about. I am of the opinion that this should be done, and I have specific reasons for this.

The first reason is that I do not believe it to be apposite. [Interjections.] A Bill of Rights is normally accepted, when a State or an organization comes into being, as the basis on which the new State or organization comes into being, something to which the citizens of the new State or the members of the new organization can pledge themselves.

What happened in Canada?

What I am saying is that this is the way in which a Bill of Rights normally comes into being. Without that, without the citizens of a State or the members of an organization pledging themselves to that Bill of Rights when the relevant State or organization comes into being, such a Bill of Rights has little, if any, significance, because then no one regards himself as being bound by it. I shall be returning to this argument at a later stage.

What is the situation in regard to the draft Constitution we are considering at the moment? Clause 1 of the Bill states very clearly that the Republic of South Africa, as a State, will continue to exist as such. There is consequently no question whatsoever of the formation or creation of a new State. In a relative sense the draft constitution is a constitutional point of departure, but fundamentally it is not really a point of departure, being in fact a logical continuation of the constitutional development of the Republic of South Africa which began in 1657 when the first free burghers obtained land at the Cape. This constitutional development is still continuing and will be continuing indefinitely. So in this regard there is no question of a new State or a new dispensation either.

My second reason is that a Bill of Rights is hardly possible under present circumstances. It is hardly possible because of the differences in interpretation and presentation amongst South Africans in general, as has become apparent in the debates in this House.

Why, then, do we not stick to the old Constitution?

An attempt to draw up a Bill of Rights, to put it into words, would simply lead, like the PFP’s national convention policy, to never-ending argument, because in South Africa it is impossible to reach consensus in regard to the interpretation that hon. members of the official Opposition attach to these rights and freedoms.

You are saying that one must not do missionary work amongst unbelievers.

Thirdly, a Bill of Rights is not necessary either. This evening the hon. member for Walmer tried to indicate to us that a Bill of Rights was a prerequisite for the successful implementation of the draft constitution. Were it not for the fact that hon. members of the official Opposition had called the draft constitution into question from the very start, and still do, one could possibly still have attached some value to the hon. member for Walmer’s argument, but coming from an hon. member of a party that is bent on jeopardizing the very possibility of the successful implementation of the draft constitution, the hon. member for Walmer must not blame us if we cannot take his statement seriously.

Whilst in this draft constitution we are, in certain important respects, moving away from the Westminster model of government, certain important elements of the Westminster model of government are being retained. The most important element is perhaps the very fact that constitutional development is also taking place by way of convention. This is expressly confirmed in the draft constitution, for example in clause 94 and other clauses.

Constitutional conventions are stronger than legal provisions in cases where there is a general desire to uphold such conventions—please note, where there is a general desire to uphold such conventions. The fact of the matter is that the fundamental rights and freedoms embodied in the hon. member for Yeoville’s motion are part and parcel of South African society, and that there is indeed a general desire to uphold them.

The fourth and final reason why I am not in favour of the hon. member’s motion requesting a Bill of Rights is because a Bill of Rights as such offers no guarantees. There are numerous examples of rights and freedoms which are embodied in a Bill of Rights but which are not upheld. In fact the hon. member for Yeoville conceded as much and gave examples showing where this happens. The foremost example, which the hon. member for Yeoville did not refer to, is specifically the Bill of Rights of the UN. Where has there ever been a Bill of Rights with finer sentiments, but with one right after another disregarded over the years, rights that are still being disregarded.

Why a Bill of Rights in itself furnishes no guarantee is because laws—this also applies to a Bill of Rights—only make up the skeleton of a society. It is the attitude of the members of that society that gives it bodily substance, that gives it life. A Bill of Rights requires a structure or organization that can enforce adherence to it. The hon. member for Yeoville implied as much. That is why the hon. member for Sandton’s motion, which is also on the Order Paper, is so closely bound up with the hon. member for Yeoville’s motion. I am not in favour of the hon. member for Sandton’s motion, but I maintain that a constitutional court is a prerequisite without which a Bill of Rights would be of no value at all. That is why the hon. member for Sandton’s motion is so closely bound up with that of the hon. member for Yeoville.

Fundamental rights and freedoms can only be upheld provided—and as long as—a community wants to uphold them and is prepared to pay the price for doing so.

Do you want to uphold them?

Yes.

Why do you not do so?

I do. Fundamental rights and freedoms do not take care of themselves. In many parts of the world today freedom is being threatened because people are not prepared to pay the price needed to uphold them, and are not prepared to accept the responsibility without which freedoms cannot be upheld.

Since the hon. member for Yeoville has asked me whether I am prepared to uphold basic rights and freedoms, let me tell him that I am indeed prepared to do so. I am prepared to pay the price for doing so, and I am also prepared to accept the responsibility that this entails. Unfortunately I cannot say as much for all the hon. members in this House.

If a society really has a desire to uphold certain basic rights and freedoms and is prepared to pay the price for doing so, those rights and freedoms will be upheld in that society, even without a Bill of Rights, as they have been maintained throughout the years—without a Bill of Rights—in the Republic of South Africa.

Mr. Speaker, let me say that as far as the hon. member for Mossel Bay is concerned I think that he told the hon. member for Yeoville a few truths here this evening, in particular as regards the sentiment that he ended off with, i.e. that the rights of the individual under the Westminster system as we know it have always been entrenched in the legislature, subject of course to the control of the law courts, in particular the Supreme Court of South Africa.

The hon. member for Mossel Bay started off his speech with an expression that is applicable to the majority of members of this House as well as their parties, and that is that in terms of the terminology and the ideal expressed by the hon. member for Yeoville with regard to the objectives that he would like to achieve, very few of us would say that we disagree with that. But the question really is how to achieve it, and with that goes the question how much individual freedom can be allowed in a democracy. As far as the sentiments of the motion are concerned, let me say that the NRP also believes that if the objectives listed from (a) to (h) in this instruction were ever attained in a society, we would really have achieved the just society.

So why do you not aim at it?

We are certainly aiming at it. But there is a considerable difference between a purely theoretical tautological argument and practical politics which determine the lot and fortune of people on a day-to-day basis. May I remind the hon. member for Yeoville of a mistake that the official Opposition made two years ago when they decided to sign the report of the Buthelezi Commission. As far as the Buthelezi Commission is concerned, it was a wonderful exercise in semantics and, political jargon, but unfortunately it landed up on a library shelf. No practical consequence or meaning for the everyday citizen of kwaZulu resulted from it. Let me say to the hon. member for Yeoville that although we may disagree with his approach towards the determination of a just society, there are many sentiments with which we can agree. I must say the hon. member for Koedoespoort gave us a very good philosophical argument of the relationship between the absolute power and the relative power of both individuals and groups in a society. While, then, we disagree with the “how”, the method advocated by that party, I must certainly say that part of his argument was very relevant to the determination of whether a Bill of Rights is appropriate in any society. We in the NRP also believe that the right of an individual is never absolute. It is always relative to other individuals and a group of individuals, and because of that I think the hon. member for Yeoville will agree that relationships between individuals and groups in any society must be regulated. The question that hon. members, including the hon. member for Koedoespoort, have asked repeatedly this evening and earlier this afternoon is to what extent the individual’s rights can be equated with the right of groups, which are a collection of individuals in society. Who will ultimately determine the elasticity or the degree of freedom that an individual may exercise while he is part of a society?

The courts.

If one believes in democracy then the will of the majority of that society will determine the elasticity and the degree of freedom for the individual.

That is majoritarianism.

It is not majoritarianism. The hon. member confuses democracy with the will of the majority.

No.

I should like to know from the hon. member on what basis a majority party should be elected to exercise its policy in a Westminster type of system? [Interjections.] Does he reject rule by a majority party? Does the hon. member believe that democracy will ultimately be expressed only by a coalition of minorities? [Interjections.] That is the dilemma in which the hon. member finds himself, Mr. Speaker. We in the NRP believe that by way of free, fair and secret ballot elections the will of the majority will be expressed in the legislature. That is the only measure of the degree of freedom allowed for the individual.

Are you in favour of Black majority rule?

Mr. Speaker, the individual can never exercise an individual power greater than the power of the will of the majority. Anybody who believes that is possible is living in the world of theoretical politics and will never be able to grasp practical politics.

For the sake of hon. members of the PFP I should like to point out that when it comes to certain expressions in this instruction moved by the hon. member for Yeoville, and when it makes mention of the freedom of the individual to associate, the converse of that also is to dissociate, and unless one recognizes the freedom to dissociate then it is clear that the freedom to associate has no legitimacy either. If the individual can call upon the legislature to provide him with a Bill of Rights in order to entrench his facility to associate, the group must equally be able to call upon the legislature for the entrenchment of group rights for that specific group as well. What in particular is absent from this instruction is the converse of the individual right. That is the entrenchment of group rights.

