May I ask whether any date has been fixed for the completion of the P.K. le Roux Dam as well?

No.

I had not intended to devote very much time to refuting the allegations that have been made in this House about the Progressive Party’s actions during the Provincial Council elections in 1965. Anybody who has read the report of the Commission of Inquiry will realize that it is unnecessary for me to devote much time to all that, but unfortunately the allegations were made again, in a veiled way by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition when he referred to “exploiters” going unpunished, and by the slanderous and vicious attack of the hon. the Minister of Defence yesterday, and by the hon. member for Piketberg last night. So it is necessary for me to spend just a little time on these allegations before I get on to the Bill before us.

The report of the Commission reveals that absolutely no evidence of any significance whatever was brought before it to justify the allegations which had been made about an unclean roll, about fraudulent registrations, etc. Even the hon. member for Yeoville, who is by no means a friend of the Progressive Party, admitted that when the debate on this report rook place. The hon. the Leader of the Opposition did have the grace to say that such travesties of the law as had taken place could have been dealt with easily under the Electoral Act. But the implications, of course, in this debate, particularly by the hon. member for Piketberg, went a good deal further than that, and I want to say quite categorically that my party played no part whatever in any of the irregularities that took place during that election. [Interjections.] And that is revealed not only in the report of this Commission, because I will refer to the famous Mr. Brink in a few moments, but that was also revealed in the courts of law. Not a single member of the Progressive Party was found guilty in the courts of law of any transgression. Only one member of the Progressive Party was in fact charged, and he was found not guilty. Now if hon. members here know more than the courts of law, then it was their duty as citizens of the country to come forward and give evidence before the Commission.

Not one single member of the Progressive Party was found guilty in the courts of law. Now this gentleman, this Mr. Brink was quoted by the hon. member for Piketberg—I would not even have bothered to mention his name, but I have to, since the name of one of the most respected ex-members of this House, Mr. Eglin, has been dragged into disrepute, and I might say, a member who, when he was here, could give cards and spades in ability and in integrity to the vast majority of members in this House, if not all of them. This man Brink, who is now brought up as evidence against the Progressive Party, in the evidence he gave—and I am glad the hon. member has now just come in in time—was questioned by the hon. member for Peninsula, who put a lot of leading questions to him, not one of which would have been admitted in a court of law. He drew from him a lot of lying statements and insinuations, not one of which has been substantiated, and indeed I believe neither Mr. Brink nor the hon. member for Peninsula would repeat outside this House and outside the Commission what in fact they said under protection.

Would you repeat outside this House what you said about Mr. Brink?

Certainly I will say outside what I say here about Mr. Brink. [Laughter.] Will the hon. member for Peninsula say outside what he said about Mr. Eglin?

In the public interest I would say it.

More than two years ago. Do not forget that. Now Mr. Brink was never a progressive. He was a nominated member of the Coloured Council, nominated by the Government. He was the brother-in-law of the late Mr. George Golding, and Mr. George Golding, as everybody knows, was a close associate of the hon. member for Peninsula. Now, Mr. Brink was provided with some unsigned registration cards, not by the Progressive Party …

Oh no.

… but by a Mr. James C. Samuels. This is the evidence quoted in a court of law. This is not what I am saying; this is evidence which was quoted in an actual case in which Mr. Brink was found guilty of registering voters without having witnessed their signature. Now, Mr. James C. Samuels was a former employee and information officer of the Coloured Affairs Department, and not of the Progressive Party. I might say that at the time when Mr. Brink committed the irregularity, Mr. Samuels who brought him the cards, was the secretary of the executive of Mr. Tom Swartz’s Federal Party. So far was his connection from the Progressive Party, and to the best of my knowledge …

Did Samuels work for Mr. Eglin?

You would know more about the way that Coloured election was carried out than I do. Whatever Mr. Samuels did, he received no instructions whatever—and this is the important thing—from Mr. Eglin to carry out any of these practices.

Did he do it off his own bat?