The hon. member for Mossel Bay also asked the hon. member for Yeoville …

Mr. Speaker, will the hon. member for Durban North tell us whether he will support the concept of a Bill of Rights if it includes a definition of group rights?

Mr. Speaker, the concept of group and individual rights is not necessarily only embodied in a Bill of Rights. [Interjections.] We believe it is embodied in the whole process of legislation within a democracy. It finds expression throughout all the laws of the country, and not only by way of a Bill of Rights. [Interjections.]

But answer the question!

I have answered the question very clearly. That is that a Bill of Rights is only one mechanism by which individual and group rights can be ensured. The question that has to be asked is whether that mechanism is appropriate for the society in which it is to operate. Here the hon. the Leader of the Opposition, as a sociologist, I presume, will agree with me when I say that certain mechanisms will only find legitimacy and practical effect if they are appropriate for the society in which they must operate.

That is a mere generality.

It is not a generality; it is a fact of life. [Interjections.] In our society, and in societies throughout the world, there is a clear division between two types of societies. On the one hand we have the homogeneous society, and on the other hand we have a predominantly plural society. In a homogenous society the aggregate or majority of people believe in the same value systems; in the same objectives. They predominantly believe in the same objectives in life, and as the Protestant ethics develop we will find a greater emphasis on individualism because the Protestant ethics, as any sociologist with a reasonable modicum of education will be able to tell us, is a prerequisite for individualism, and therefore also for the rise of capitalism. [Interjections.] On the other hand, Mr. Speaker … [Interjections.] Hon. members should go and study that, Sir. If they studied that some time they could learn something. [Interjections.]

The USA is predominantly a Protestant country. It is a country based on the ethics of capitalism and free enterprise, and on aggregate they believe fully in individual rights. A Bill of Rights in a homogeneous society, I believe, will however only operate with the goodwill and the consent of the majority. In no country in the world will a Bill of Rights stand up unless it has the support of the majority in that particular country. Therefore to quote the American example to South Africa is totally irrelevant because America is in essence, in terms of the criteria I have given the hon. member, a homogeneous society. [Interjections.] The majority there are Protestants. They believe in capitalism and private enterprise. They also believe in the rights of the individual. As far as Britain is concerned, by these very criteria it is also homogeneous. South Africa, however, reflects the greatest diversity on earth and is a plural society. A plural society is characterized by differentiation between groups and individuals. A Bill of Rights will only survive in South Africa under a disposition of majority rule. That is the only condition under which it will survive. The question is, however, whether it will in fact survive under majority rule in a plural society such as ours is today. The hon. member for Yeoville quoted freely the German attitude towards the Bill of Rights and I want to ask him which nation in the Western World gave a tinker’s cuss about the overriding of individual rights in Zimbabwe. Did Germany raise a protest against the abrogation of individual rights in Zimbabwe, in Angola, in Mozambique, in Tanzania, in Ghana, in Libya or in Chad? Which western nation was prepared to put its name on the line and say: “We are prepared to fight for individual rights in those societies”?

How do you know they did not make representation …? [Interjections.]

I think the hon. member is quite well informed. He will know that not a single Western nation trading with South Africa was prepared to force a Bill of Rights onto those countries. [Interjections.] We are concerned here with Africa and circumstances in Africa. A Bill of Rights is totally unworkable in a plural society, wherever it may be in the world, and South Africa is a plural society.

Let me illustrate the folly of the arguments of the PFP with the aid of an example given to us by the hon. member for Edenvale today. A Bill of Rights assumes homogeneity throughout a society. It assumes a common society. It assumes a common set of values.

You are talking nonsense.

Well, if one has two different sets of values, how is one going to apply a Bill of Rights which is based on only one of those standards? [Interjections.] I am afraid the hon. members of the PFP have a long way to go.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask the hon. member whether he is aware of the situation in Canada where only a couple of years ago a Bill of Rights was introduced in a country which has a problem in regard to Quebec, a problem in regard to language, in regard to religion and in regard to culture? [Interjections.]

The hon. member for Yeoville is aware of the tension between the English- and the French-speaking communities in Canada. In fact, Quebec and the other States of Canada for a long time advocated separation. Today in Montreal no official memorandum may be written in the English language …

Where is the Bill of Rights now?

Yes, where is the Bill of Rights?

They have got a Bill of Rights.

What good is a Bill of Rights then? [Interjections.]

The hon. member for Yeoville can continue to test examples taken from throughout the world and he will find on the bottom line that a Bill of Rights does not work.

Let me come back to the hon. member for Edenvale. The hon. member for Edenvale will agree, as other intelligent hon. members on that side will, that, in order to apply a Bill of Rights, one must have a common standard applicable to everybody. Unless a Bill of Rights applies equally to everybody, it has no value as a Bill of Rights. The hon. member himself said here today that, if I went to KwaZulu and invoked the Bill of Rights in order to purchase land under freehold title in KwaZulu, I would not be entitled to do so. That is because the group rights of the Zulus are recognized to determine for themselves by local option their format of land tenure. I agree with the hon. member for Edenvale that in a diverse and plural society such as that of South Africa one cannot apply a common standard. The very fact that one can not apply common standards in South Africa means in practice that one cannot apply a Bill of Rights unless one is totally insincere about the ethics and morality of the application of a Bill of Rights. [Interjections.] Let me say also that we do not believe in a Bill of Rights because of the conflict potential it has in a plural society. [Interjections.] The legislature, the House of Assembly of South Africa, is the highest authority in the land. We are representing our communities. We came here on a majority vote in order to represent the people who elected us, if we are not able to protect individuals by legislation, what hope does a Bill of Rights have of doing so?

Why do you not issue a challenge and contest your seat?

You see, Sir, whenever the hon. member for Yeoville gets into a comer he changes tactics. He recognizes that a Bill of Rights is as dead as a kipper in the Antarctic and that is not going to work in the South African society. In fact, it is quite interesting to note that the hon. member does not even have the support of the heavyweights in the PFP for his Bill of Rights as tabled in the form of an instruction. [Interjections.] The hon. member was only allowed to come here with a lovely expression of intent, while in terms of practical output it is not worth very much. That is why we should sympathize with the hon. member for Yeoville.

Let me say again that the conflict potential in the application of a Bill of Rights in a plural society is considerable. What one is going to do, as my hon. leader said toady, is to start a process of litigation to test every single bit of legislation which appertains to group rights in our plural society. This will be a never-ending process, and one will end up with conflict between the courts and the legitimately elected representatives of the population of South Africa. [Interjections.] That of course is what our hon. friend wants. Like the socialists in this world, and to some extent the communists, there are certain factions that can only benefit from instability. They cannot operate under conditions of stability and progress.

The hon. member for Mossel Bay asked the hon. member for Yeoville whether, in terms of paragraph (b) of his instruction, he will allow the communists to operate legitimately in South Africa. The hon. member did not say anything to that, but his colleague the hon. member for Houghton has on many occasions said that under a Bill of Rights the Communist Party will be allowed to operate legitimately in South Africa. [Interjections.] What does the hon. member for Yeoville say to that.

I have said repeatedly that no party that advocates violence … [Interjections.]

I gather from that the hon. member for Houghton and the hon. member for Yeoville differ. [Interjections.] We all know that the aim of the Communist Party is violent revolution and overthrow of the capitalist society. Perhaps the hon. member for Yeoville and the hon. member for Houghton will get together some time and sort out their differences. This country cannot afford the luxury of an experiment to salve the conscience of the PFP. We cannot afford the luxury of trying to construct in this country a constitution as an experiment to discover whether we can do in South Africa what other countries in Africa have failed to do, even with the backing of our Western allies. [Interjections.]

Order! I want to appeal to hon. members not to interrupt continuously. The hon. member may proceed.

Sir, as can be seen from their vociferous reaction, hon. members of the PFP are most interested in my speech. I may also point out to the hon. members of the PFP the impracticality of any attempt to bring about a Bill of Rights in a plural society. I want to ask those hon. members of the PFP who will still be speaking in this debate later, whether they would advocate that polygamy should be disallowed in South Africa. I think the hon. member for Pinetown, who is a very learned and prominent member of the Church, will tell us whether they will outlaw polygamy.

[Inaudible.]

I am referring to the hon. member for Pinelands. Does he envisage that, in order to apply a common standard in South Africa, they would outlaw polygamy?

What does sex have to do with this?

When it comes to the fundamentals of life, the hon. member for Bryanston is in difficulties. [Interjections.]

Order!

Mr. Speaker, let me ask the hon. member for Pinelands and the other hon. members of the PFP: Will they, through their Bill of Rights, enforce integration in schools throughout South Africa? Will they allow a group, as the hon. member for Edenvale has intimated today, certain basic ethnic rights? Let me use my own constituency as an example. If a Black or a group of Blacks applied for admission to any of the secondary schools in my constituency, would they invoke their Bill of Rights to allow those Blacks entry into those schools? [Interjections.] I ask the hon. member to give me an answer: Will they allow the invocation of their Bill of Rights for those individuals to exercise the right to attend those schools? I want an answer to this question. [Interjections.]

Order!

Mr. Speaker, if I may ask the hon. member a question: Would he allow the right of dissociation for that same school in Durban North if they did not want to allow either Afrikaners or Jews to attend that school?

Mr. Speaker, when the hon. members of the PFP cannot answer a question … [Interjections.] I am going to give the hon. member an answer. We believe that in terms of local option any community has the right to establish its own institutions of education. We have debated this before. It is the right of that community, provided it is economically viable, to retain the character of the institutions that they are supporting. [Interjections.] The hon. member can go back to my speech on the Universities Amendment Bill to find the answer to that one. I am, however, basically talking about a residential area which is made up of a number of communities …

These English are dangerous!

No, the hon. member for Yeoville cannot talk like that. He will jealously guard the Jewish institution in South Africa to the death. [Interjections.] I want to ask the hon. member for Yeoville whether I, under this Bill of Rights, can become a member of the Jewish Country Club in Durban and invoke the Bill of Rights?

Yes, of course. [Interjections.]

Mr. Speaker, it is just as well that those hon. members know that this Bill of Rights will never come into operation in South Africa.

I cannot become a member of your country club …

But of course the hon. member can. [Interjections.]

Order!

Mr. Speaker, I have directed some very direct questions at the hon. members and I do hope that they will reply to them in the course of the debate. [Interjections.]

Order! I request hon. members not to keep interjecting even after the Chair has called for order. The hon member for Durban North may proceed.

It is evident from the way in which the hon. member for Yeoville has worded this instruction that he is trying to achieve the best of both worlds. We have a tremendous amount of sympathy with him, because if one looks at the clause following paragraph (h), you will see the dilemma in which the hon. member for Yeoville finds himself. He says that we should have a Bill of Rights in order to guarantee certain individual freedoms, which are listed in subparagraphs (a) to (h). But them the realities strike him and he puts in a qualification by saying that these freedoms can only be exercised on the following basis—

What is the hon. member saying? The individual will still be subject to the laws of the country. Is that correct?

Well, what do you want him to be? Do you want him to be outside the law?

Who will determine the laws of the country? It is this Parliament? Who elects this Parliament? It is the majority of the voters that elect this Parliament. [Interjections.] Therefore, the hon. member on his own admission recognized the fact that a Bill of Rights will be subservient to the laws of a Parliament established by the will of the majority in the country.

Not in the country.

That is our point of departure. Originally when I started this discussion here today I said that a Bill of Rights can only be exercised to the extent to which a majority that has been democratically elected will allow a Bill of Rights to be exercised. Therefore, it is no more than a semantic expression of the intention of the majority of any democratic society and, if it is in fact that, then it synonymous with the expression of the laws passed by the majority in the same legislative assembly. Therefore, as far as we are concerned, a Bill of Rights is superfluous when it comes to the actual and real effects on the rights of an individual. In the classic democratic model, an individual’s rights are determined by the legislative procedure of the majority in the House of Assembly.

The majority of the people.

There sits the majority.

But not of the people.

Of course they are a majority of the people. They are the people who believe in democracy and private free enterprise. Of course, however, the official Opposition have a different majority in mind because they believe in the transfer of power from a White minority to a Black majority. [Interjections.] They signed for this on the Buthelezi Commission. They stand for universal adult franchise on a federal basis that will ensure that every federal State has a Black or non-White majority. When we look at the PFP’s policy of the transfer of power to the majority, combined with a Bill of Rights, we see the impracticality and, in fact, the discrepancy in the logic of their political stance in South Africa. In a plural society it is impossible to utilize a Bill of Rights in order to give the individual greater rights than the groups that make up that particular society. The reality of South Africa is that we are a plural society. We have many different ethnic groups some of which differ so radically from each other that it will be impossible to implement a democratic private free enterprise model in respect of all the groups. Therefore, in the differentiated society that we have in South Africa we in the NRP believe that a Bill of Rights is totally superfluous, it is impractical and will result in greater conflict and instability in South Africa which will be to the disadvantage of the quality of life of every citizen in South Africa. Therefore, we totally reject the instruction and the Bill of Rights.

Mr. Speaker, I agree with much of what the hon. member for Durban North has said. However, I want to follow up what was said by the hon. member for Mossel Bay during the course of his speech. He said that in opposing this motion we are not against either the maintenance or the growth of human rights in our country. On the contrary. What the hon. member for Yeoville has proposed is contained, as hon. members who spoke before me have indicated, in the Preamble that is before us as far as the goals are concerned. Furthermore, he said that many of the goals that the hon. member for Yeoville seeks to achieve are already to be found in our laws. Mr. Justice Van de Sandt-Centlivres had this to say—

Chief Justice Van de Sandt-Centlivres declared that—

I want to go further to say that we understand of course that human rights are fundamentally important and we understand that it is proper that we at this time in our history allow our minds to dwell upon those human rights.

I deeply disagree, however, with the hon. member for Yeoville where he said that as far as he was concerned a Bill of Rights was more important than even a new constitution at this time. That will be the basis of my argument because that is simply not so. There are no shortcuts. The hon. member argued the case for Canada. He told us what the experience in Canada was, but the fact is that by 1960 the Bill of Rights as it appeared in the Canadian experience was not written into the law. I understand that this happened only very recently.

The fact is that if we look at the American experience to which the hon. members of the PFP have referred, we find that liberty did not flow from the constitution. That is a common fallacy. Liberty, the inalienable human rights contained in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, already existed in the laws of the governments of the States. Long before the break with England those rights were already vested in the State governments. That is a fact and it is of cardinal importance. [Interjections.] What about the declaration of Virginia long before? The fact is that those States gave off their rights to the central or federal government simply to protect themselves and to create peace because their country was threatened at that time. Liberty, referred to by the founding fathers and as so many hon. members have spoken about it today, presupposes a responsible selfsufficient representative body politic. That is fundamentally important because that is what we are trying to achieve now this week also in this House. The States simply endorsed the pre-existing rights which were already enjoyed. Frederic Bastiat said a hundred years ago—

Mr. Justice Learned Hand wrote—

The hon. member made much play about the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson in the last centure in America. I should like to read from the Acta Juridica of 1979 in which Mr. Jack Greenberg had something very interesting to say. He was the legal representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in the USA. Those ought to be good credentials for the hon. members. In reading this I should like to say that I think hon. members should reserve the same sympathy and understanding for their own country than what they reserve always for foreign countries. He was speaking here of the American experience—

When he spoke about Brown, he went on to say—

The point is very simply this: A Bill of Rights does not create rights, but simply endorses the fact that pre-existing rights already exist. I can quote no better an authority than the hon. Leader of the Opposition who has said so himself. Declarations, constitutions and Bills of Rights do not guarantee rights. If you do not have the social fabric to uphold them, they simply fall down. We must build those structures so that we can indeed uphold them. That is the challenge to South Africa.

Our constitutional advance must of necessity have regard for our traditions, our history and the reality of our geography. [Interjections.] What we in fact have here on offer, are the arguments of the tyrant, because only a tyrant can offer the unattainable. What is on offer is the impossible dream. It is like the advertisement which states that if you drink a certain elixir you will be thinner, or fatter or more beautiful. What we must have is increasing democratization, participation in orderly, sustainable, interacting structures that are responsive to human needs, always building on the many freedoms that already exist in our common law, our criminal law and in our statute law. Bismarck said that “one can advance the clock, but that for all that, time does not go any more quickly”. That is the lesson of history. The hon. member for Yeoville spoke about Magna Carta in 1215. The fact of the matter is that Magna Carta was no panacea even for their time. In 1381 there was the Peasant’s Revolt under Wat Tyler, there was the marching on the Palace of John of Gaunt, the taking of the Tower of London Bridge and so on. From Magna Carta to the Petition of Rights in 1628, 413 years elapsed. The American example is upheld to us as the model we must follow. One has high regard for many American traditions, but the fact of the matter is that in 1791 with the American Bill of Rights, in spite of the amendments to the constitution, in spite of the Reconstruction amendments which came between 1865 and 1870, the Twelfth Amendment on slavery and the Fifteenth Amendment on the right to vote, we find that more than 100 years elapsed before, in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education, those rights were ratified on 19 May 1979.

It could not have been in 1979.

The case began in 1954, but judgment was given only on 19 May 1979. Hon. members should get their facts right.