Yes, if he did it, he certainly did not do it off our bat. It may be that he did it off the bat of the hon. member for Peninsula, but I know nothing about that.

Not the Progressive Party’s?

No. Yours, to get us into trouble. I would not be surprised if the whole thing was a trap. I would not put it past the hon. member for Peninsula to arrange that.

Order! The hon. member must withdraw that.

Very well, I withdraw it. Now I want to point out further, before I leave this subject, that Mr. Brink was not an ignorant Coloured man who was prevailed upon to do any of this by the Progressive Party. Mr. Brink was a teacher and he knew perfectly well that what he was doing was illegal. He had only to say “No”, and he should have reported the matter to the electoral authorities. That is as far as I want to go in reply to the hon. member for Piketberg. I say again that there is not a shred of evidence before the Commission to reveal any gross irregularities. 129 Cards out of over 20,000 handed in by the Progressive Party were found to be incorrectly signed. I might say that most of these people were put on the roll eventually because they were qualified to be on the roll. I want to add, further, that the Government does not make it easy for Coloured voters to be registered. Unlike white voters, in whose case there are paid enumerators who are sent round to put them on the roll, every possible difficulty is put in the way of the Coloured voters to be registered. That was brought out very strongly by the representative of the Department of the Interior for the Cape Region when he gave evidence. He points out these difficulties and he points out that the way in which to improve matters is to have better machinery for registering voters.

Now the hon. the Prime Minister immediately disowned the hon. the Leader of the Opposition when he said the other day that the reason why he has agreed to the extension of the lives of the present sitting members was because the roll was unclean. The Prime Minister said indignantly: “I said no such thing; I said there had been meddling by the Progressive Party”. Meddling of course only became meddling after the Progressives won the provincial elections of 10th March, 1965. That is when it became meddling to win a Coloured seat, because until that time there had been no talk and nobody had said anything about the abolition of the Coloured seats. These members could have sat here indefinitely if the Government had only found a way of doing it, but I will come to that in a minute and I will explain why I say that. But, as I say, the hon. the Prime Minister disowned the Leader of the Opposition, and I hope that will teach the Leader of the Opposition a little lesson, that there is some truth in the old adage that when you sup with the devil you need a very long spoon indeed. Of course, he grasped speedily at the offer …

Order! Is the hon. member referring to the Prime Minister in those terms?

No, I was merely referring to an incident, and not to the hon. the Prime Minister himself. I am just using a little idiom. The hon. the Leader of the Opposition grasped eagerly at the opportunity of finding some way of delaying the Coloured election. He, too, was just as keen at that stage and therefore he accepted this excuse, this literal interpretation of the words “improper interference”. The hon. the Prime Minister did not mean that at all. He just meant that a party which was bitterly opposed to apartheid, and which had made no bones about its bitter opposition to apartheid, was entering the field across the colour line in politics. That is what he meant by “improper interference”, and that is what every other member on that side of the House means when he talks about “improper interference”. Now. I opposed the first reading of that Bill which went back, as I said at first reading, to the first prolongation of the lives of the Coloured representatives; it went back to 1965. Now, what interests me about that particular Bill is that it made no provision whatsoever for not filling vacancies. That very first Bill did not lay down that in the ensuing period, when the lives of the Coloured Representatives were to be prolonged, the vacancies would not be filled. Now we had some very dramatic words last night from the hon. members for Peninsula and Karoo. They said dramatically that they would resign here and now if the Government would give the undertaking that those vacancies would be filled and that the Coloured people would have the right to put in the people of their choice. Sir, why did they not resign when that opportunity arose? They had a whole year; they had more than a year, because that Bill was passed in 1965 and it was not until late 1966 that another Bill was introduced which did not provide for the filling of vacancies. Why did they not do it at that time? Did they not know at that time? [Laughter.] This has nothing whatever to do with my row with the United Party; it is quite irrelevant. The point is that they did not say that they would have nothing to do with this nefarious scheme to stop the Coloureds from electing the people of their choice. Oh no, they sat here until another Bill was promulgated making provision that the vacancies would not be filled, and now, three years later, they make this dramatic gesture. That cuts no ice with me at all.

We followed the example you set when you left the U.P. [Interjections.]

I say that the Government had no intention whatsoever of removing these Coloured Representatives originally. They could have sat here for time immemorial. I do not join in these paeans of praise for the wonderful work they have done. I think it suited the Government to have them here and they would never have been removed. This is borne out by the fact that when in 1964 the Coloured Representative Council was established there was no talk of that being a substitute for representation in Parliament.

But the first doubt entered the Government’s mind in March, 1965, when we won the Provincial Council seats and they knew, because those two seats get divided into the four parliamentary seats with the same voters, that the chances were that we would win those seats—certainly three, and possibly four of them. The results were pretty well clear-cut, and they knew it. But even then they did not really want to remove those Coloured voters. We had assurance after assurance from the then Prime Minister, Dr. Verwoerd, thereafter. As far as I am concerned, Dr. Verwoerd was determined to retain the Coloured representatives here; he wanted to honour his assurances—contrary to the impression that the hon. the Minister of Defence wanted to create here yesterday that Dr. Verwoerd thought one thing and said another. What a despicable manoeuvre. I wish the present Prime Minister was here. He could have told the House whether he thinks Dr. Verwoerd was lying to this House when he told us that he intended retaining the Coloured representatives. I am sure he would not say that. I am convinced, and every thought I have about this Bill increases that conviction, that Dr. Verwoerd instructed his Parliamentary legal advisers to find a formula for retaining the Coloured representatives and at the same time preventing the Progressive Party from winning those seats and from “interfering”, directly or indirectly, in the elections. I am convinced of that because in 1966, after agonizing birth pains and after we had all waited for its long delayed birth, came the ugly Improper Interference Bill. I am convinced that the reason why that Bill was such a tortured monstrosity was because the then Prime Minister was determined to stick to his assurances to retain the Coloured representatives. So, every possible loophole had to be covered to stop the Progressive Party “interfering” directly or indirectly in the elections of these representatives. And let me say that as late as 26th August, 1966, the Minister of the Interior, this hon. Minister who has now introduced this Bill, also gave an assurance that these Coloured representatives would be retained. He said so during the Budget debate in reply to a question put to him by the hon. Leader of the Opposition. This is what he said—

Not at that stage. [Interjections.]

This was just after an election. The hon. the Minister quite correctly says that if that was the intention the country should have been informed—not after the election, but before. Of course, it was not their intention then, and I will tell him in a minute why it was not. In any event, that is what he said. I presume he was not thinking differently—as a matter of fact, I should say he was not thinking at all. That was on 26th August, 1966 (see Hansard, Col. 1542). As I was saying, the Government at that time still thought that it could stick to its promises. And even when the present Prime Minister took over in September 1966 he too hoped it would be possible to retain the four Coloured representatives. He wanted to do that; he was frantic to find a way of doing that. But there he was, faced on the one hand with this monstrosity, the Improper Interference Bill, and his desire to retain the Coloured representatives on the other hand. Because this Improper Interference Bill was too much even for him, he decided to set up a commission in the hope that it could find a simple way of retaining those seats and at the same time of preventing the Progressive Party from fighting and winning those seats in an election. And the Prime Minister did not give up hope of finding such a simple formula because as late as 4th April, 1967, the Prime Minister, in his address to the present Coloured council, said he wanted to make it absolutely clear that not a single promise made by his predecessor will not be carried out by his Government. Famous last words, Sir!

Meanwhile, there was the commission battling away for two years in search of a simple solution. It could not find any evidence, in the literal sense, of any “interference,” which it could use. Neither could it find a simple formula for retaining the Coloured seats and at the same time preventing the Progressive Party, or any other anti-apartheid party, from fighting those seats. That being the case, the hon. the Prime Minister came to the conclusion that there was nothing for it but to abolish the four Coloured seats and to introduce legislation to prohibit “improper interference”. The essence of this new legislation is to prohibit multi-racial parties. These then are the reasons why we have to face this unholy trinity of Bills in the House to-day. That is the only explanation. We do not want to know what Dr. Verwoerd meant because we know what he meant, as we also know what the present Prime Minister meant and even what the present Minister of the Interior meant—and, believe me, that is difficult enough. Meantime all these assurances have joined the dead hand of the past. There is now a veritable forest of these dead hands of the past. That is how far we have gone in South Africa.