Are you seriously suggesting that the United States Supreme Court took 25 years to give judgment?

The judgment came on 19 May 1979 …

Which case?

Brown. [Interjections.] I will pass the hon. member the relevant record if he does not believe me. The fact of the matter is that in the 100 years preceding 1940, 3 833 people were lynched by lynch mobs in America south of the Mason-Dixon line. 3 833 people were hanged by lynch mobs south of Mason-Dixon line in that 100 years under that grand constitution and under those grandiloquent ideals that were contained in their constitution and in their conventions. What is absolutely true—one hon. member mentioned this earlier and others have talked about it—is that there are not only rights in this world but also obligations and duties. That is vitally important because we do not have to go back to Magna Carta. If we go back to the fountain of our morality, i.e. the Old Testament, to Deuteronomy, were we read the Ten Commandments, we find nowhere in the Ten Commandments that there is any reference to rights—human rights or any other kind of rights. In the Ten Commandments we have only obligations and duties. The Ten Commandments do not tell us about the responsibility or the rights of parents or children. They tell us that the duty of the child is “honour thy father and thy mother”. That was the Mosaic law.

Moses slipped up.

The fact of the matter is that it is from those duties and obligations contained in the Ten Commandments that enormous rights flowed. A great Canadian expert on freedom said—

The fact of the matter is that it is not a right to adopt a civilized life-style. It is the duty of everyone. It is in fact the duty of every new generation because every new generation has to be taught not to demand, not to grasp and not to seize, but to give, to yield and to produce. Bills of Rights to distribute human rights are in fact an illusion. A person does not even have the right to walk down the street in safety unless someone else assumes the duty and the obligation to protect that person from molestation, and that is the lesson—that the obverse of the coin must be emphasized. Somebody once said that one cannot give Peter a right without imposing an obligation upon Paul. It was also said that if Peter is to be a pumpkin eater, then Paul must be a pumpkin picker.

With regard to paragraph (h) I just want to say on this question of equality of opportunity that it is a mirage. I say it is a mirage, a noble mirage and a beautiful mirage, but a mirage nevertheless. It has a corrosive effect upon humanity. I want to quote no less an authority than Hayek. Hon. members will know that when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of Great Britain she sent copies of some of Hayek’s works to all of the Directors-General, or their equivalent, of the departments of State in Great Britain. In his book Law, Legislation and Liberty he wrote the following with regard to equality of opportunity—

[Interjections.] What I am talking about is equality of opportunity and I was quoting Hayek on equality of opportunity. There are no short-cuts; not for the world community, not for South Africa. There are no panaceas, no slogans that will resolve our problems. We will not be able to escape into a world of illusions, of high-flown, grandiloquent phrases. What we will have to do is carefully, sensibly and sympathetically to bring about structures for our society, which will sustain and uphold the noble objectives, some of which have indeed been mentioned by the hon. member for Yeoville. Perhaps the time will come, when we will have achieved these things, that we will be able to talk again about the kind of concept put forward here today by the hon. member for Yeoville.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Maitland has followed very much along the same lines as previous speakers on the NP side He has, however, endeavoured to give some substance to his speech by quoting from a number of authorities. He will nevertheless forgive us for not taking his quotations terribly seriously when we find that one of the major statements he makes is quite incorrect. I should like to quote for his edification from a book entitled Congress vs. the Supreme Court. 1957-1960, written by C. Herman Pritchard.

[Inaudible.]

All right. I am quoting from that book now, as follows—

You will note, Mr. Speaker, that the book refers to the decision which was taken in 1954. The hon. member for Maitland, however, tells us that the decision was only taken in May 1979. How little does he know! He reads a book but does not realize that the decision was actually taken in 1954—25 years earlier.

1979 was the 25th anniversary of the decision. [Interjections.]

What he is referring to is the 25th anniversary of the decision.

That is correct.

He does not refer to the decision itself. [Interjections.] Nevertheless, I am quite prepared to accept that the hon. member has made a mistake in that regard. It is very difficult, however … [Interjections.] Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Maitland has kindly sent me the book from which he quoted earlier, and I should like to quote from it too, as follows—

That is exactly what I have told hon. members. Mr. Speaker. [Interjections.] If the hon. member has any more books, I should ask him please to keep them. [Interjections.]

He should rather not read them.

Well, everybody can make a mistake, Mr. Speaker. I should, however, like to continue now in a more serious vein. The hon. member for Maitland had followed many other hon. members who have spoken today in saying that the wording of the instruction before the House is fine. The hon. member for Durban Point, and hon. members of every party in the House indeed—except hon. members of the PFP—have described the instruction as a series of platitudes. Now what makes words platitudes? They are platitudes if there is no way in which they can be enforced; if they have no substance, no drive. The hon. member for Maitland and his colleagues want to tell us now that what we want is not a Bill of Rights, which can be enforced, but that we actually want a statement of intent; of high sounding words, just like the Preamble to this present Constitution Bill. There is no way in which they can have any force in law. They are mere platitudes. That is the point. That is the distinction. That is the distinction which the hon. member for Maitland has failed to grasp, like he has failed to grasp so many other truths.

He wants a “Bill of Platitudes”. [Interjections.]

I must say, Mr. Speaker, that we expected the NP to oppose this instruction. It came as no surprise to us when hon. members on the NP side said they would oppose this instruction. We were not surprised when the CP opposed the instruction because on an issue like human rights there is no real distinction between the NP and the CP. Both do not fit in very comfortably and easily with their whole attitude and their whole temperament. Human rights is something foreign. It is part of the left wing front, part of left wing liberalism, and therefore it must be rejected. However, let me say to the hon. members of the NRP that I confess I was surprised when their hon. leader, who was in turn supported by the hon. member for Durban North, said here that they rejected the Bill of Rights as a series of platitudes which will not work and as inappropriate. Why was I surprised?

This is not a new attitude.

Wait a minute. Why was I surprised? Let us go back a little. That hon. member is very fond of going back to who said what, where and when. Let me then tell him what his former party did. He will immediately say: “We are no longer the United Party; we are the NRP”. However, when it comes to an election, they go from door to door saying: “We are the heirs of the old United Party; we still have the mantle of the old United Party”. They must make up their minds. In Hansard of 1951, for example, one finds that the former Leader of the Opposition …

Strauss.

That is right. He is on record as saying …

What did Jan van Riebeeck say?

Hang on. That hon. member is one to talk! This is the first time today he has not quoted Verwoerd. [Interjections.] Yes, this is the first time he has not quoted him, either to criticize him and say he is not quite relevant for today or as though his words were written in stone and have been handed down from the mountain top. The fact of the matter is that it was the United Party’s determined view that, should they come into power, they would introduce a Bill of Rights into the constitution of South Africa.

Strauss said so, but it was never official policy. [Interjections.]

But he was the Leader of the Opposition …

I know he was, but it was never official policy.

… and he used those words in the House.

You have also said some idiotic things in your time. [Interjections.]

Ah, so he said some idiotic things! All right. So, his statement that the Bill of Rights was going to be introduced should the United Party come into power is nothing else but an idiotic statement.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask the hon. member a question?

No. Wait a minute. The hon. member must take his medicine now. He has a lot more coming.

Do you believe in a qualified franchise? [Interjections]

The hon. member must just keep quiet and listen for a change.

If the hon. members in those benches say: “Ah, yes, but that was 1951”, I want to ask them where they were in 1977 when a private member’s motion was debated in this House. At that time their spokesman supported that motion introduced by the hon. member for Yeoville. He supported it on behalf of …

But a private member’s motion is not official policy. [Interjections.]

Must I then take it that, when I listen to the hon. leader of that party in the House, I cannot ever know whether what he is saying is official policy or not?

Mr. Speaker, may I ask the hon. member a question?

No, Sir that hon. member has had his turn. I want to deal with that party. Let me develop my argument. That hon. party has performed a complete somersault, because one of the things one always remembers of the former United Party was their emphasis on civil liberties.

Why is Harry not listening to you?

Over the years that was whittled away and more and more they ended up on the fence. Today they have toppled right over.

Why is Harry not listening to you?

Today they have turned their backs on the heritage they should be proud to claim. They have said: “No, we do not want a Bill of Rights.”

Whose instruction is this?

Listen to this. That hon. party, together with the NP and the CP, say: “We are for conscience in religion, but we do not want to see it enshrined; we are for freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including the freedom of the Press and other media of communication, but do not ever put it in such a way that it can be enforced; we are for freedom of association, peaceful assembly and movement …” Those are all so many words. The hon. member for Mossel Bay said: “I can agree with every one of the paragraphs from (a) tot (h), but we do not know what it means”. What do words mean?

I do not know what meaning you attach to words. [Interjections.]

Why does the hon. member not follow the logic of his own argument and say that he likes the contents of paragraphs (a) to (h) and that he will leave it to the impartial judiciary to interpret?

On what basis?

That hon. member does not like the courts at all because they must not be allowed to interpret unless they do it in terms of NRP policy. [Interjections.] We are prepared to trust the courts. That is the point.

One can only look at the instruction before us, at natural law, at the Magna Carta of 1215, particularly at section 29, at the Petition of Rights in 1627 and finally at the Bill of Rights of 1688 in Great Britain, the American constitution—we have heard a great deal about that and I am not going to go into that again—and at the developments in post World War II throughout Europe, and indeed many parts of the world, to see why acceptance was gained for the need to protect individuals against the arbitrary exercise of the power of the State. That is the major point. One can also look at what took place in the Federal Republic of Germany, at the Declaration of Independence by the State of Israel in 1948, at the constitution of India in 1949 and at the Nigerian constitution of 1959. One can also think of the Bill of Rights of Canada in 1960, which was referred to by my hon. colleague.

All of these emphasize and stress the need for a Bill of Rights as being essential to protect the individual against the arbitrary exercise of the power of the State. It is generally accepted that power does corrupt and that total power corrupts totally. We all accept that. And yet, when one wants to build in safeguards on behalf of individuals and groups hon. members of parties in this House have the audacity to get up and say that they do not believe in Bills of Right, that they are not necessary and that they do not like them. They say they do like all the words, but let us stop with the words and not give it any force in law. After all, it is very inconvenient to clutter up the courts. Is that not a terrible thing to do? The Government may go on denying people basic human rights, but the courts should not be cluttered up, whatever we do. What sort of argument is that? [Interjections.] I really cannot understand it. I believe those who have dared to resist the introduction of a Bill of Rights into the constitution of South Africa are one day going to be judged for their actions.

The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was accepted in 1948. It was a more general commitment to human rights and received overwhelming support from member nations. The two countries, which refused to sign the declaration were of course the Soviet Union and South Africa. It is very interesting company South Africa often keeps. Oh yes, another country was Saudi Arabia.

I now want to look at the underlying reasons for the necessity for a Bill of Rights in South Africa. In the first place I put it to the House that there are certain basic rights which members of every community, including in South Africa, are entitled to enjoy. We have set these out in a notice of instruction. Whilst we would never dream of suggesting that every single word in this notice of instruction must be regarded as inflexible and written in stone, it certainly highlights the fundamental rights which ought to be enjoyed by all.

The second reason for a Bill of Rights is the question of entrenchment.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask the hon. member what the decision by the University of Cape Town that Minister should not be allowed on the campus means. Is that in accordance with the so-called Bill of Rights?

Obviously the hon. the Deputy Minister is very worried because he was looking forward to an invitation. [Interjections.] However, let me answer his question. Let me correct the hon. the Deputy Minister first. The motion moved at the public meeting, which was read out by a very distinguished South African—I cannot remember his name now … [Interjections.] Yes, his name was Andrew Boraine. That is right. What did he say? He urged that student body not to invite members of the Cabinet to the university Campus. [Interjections.] No one bans them like the Government does to others. [Interjections.] I think Cabinet Ministers ought to be invited. I think they should go there because they make such a laughing stock of themselves. Let them go.

If there is a Bill of Rights, they could go to court.

That is right. If there was a Bill of Rights the hon. the Deputy Minister would still be able to go to university. How about that? [Interjections.] Much more serious, if there was a Bill of Rights, the Government would not be able to ban my son. That is much more serious. [Interjections.]

[Inaudible.]

No, not at all. [Interjections.] take it to court. That seems to have silenced the hon. the Minister. As far as I am concerned, however, he can go around and say the same foolish things. [Interjections.]

Order!

Mr. Speaker, could I have some protection from that hon. Minister?

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order: Would you give our members some protection?

The hon. the Minister of Constitutional Development and Planning has certain rights, but so do I.

The hon. member may proceed.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker,

The second reason is that the entrenchment from legislative or executive abuse or transgression is necessary and desirable in a just society. The third reason for a Bill of Rights is that a good and reliable system of overseeing the entrenchment of basic rights is through the judiciary and not through platitudes or statements of intention made by politicians. We are prepared to trust the judiciary. Why does the Government resist a Bill of Rights? Quite clearly, no provision is made in the constitution for an entrenched Bill of Rights. It is for this reason that we have been compelled to move this instruction. It is true that the President’s Council rejected the need to incorporate a Bill of Rights in the proposed new constitution. Paragraph 9.16 of the report reads as follows, and I quote—

In other words, the President’s Council was of the opinion that individual human rights already enjoys a high degree of protection in South Africa and therefore a Bill of Rights was unnecessary. Anyone who has followed the debates in recent years in this House on the question of a Bill of Rights, would not have been surprised by the conclusion reached by the President’s Council. For example, it is the kind of position that was taken up by speakers on that side of the House in the 1977 debate which took place in this House on a private member’s motion moved by the hon. member for Yeoville. It was clear that the NP had strong views as to why a Bill of Rights would not find a place in a South Africa constitution. I quote for example the then hon. member for Waterkloof. He was the first speaker on that side of the House at that time, and he said—

A remarkable statement:

Quite correct.

However, he offered a second reason. Obviously the hon. members immediately to my left will also agree with this, I presume. He said—

In this he was very strongly supported by the hon. member for Pretoria Central. He quotes with approval his friend and colleague, as he referred to him then. However, that was in 1977 and I am sure that is not the position any longer. As I said right at the beginning, however, I have no doubt that the NP and the CP are still one in their fundamental objections to a Bill of Rights. The member for Pretoria Central expressed his concern in the form of a question. In Hansard, col. 841 of 4 February. 1977, he conceded that constitutionally the courts could protect human rights under a Bill of Rights but, he asked—

That is quite a remarkable question. He then went on to make this significant statement—

I do not know whether the hon. member still stands by this statement that he made then. He is not in the House now but perhaps somebody else could speak for him. This was what the hon. member said in 1977. He said that if problems arise in the country, the fundamental question is: Who has his finger on the trigger? It is not the courts but it is who has his finger on the trigger. Do the NRP agree with that? They have nothing to say. Let me put the question then to the hon. the Minister. Does the hon. the Minister agree with the sentiments expressed and never refuted by the hon. member for Pretoria Central? He said, and I quote again—

I shall reply to that.

I hope you will. It is clear, therefore, that the President’s Council was simply echoing the views long held by the NP. The main point made in the 1977 debate and again by the President’s Council was that we do not need a Bill of Rights. It is simply unnecessary because the basic rights of the individual and of minorities are already sufficiently protected. However, this is of course demonstrably untrue. The South African legal system is based on the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. This means that Parliament may promulgate any law it wishes …

And does!

… and no court of law is competent to pronounce on the validity of any act of Parliament other than an act which appeals or amends the entrenched sections. Prof. Dugard has observed that adherence to the principle of parliamentary sovereignty—

In this way legislative enactments have violated human rights and fundamental freedoms in South Africa. I bring as another witness no less a person than Mr. Justice M. M. Corbett who said the following at the Human Rights Conference in Cape Town—

That was said by Mr. Justice M. M. Corbett, not some so called wild-eyed Prog sitting here in these seats.

In particular, race has become the dominant feature and has severely affected basic human rights in South Africa. For many years now, race in South Africa has affected the question of marriage—it is not sacred—sexual intercourse, employment opportunities, salaries and wages, residence, occupation, movement, education, political rights and separate amenities among others. The list is endless.

Especially moving through Pinelands.

The harsh truth of our society is that what is at the heart of a Bill of Rights, that there should be equality before the law, regardless of race, colour, sex, marital status, is not applicable in South Africa. In addition, there are other substantive rights which have been abrogated in South Africa and which in a Bill of Rights are regarded as essential freedoms, for example freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of association and freedom of protest. I have not even mentioned the question of arbitrary imprisonment, detention without trial and bannings. In other words, there is an absolute, clear difference of opinion between that side of the House and this side of the House. The Government believes that the basic rights of the individual are protected and obviously the NRP supports that view. We hold the contrary view and I submit that the facts are on our side. If they are in dispute, just ask any Black man, any Coloured man or any Asian man in South Africa if he has human rights under the protection of the Government today.

I have mentioned the first reason why the Government considers a Bill of Rights not necessary. It says that the individual is totally protected. The second reason is that we do not mention group rights. There is no reason at all why the hon. member for Pretoria Central could not have moved an amendment which would simply include the word “groups”. If one looks at the second instruction which we shall debate—the hon. member for Mossel Bay is quite right, one has to hold the two instructions together—what does one read in it? I quote—

It is not the Bill of Rights which protects them; it is the constitutional courts.

The hon. member has received the message! Will he now vote for us? [Interjections.]