I am not going to delve too deeply into the ignoble history of Coloured franchise in South Africa although I want to reply briefly to some of the assertions which have been made about this “meaningful” substitute for what was “meaningless”. I will be the first to admit that there were many inequities under the old Common Roll. But these inequities could have been put right. Coloured women could have been given the vote; the vote could have been extended to the other provinces. In this and other ways all these inequities could have been put right and the Coloureds retained on the Common Roll. And despite the fact that the Coloured vote represented only a section of a section, it exerted a meaningful influence on the power structure in South Africa. Indeed, the Coloureds were increasingly affecting the number of seats which could be won by one or other of the two white parties. The majorities with which these seats were held were approximating the number of Coloured voters on the roll. That is the simple reason for the Coloureds being kicked off the Common Roll by this Government—because the majority of the Coloured vote was adversely affecting the Nationalist Party. That was the reason why they were booted off the Common Roll and not because the Government wanted to save them from being a political football.

And to-day we see the end of Coloured representation in this House for a similar reason—not because these votes are meaningless but because they are meaning more. That is the reason why we are to see the end of Coloured representation in this House. In the 1950’s the Coloureds lost their vote on the Common Roll because they were voting United Party and the Government did not like it; to-day the Coloureds are to lose their representatives in this House because the Coloureds are voting Progressive and the Government does not like that either. That is the reason. The Government does not want to see four members sitting in this House, members elected by the Coloured people as proof of their unequivocal rejection of apartheid—despite every assertion the Government is making that the Coloureds have accepted and indeed are enjoying apartheid. That is the long and the short of the whole thing. But not only does the prospect of four more Progressive Party members sitting in this House frighten the Government out of its wits—it also frightens the United Party out of its principles. As a result their undertaking to restore the Coloured voter to the Common Roll is gone. They knew perfectly well—as a matter of fact this is what the Connan Commission revealed—that there would be more Coloured voters than Whites on the roll in the Cape. They could not face the white electorate with that knowledge. In any event, they knew that the Coloured voters would vote for the Progressive Party. So, it did not suit them either way. Consequently they abandoned the Common Roll principle—for no other reason than that they could not go to the country in the knowledge that the number of Coloured voters on the roll in the Cape would outnumber the Whites. So, gone are all those sentiments of “the century-old franchise rights of the Coloured people”, and gone are all the warnings about the dangers of a bloc vote. We do not hear anything more about that from the United Party.

Sir, I think that when future historians examine this somewhat sordid chapter in our history, they will not find the United Party’s role very much less ignoble than that of the Nationalist Party. Because I do not now know why they fought so hard right through the fifties for the principle of the Common Roll. I do not now know why they went to all the trouble of fighting the High Court of Parliament Act, of fighting the cases in the courts of law, of fighting the enlarged Senate; all these strong and stalwart stands they took on a principle. At that time they said there was no danger of the swamping of the white voter by the Coloured voter, and they were prepared to stick to their principle. The minute the danger evinced itself, the principle went out of the window. I must say I am sick and tired of all the talk I hear in South Africa and in this House particularly, about this ganging up. [Interjections.] I will stay as long as I want to, and I will talk as loudly and as long as I want to talk. The hon. members can lump it as far as I am concerned. [Interjections.]

Order!

Sir, as I was saying, I am sick and tired of all this sanctimonious talk in this country about the Coloured man belonging with us and our civilization, talking our language, going to our churches and so on. I am sick and tired of that, because it means only one thing. It means ganging up; that is all that it means. Let us all gang up against the black man. I do not know why we equate—and with the examples before us—a white skin with civilization. I cannot imagine why we do that, because there are many non-white people, believe me, who are just as civilized, if not more, than the hon. members sitting around me. I must say that the most sickening thing about this whole shoddy business is all the self-righteous cant that we have to listen to about this being better than anything the Coloureds have ever had before.