The third reason why the Government will not support a Bill of Rights is that it believes such a Bill of Rights is unworkable, “it is not worth the paper it is written on”. This is a remarkable argument if one bears in mind that the Government has agreed to such a Bill of Rights in a draft constitution for South West Africa/Namibia. The NP is there, the Afrikaner is there, everybody is there. They have the same problems: Ethnic groups, a heterogeneous population, conflicting opinions, differences on their borders, inequalities, rule by minority for a long time—all the same problems. It is nevertheless all right for them. The hon. leader of the CP, I believe, will be going there and I suggest that the people of South West Africa should be told too that the Bill of Rights is not worth the paper on which it is written. Yet, the Government says it is fine. The Government agrees with that constitution for South West Africa, but not for South Africa. What is the fundamental difference? The one is a mandated territory and the other is a sovereign country. [Interjections.] The hon. members should look at the situation as it exists in both countries and then they will realize that they do not have a leg to stand on. One cannot use the argument.

There are two other reasons why the Government does not want a Bill of Rights. The first is that in the final analysis they put their trust in the power of the security of the State, the military. It is the trigger that counts. The State Security Council assumes more and more power in South Africa by the day and real decisions are no longer made in the Cabinet or in the caucus; they are made in that council. If problems arise in the country, the fundamental question is: Who has his finger on the trigger? Here I am quoting one of the hon. members on the side of the Government.

The Government has debased some of the great values by describing them as a part of a left wing plot to overthrow the Government. What could a Bill of Rights achieve for this country? First of all I believe it could help to point the way to consensus government, because if we could get consensus on the basis of a Bill of Rights, then I believe we would have started somewhere—we would have joint decision-making. Secondly, a Bill of Rights could educate all South Africans. There is enormous insensitivity in this area and deprivation goes on apace, with very few people worrying about it if they are not part of the deprived mass. Prof. Marius Wiechers has written very eloquently about this insensitivity, this need for education in human rights. I believe that this Bill of Rights could alert South Africans to an awareness of their rights and enable human rights to be enforceable in a court of law. It would give substance to what is often a hollow note in the preamble, which speaks in such lofty terms. This would give it force in a court of law. I believe this is very important too.

Finally, I believe it will be a check on party political abuse. A Bill of Rights would provide basic safeguards for all South Africans because its implementation would be entrusted to an independent and impartial judiciary to serve as a check on party political abuse. The sanctity of human rights would no longer depend on the whim of a party, no matter which party is in control, but rather on the impartial judiciary. That is why I support this instruction.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Pinelands had an axe to grind with the NRP about a party to which all of them once belonged and which has died a long time ago.

The hon. member also tried to put forward some arguments in support of the instruction of the hon. member for Yeoville. I will return to the instruction of the hon. member for Yeoville shortly, but first want to refer briefly to what the hon. member for Pinelands said. He said that one of the main reasons why our country should have a Bill of Rights is that every person has certain basic rights that have to be guaranteed somewhere. That statement in itself is not true and the hon. member for Yeoville also realized that it was not true as a statement on its own. One has to qualify that, as the hon. member for Yeoville has done in his instruction. To his paragraphs (a) to (h) he has added the words “such freedom to be subject only to such reasonable limits as are prescribed by law …”. Every right must be limited by the rights of other people, and a number of speakers have pointed this out already. We are worlds apart, and where I am worlds apart from the hon. member for Pinelands is in regard to the way in which one interprets the term “subject only to such reasonable limits”. Who is going to interpret that and on what basis? That is our problem. We will never be able to convince each other.

*I now return to the instruction of the hon. member for Yeoville. On first reading through this instruction I wrote down four things. The first thing was that the instruction was a motion of no confidence in South African common law, because all the provisos in paragraphs (a) to (h) are already guaranteed by our law. The hon. member for Pretoria Central, other hon. members on this side of the House and of other Opposition parties have already pointed this out and I therefore do not want to elaborate on this any further. However, I want to challenge the hon. member for Yeoville and the hon. member for Walmer to mention one of the matters listed in paragraph (a) to (h) which are not guaranteed by our legal system at this very moment, while we are gathered here this evening. They cannot do so.

The second thing I wrote down was that the instruction of the hon. member amounted to a motion of no confidence in our courts. He is suggesting that neither in that past nor at this moment have our courts—without a Bill of Rights—maintained our common law and our existing legal principles, nor will they do so in future. The hon. member wants to give our court specific prescriptions, statutory prescriptions. He therefore does not have the confidence in our courts which we on this side of the House have.

The third thing I wrote down was that in his instruction the hon. member was assuming a usurping of power by the State in the past, something against which the citizen’s rights and freedoms have to be protected by means of a Bill of Rights. This is a serious accusation to make against the State, the more so because the hon. member did not give a single valid reason for this assumption.

A fourth thing I also wrote down was that this instruction was politically inspired. It is a political gimmick. This Government has been in power now for 35 years without an effective Opposition. The strongest opposition it had in the past expired in 1976 and no longer exists. It disappeared. At present there are three Opposition parties in this House. The one, of which the hon. member for Yeoville is a leading member, has become completely irrelevant in our politics owing to their boycott policy. The second Opposition party has fled from reality and has no support among reasonable people. The third party sitting to my immediate right, the NRP, is a small party without any power base. However, as is quite clear from what the hon. member for Pinelands said to the hon. members of the NRP a moment ago, the hon. member for Yeoville does not want to enter into a coalition or co-operate with the NRP and even less with the CP. However, this is a situation which the hon. member for Yeoville finds extremely galling. After all, we know him. He wants to have a say. He wants to have control. He wants to manipulate something somewhere. I now want to quote to the hon. member what Dr. Thomashausen said, something with which the hon. member will probably be in full agreement. It reads as follows—

He then goes on to say—

This is what really galls that hon. member. The hon. member knows that his party is a “spent force” in South Africa. He knows that he and his party will never be placed in a position, through the ballot box, of exercising any control over the wielding of power in South Africa.

Do not be too sure. I am safer in Yeoville than you are in Ermelo.

The hon. member should ask the hon. member for Johannesburg North how many people attended his meeting in Ermelo. Then we can talk again. However, that hon. member and his party want to get in by the backdoor, by believing that by giving the courts a testing right they will be able to control the course of events to a greater extent.

We therefore reject the instruction of the hon. member for four basic reasons, namely (a) it is unnecessary; (b) it is presumptuous; (c) it has no merits; and (d) it is based on political fear. Let us examine the instruction more closely and analyse and assess it on the basic of three considerations: That of principle, a philosophical and juridical consideration and a practical consideration.

I shall begin with the principle of the instruction. Here we can say that the instruction deals with the relationship between the State on the one hand and the citizen on the other, within the State context. The main question which then arises is what we have to do to ensure that relationship is not changed in a revolutionary manner or outside the law, or disrupted by the improper exercising of the State’s power. The hon. member for Yeoville’s solution to this is a Bill of Rights. He and his party believe that the solution to the tension between Government and subject, if it arises, has to be sought in the defining of the subject’s so-called fundamental human rights. That view of the hon. member has its origin in humanistic philosophy, in which the individual comes first. It considers the individual, and his so-called rights and freedom, of more importance than the interest of the State or the order which has to be maintained by the State. The problem we therefore have with the hon. member’s approach, is that his view of human rights is linked to his own view of what the individual and his task, his position and his destination in the State set-up are. Of course this is a completely subjective view because we each have our own views, and the view of each of us, even if it is within a party context, has to be seen as subjective.

If the courts are given the testing rights which the hon. member for Yeoville suggests and wants to give to them, the dilemma then lies in deciding which one of these many approaches will be used by a specific court as a point of departure, for example, to decide what is meant by “reasonable limits as are prescribed by law”. This is only one of the matters such a court will have to adjudicate on.

As far as these matters are concerned, the hon. members on this side of the House and I adopt the Christian standpoint. It is stated in the preamble to this Constitution Bill as well as in many other laws of this country that South Africa adheres to Christian values. From that point of view we say that the basis for the relationship between people and the State is the truth in the light of God’s word. This is the basis of our entire legal system, and the truth principle is also the maintaining factor for the spheres of life of both the State and the citizens. We also say that the State is one of the spheres of life in the temporary reality because every citizen of the State finds himself in a variety of these spheres of life. He finds himself in the sphere of life of the State, the church, the community, the family, etc. In none of these spheres of life is the legal sphere, however, absolute. Many hon. members on this side of the House have already pointed this out. Each one of these spheres of life must after all recognize and respect the legal sphere of the other, and neither the State nor the citizen is above the law.

An equilibrium must therefore exist and be maintained between the interests of the State and the interests of the citizen, and when they interfere in each other’s legal spheres, we are in conflict with the established principle of sovereignty in one’s own sphere. If the State interferes in a legal sphere in which it does not belong, the citizen may resort to the private law to protect his interests. If the citizen does this against the State, the State may use public law and constitutional law to call the citizen to order. To summarize I can therefore say that the hon. member for Yeoville’s Bill of Rights places too much emphasis on the rights of the individual without ensuring and accommodating the interests of State and its maintenance.

In the second place, from a juridical-philosophical viewpoint the main criticism against the hon. member for Yeoville’s instruction is that it gives the citizen an extra-juridical basis to on which to regulate his legal relationship with the State, and this will lead to a disturbance in and even a severing of the relationship. After all, the hon. member for Yeoville’s Bill of Rights is based on certain fundamental human rights. However, if one pursues this to its logical conclusion one arrives at the origin of this idea, viz. “one man, one vote”. That is why the instruction comes from that party. However, that concept is not a legal principle but a slogan. Now that hon. member and his party want to introduce a legal principle into our legal dispensation by means of a slogan which is totally unacceptable to us. If we apply the test of truth we find that it is not true that all people are equal before the law. That is not a legal principle. It is not true. Nor is there any truth in the concept of the “one man, one vote” slogan, because this involves the de-christianization of the dispensation of talents by the Creator Himself. With this instruction that party wants to alter the creation. Nowadays the world is full of these slogans. It is so full of the rights and freedoms people are supposed to have that there is no place left to discuss the obligations people have, the obligations of the citizen towards the State and the citizen towards his fellow-citizens. No, Sir, one does not simply have rights. One has the rights which the law gives one and one only protects those rights by means of other legal norms which are based on true legal principles and not by means of slogans. That is why the instruction of the hon. member is totally unacceptable to us from a jurisprudential point of view.

There is another matter and that is the practical consideration. So many of my colleagues have however referred to this that I only want to mention two of them. The first is that our courts will be politicized. This is a necessary consequence of a Bill of Rights. In the second place this is going to create legal uncertainty. Some of my colleagues have already raised that argument. I want to conclude by saying that the instruction of the hon. member and his party is unacceptable to us and we shall vote against it.

Mr. Speaker, I listened with very great interest to the various statements made by the hon. member for Ermelo. Two in particular come to mind. He said that the introduction of a Bill of Rights and the testing rights of the courts would amount to a motion of no confidence in the Government; secondly it would lead to politicization; and, thirdly, the testing rights of the courts would interfere with the State. It amazes me that, after 200 years of existence of the greatest power on earth, the United States of America, where these testing rights have been part of the constitution, none of the things the hon. member mentioned have ever taken place. There is not politicization, there is no interference and, certainly, there is not cluttering up of the courts. It seems to me that the method in which the Supreme Court of the USA operates is not understood by the hon. members on the opposite side of the House. [Interjections.] The situation in America is quite simple. There is a Bill of Rights and the testing power is in the hands of the Supreme Court. I will quote a recent case, namely the case of Debakey vs. the Regents of the University of California.

What about the politicizing of the courts?

I will deal with that just now. [Interjections.] Debakey, a white person, was about 34 years of age, had a Ph. D and had tried to enrol for a degree in medicine at the University of California at Berkley. He was refused entrance. The basis on which entrance was refused was that the United States Government had passed a law whereby quotas had to be given to minority groups.

Like Dr. Gerrit Viljoen?

The quota had therefore to be filled by a certain number of people who were either Black or Hispanic. The quota had been filled and he could not gain entry to the university. Debakey then appealed against the decision on the basis that this was reverse discrimination. He went to the Californian High Court and lost his case. He then went to the Appeal Court of California and also lost his case. He then went to the Supreme Court where it was adjudged that the United States had no right to introduce that particular law because it was reverse discrimination. That is the situation. It is the exact opposite of what hon. members on that side of the House are talking about, namely that only Blacks are receiving rights. There are also rights for Whites, as for any person in the United States.

Let me read what the judges of the Supreme Court of the United States have to say about this interference. I will quote just two. In the case of Elkinson vs. Deliesseline in 1823 Justice Johnson said—

I also want to quote what Justice Frankfurter in the case of Minersville School District vs. Gobitis in 1940 said. This is where the question of no-confidence in the State will be proved to be completely wrong. Justice Frankfurter said—

In other words, it is both the courts and the legislature that are responsible for upholding the constitution.

I want to quote from the speech by James Madison at the very first session of the American House of Representatives on 8 June 1789. He said—

That is the point. It was two years earlier that the members of the Constitutional Congress met in Philadelphia and it was only on 26 September 1787 that they signed the new governmental framework which had to be sent to the various States that existed in the United States for them to ratify before the Congress could be formed. The system then was that the power had been given by the various States to the constitutional congress to draw up a constitution. It was ten months later that sufficient States ratified this constitution. It was only 17 months after they had signed that the first election could take place in the USA. There was no Bill of Rights in that original constitution. It was at the first session of the United States Congress that the need for a Bill of Rights was discussed, debated and agreed to. How was it agreed to? It was not agreed to in the form of a law. They introduced ten amendments to the constitution and it is those ten amendments which constitute the Bill of Rights in the USA. It was not a document that was drawn up and specially put into the constitution. Congress amended the constitution which the various states afterward ratified it is those first ten amendments which compare the Bill of Rights, and this is the testing power which the court was given. It is important to note that the Bill of Rights was embodied in the ten amendments and that it is not a separate document. The amendment came from the legislator, not from the convention. That is why the ultimate success of the American constitution is due to the fact that it has been a slow, deliberate process of constitution-making. It was not an attempt to rush everything through in a few weeks. The Bill of Rights is the high point of a courageous struggle to pass on the relatively new idea that the rule of law must for ever stand as a check upon Governmental power. That is the crux. Certain freedoms are rights and not privileges at the will of the legislature. There are certain rights that one has to possess and no legislator can have any right whatsoever to take them away from any one.

Let me inform all hon. members in this House that the history of the Bill of Rights is the history of liberty itself. The Afrikaans word for liberty is “vryheid” and the history of the Afrikaner is embellished with this struggle for liberty. In 1799—this was mentioned by the hon. member for Mossel Bay—the Free Burghers petitioned the Council of Policy of the Dutch East India Company. That company was the government of the day. Why did they petition them? They petitioned them for one of the rights mentioned in this instruction to the House and that was the freedom …

Mr. Speaker, may I ask the hon. member a question?

No, I do not have time. They appealed for the freedom to pursue the gaining of a livelihood and the freedom which would ensure equal opportunity to the individual in the economic and social structure of the country. The Free Burghers asked for the right to sell their produce direct to passing ships, not only direct to the company, and also to sell it to Holland and not only Batavia. These are two of the rights which we have asked to be entrenched. From 1795 to 1803 the Republics of Graaff-Reinet and Swellendam were established as a direct result of the ideals of the American and the French revolutions with particular reference to the American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Finally, the reason for the mass emigration of Afrikaners from the Cape during the Great Trek from 1836 to 1838 was to search for liberty and because of a desire for certain rights, particularly the right of freedom from the deprivation of liberty and the security of property. They certainly did not believe that the Colonial Office, the government of the day, were acting towards them in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. These are the rights which we want entrenched. Lastly, in Piet Retief’s Manifesto, published in the Grahamstown Herald it specifically states “we are resolved to uphold the just principles of liberty”.

The whole purpose of a written Bill of Rights is to incorporate written guarantees of personal freedom into a constitutional document in which articles define and limit the area of legitimate legislative action by the legislature. That is its purpose—to have a written guarantee. The word given to me by hon. members on the other side of the House and particularly by the hon. member for Durban Point is not worth the paper it is written on.

The question we must ask ourselves is: Why was there no written Bill of Rights in the Act of Union as passed by the British Parliament? It is from the British Parliament that we in South Africa, this Parliament, has inherited its constitutional authority. I think it is very necessary to investigate the history of the constitution in Great Britain.

The obvious starting point in respect of the rights of the individual is the Magna Charta of 1215 when, for the first time in English history, a written instrument—that is important—was exacted from the Sovereign by the bulk of the politically articulate community that purported to lay down binding rules of law that the ruler himself could not violate. The Magna Charta was the root principle of fundamental individual rights that the State, sovereign though it was, could not infringe under any circumstances.

It was the rights of parliament, not the individual.

On the contrary, the quid pro quo that King John received for the concessions he made in the Magna Charta was a renewal of homage and fealty and loyalty by his former opponents. That is what one gets in return for a Bill of Rights. What one gets for giving a Bill of Rights is a renewal of homage, a renewal of fealty and a renewal of loyalty from everybody in South Africa. On the meadows of Runnymede a bargain was struck between the King and the people. It is no less essential that on this day in this House a bargain must be struck by the President to whom the people in South Africa wish to delegate power, to pay homage and pledge loyalty and fealty by producing a written document that can only be tested by the learned judges of our courts.