Order! I think the hon. member must come back to the Bill now.

I am, Sir. I am talking about this very Bill now. Hon. members tell us that the Coloureds are receiving more than they had before. But all I can say, is that they are not getting a good bargain, that the council, which I shall discuss in detail when that Bill comes before the House, is no substitute for a Parliamentary vote, which is the badge of citizenship. A vote in this Parliament is a badge of citizenship; everybody knows it. Nobody would exchange it for a council. No white man would exchange his vote here for a vote on a council which has only local governmental power. In passing, I might say that this abandonment of the M.P.C.s by the United Party is also a disgraceful matter. I wonder if they would have been so ready to throw them over if Messrs. Friedlander and Braak of the United Party had been sitting there instead of Messrs. Wollheim and Van Heerden of the Progressive Party. The Nationalist Party may deceive themselves, but they deceive nobody but themselves. I might say that this is a sorry spectacle, the spectacle of an all-powerful white party relentlessly pursuing a helpless minority group, because that is what it is, until the last vestige of their franchise has been destroyed.

I say finally that it is an ugly characteristic of this Government, that even the rules which they made themselves and the unwelcome laws which they thrust down the throats of people, unwelcome …

Order!

Well, the laws, Sir; I withdraw the word “unwelcome”. If it does not suit them, those laws are changed. If they find they cannot win the game, the rules are changed as well. I say quite categorically that this is gerrymandering. It is fundamentally in opposition and incompatible with the whole concept of Parliamentary democracy. It shows little respect for the concept of Parliamentary government to mess around with the nature of the electorate, because that is what this Bill is doing, by arbitrarily changing the rules, always at the expense of the underdog when they do not prove to advance the ideological aims of the top dog.

We have done more for the underdog than any other party in this country!

I just wonder—I leave this final, deadly thought with this House—if this thought has struck other members as it has struck me. If this is the way this all-powerful Government behaves when its power structure is not remotely affected by four more seats in this House falling to the Progressive Party or to a party which is anti-apartheid, how will this Government behave when it does perhaps feel its power-threatened? I wonder if this deadly thought has struck other members on the Opposition side as it has struck me. How much respect will this Government have for the institution of Parliamentary democracy when its own power structure is indeed seriously affected by events in the future?

Mr. Speaker, I have on various occasions had the privilege of listening in this House to the hon. member for Houghton, but I have never seen her as frustrated and as bitter as she showed herself to be in her conduct this morning. But we need not search far afield for the reason, because this legislation which we are now piloting through the House will prevent the Coloureds from continuing to be thrown to the political wolves of the Progressive Party. She is so frustrated that I would also like to express my contempt for the comparison she made here this morning when she termed these three Bills an “unholy trinity”.

Disgraceful!

It is really a disgrace …

Your Bills are “’n skande”.

… that such a comparison should be made here, because we on this side of the House, and I believe the majority of the House as well, still have the deepest respect for something like the Trinity.

She has not.

Mr. Speaker, I think that she and her Party were sufficiently castigated in advance yesterday by the hon. member for Piketberg. I shall not deal with her any further, because after all it is a fact, even though she did behave in such a bitter and unladylike fashion this morning, that she and her Party are by no means the greatest offenders as far as the Coloured vote is concerned.

You are putting it mildly.

In this respect the United Party has always been the greatest offender. I should, in due course, prefer to discuss this matter a little with them, because I should like to avail myself of this opportunity of reproaching them here this morning with incidents from their past. With this legislation now before us, we have arrived at the final chapter of a period in our political history. Actually we are now completing the final touches to our apartheid legislation. The United Party has stated by means of interjections and by way of argument that this legislation would never have been there if the Coloureds had voted for the National Party. I want to reject those allegations. I want to state explicitly here that even had they voted for the National Party we would still have piloted through this legislation because this legislation is the logical outcome of everything we have been doing over a period of many years. I should also like to state that in our entire political history there has never been a greater evil than the fact that the Whites and the Coloureds were together on the same common voters’ roll. There was nothing which disturbed and bedevilled good relations between the groups as much as this very fact.