May I ask a question?

I am sorry, I do not have the time. In the Magna Charta two fundamental rights come to mind. These we accept today as ordinary fundamental rights. We do not even argue about them. Taxes could no longer be levied by the King but had to be levied by what subsequently became Parliament. Secondly, it protected the personal liberty and property of all free men by giving security from arbitrary imprisonment without being tried by a court under due process of law.

There were many other Charters and Acts that gave sovereign power to Parliament and ensured rights for the people such as the Petition of right of 1627. For the information of the NRP I also want to say that in 1688 there was a Bill of Rights. If any of them would like to read it, I have a copy here. Therefore, a Bill of Rights did exist in England. However, with typical British ambiguity, many of the rights were not documentary but customary—traditional rather than part of the written law. Some of the basic but unwritten rights was the freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including the freedom of the Press and other communications media

Have you got much more to read there, Reuben?

You keep quiet. [Interjections.] I have no doubt that it was assumed by the National Convention of 1908-’09 that when the House of Commons passed the South Africa Act, the unwritten conventions would automatically be assured in a then free South Africa for all time because it was implicit that the peoples of the colonies should possess—and here I want to quote a statement made by a British politician—

I should like the hon. member who has just made those rude remarks to remember that it was his forebears who brought these fantastic principles into being in this world. [Interjections.] The purpose of a Bill of Rights, it must be clearly understood, is that we should say that the Government of the day cannot do this or that. We can never rely on the President who without any encumbrances may say that he will never do this or that. That is the difference. We have to have an assurance that he will not do this or that. We cannot take his word and the wonderful statements which the hon. member for Durban Point intends making in the preamble are of no consequence. The acceptance of a constitution without these impediments on the powers of the President and Parliament does not grant less sovereignty to this house. The people who give to Parliament the sovereignty to rule over them, merely limits that sovereignty by a Bill of Rights.

Unfortunately under the British constitutional system which we have inherited, there is no umpire or referee or judge to determine whether the Government has exceeded its authority. The courts were never given that power. The courts have merely been a part of the law enforcement machinery and not a check upon it. We believe that the time has come that there must be a change in order to ensure that the people of South Africa have security in their own being.

Let us return to South African history to examine when Bills of Rights have applied before and after Union. Let us also examine how these Bills of Rights have operated. It may come as a great surprise to hon. members on the opposite side of the House to learn that the Orange Free State constitution was heavily influenced by that of the United States. The legislature was never completely sovereign in the Free State. Why? Because in the Free State there was a Bill of Rights. [Interjections.] What were the rights in terms of the Free State Bill of Rights? The right of peaceful assembly and petition, equality before the law, the right to property, and for constitutional amendments the consent of three-quarters of the members of the Volksraad had to be obtained in three successive annual sessions. In fact, if one reads G. B. Scholtz’s book Die Konstitusie en Staatsinstellings van die Oranje-Vrystaat in 1854 one notices that most of the constitution of the United States was accepted and some of its provisions were accepted almost verbatim and so translated into Dutch.

There was a very, very interesting decision in the Free State courts on the question of judicial review. Mr. Justice Kotzé, Chief Justice of the Transvaal, challenged the validity of decisions of the Transvaal Volksraad and he was supported by none other than a judge by the name of Mr. Justice J. B. M. Hertzog. Later in his life Hertzog sat for many years on that side of the House as the Prime Minister of this great country. In 1898 Mr. Justice Hertzog rejected the doctrine of legislative supremacy in the case of The State vs. Gibson when he held—

Order! There is too much noise in the House. Hon. members must give the hon. member for Bezuidenhout an opportunity to make his speech in peace. The hon. member really has to raise his voice to make himself heard and that should not be necessary. The hon. member may proceed.

Let me quote again what Mr. Justice Hertzog said—

Let us consider what happened only a few years ago. The constitution of Bophuthatswana has a Bill of Rights. Bophuthatswana came into existence by the will of the NP. Bophuthatswana was set up because the nationalist party wanted to give it full independent rights. They passed a Bill of Rights which deals with principles of equality before the law, the right of life, the right of freedom and liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and the protection of property.

In the case of the State vs. Marwane (SALR 1982 (3) page 717), Marwane appealed to the Appellate Division of South Africa against a decision of the High Court of Bophuthatswana on the grounds that an Act of the Republic of South Africa under which he had been found guilty was in conflict with his rights under the Bill of Rights. The Appellate Division of South Africa upheld the appeal by seven to four. Mar-wane’s rights had to be recognized. Did the heavens fall when that took place? Has there been a great change in South Africa as a result of that decision? Thus the S.A. courts have already exercised their testing rights on a Bill of Rights, without cluttering up the courts. Somebody—I think it was the hon. member for Maitland—quoted Chief Justice Centlivres who said that in general the provisions contained in the first nine amendments to the American constitution—that is the Bill of Rights—may be regarded as constitutional conventions applicable to South Africa. That is perfectly true, but there is no way of enforcing conventions unless conventions are made part of the law. It is a fundamental law and maxim that no man may be a judge in his own cause. However, it appears to me as if a large number of members in this House who believe in majoritarianism want to be not only the lawmakers but the judges in their own cases as well. That is the basic problem we face and for which we can find no solution. A Preamble of Intent, as suggested by the hon. member for Durban Point, is not worth the paper it is written on because it is entirely exhortative but unenforceable. That was also the problem with the Declaration of Rights of Mankind in France. No teeth were given to that declaration because it never became part of the constitution. It was part of the Preamble to the French constitution. The whole struggle of Parliament in England hinged on the question of the divine rights of kings versus the will of the people. This struggle went on over the centuries and only ended when King Charles had his head chopped off because Parliament would not tolerate it any longer.

Let me conclude by saying that it is well to remember that both South Africa and the United States have a long British colonial heritage. Just as the people of England struggled against government by royal prerogative, so must we in this House ensure that we do not pass a constitution which entrenches these same prerogatives for a President. A Bill of Rights is the only step we can take to ensure that the President of this country does not have divine rights given to him by this Parliament. English-speaking citizens of this land might do well to keep the history of their forebears in mind in considering the desirability of the proposed constitution as it now stands. Theirs has been a history of trying to get rights from kings who did not wish to give them rights. Finally, let them never forget that equity and justice are no defence against power.

Mr. Speaker, I must first of all thank the hon. member for Bezuidenhout for a most interesting history lesson. The only point I would make is that if he were to be taking an examination in the subject of English history, I do not think he would pass because there were a considerable number of errors in the statements he made. I do not have the time to go into the detail of them, but there were a considerable number. However, I should like to state at the outset that we in these benches, generally speaking, support the ideals that are mentioned in this particular instruction. I say “generally speaking” for a reason because in due course I propose to go through them one by one and to tell hon. members what we disagree with because there are points with which we disagree.

That is your local option.

It has got nothing to do with local option. I should just like to make this point in mitigation perhaps of the idealistic enthusiasm of our PFP colleagues. When I was relatively young some sour and embittered politician once said to me that in so far as politics were concerned the young were generally idealistically liberal. Naturally, of course, they have no heart if they are not. However, if when they mature and become a little older, they are still idealistically liberal, then they have no head. This to me seems to be the situation with which we are faced with the PFP today. I give them credit for being idealistic and they themselves, of course, claim to be liberal in their thinking. Some are social democrats, some are liberal democrats, some are pure socialists—there are all sorts of liberal ideas in the PFP. It is because of the mixture of liberalism that they have in that party that it is very difficult for somebody such as myself quite to appreciate what the PFP really represents. It is because there is such a variety of these liberalisms. I give many of them credit for absolute sincerity, but there are some whom I do not give credit for sincerity; they are guilty of political expedience, and this I feel is a little unfortunate because it does detract from the credibility of those whom I do believe to be sincere people.

Is that your official policy?

No, this is your policy I am talking about or perhaps your lack of real policy. The hon. member for Yeoville indicated during the course of his speech …

Is he a sincere liberal?

No, he is a social democrat. One has got to know the type of person one is talking about when one is talking to Progressives because they have such a variety. One has them, as I say, almost from communism right up to date. The hon. member for Yeoville made the point that the Bill of Rights was in fact at this stage probably more important than the constitution itself that is before us. May I suggest that I have never heard anywhere of anybody having a Bill of Rights without having a constitution to back it up.

But we do have a constitution, do we not?

Yes, but we are proposing to have a new one.

But do we not have one now?

We have a constitution that originally came from the British Government in 1910 and it was subsequently changed, but that constitution had no Bill of Rights. The hon. member is implying … [Interjections.] The hon. member really can chitter-chatter, chitter, chitter, chitter! [Interjections.] It reminds me of a little monkey.