Let us now consider an item such as registration. I am pleased that the Bill which the Minister of Coloured Affairs is soon to pilot through Parliament will make provision for compulsory registration for the Coloureds. If we had not been serious about this matter we could merely have said that there should be registration and have left it at that. A small number of Coloureds would then have registered. But let us take a look at the past, when the United Party was actually responsible for the registration of the Coloureds. What did they do? In those constituencies where a man could win the seat if he was able to register enough Coloureds, the United Party had everybody, from top to bottom, everybody who could possibly be registered, placed on the list. Many who should not have been on that list, were placed on it, and subsequently had to be deleted from the list. What did they do in the safe constituencies? There they did not concern themselves at all about the Coloureds. They felt that it was not necessary to overload such constituencies with Coloured votes. If we want to see what evil arose about this joint voters’ roll we must return to some of the elections in the past.

But surely we are not arguing about that.

This measure is the outcome of all those things. I want to tell my hon. friend, for whom I have a great deal of respect and of whom I am very fond, a few things in regard to what the United Party did in those years. [Interjections.] Just a minute, you can relate what the National Party did. I shall tell you what you did.

Order! The hon. member should rather address the Chair.

I shall, Mr. Speaker. Let us consider an election such as the one in 1943. I do not know whether you still remember it, but we called it the “Khaki election”. Even then I was participating as a young boy in electioneering work. It was then that I saw what disgraceful practices the United Party were applying in regard to the Coloureds and the Coloured vote, and I prayed fervently that the day would come when I would be able to do something about the situation. That is why I am very pleased that I have been afforded the opportunity this morning of saying something in respect of this legislation, of voting for it and helping to pilot it through the House.

But surely that was done a long time ago.

Listen a moment, just keep quiet for a bit. During the khaki election of 1943 the night-schools of the United Party for the Coloureds were flourishing. Yesterday the hon. the Minister of Defence told us a thing or two about these night schools, but I should now like to tell you something else. They brought the Coloured together and then supplied them with political information. They told them why they should vote against the National Party. However, they were never able to tell them precisely why they should vote for the United Party. Admittedly there was nothing the United Party could offer the Coloureds. They told the Coloureds, “Vote against the National Party, because if that Party comes into power, certain unpleasant things will happen to you”. What did they tell the simple Coloureds would happen to them? I can mention the place where this happened. They told these people: “Look you must vote for the United Party, because if the National Party comes into power, they are going to load all the Coloureds onto a large ship, let the ship sail out to sea and then a big bomb will explode on the ship and you will all be drowned.” Now they themselves are sitting on the bomb. You will probably laugh at that to-day, Sir. Our Whites reject such propaganda with contempt. We will pay no heed to it. When one group of Whites slanders and calumniates the other group amongst simple Coloureds, what is the reaction of the latter? Their minds retain some of it, and to-morrow or the day after when the Whites have to co-operate with the Coloureds then they see how suspicious the Coloureds are of them. I want to state it as my honest conviction now that since we placed them on a separate voters roll the suspicion and lack of confidence we always experienced at elections has disappeared, and is no longer inflaming the hearts of the Coloureds as it did before.

Then there were the night-schools.

Did they have to learn to write there?

The hon. member is correct. Let me tell hon. members how the Coloureds learned to write there. We often watched them secretly. A soft, feminine white hand would take the Coloured’s hand, and she would stand a little distance away so that she did not have to touch him, and the hard, brown, calloused hand holding the pen would by guided and the Coloured would be taught so that in seven or fourteen days’ time he would at least be able to sign his name, by which means he would then be placed on the voters’ roll. When he had finished making his mark, that Coloured was forgotten and then he could as the hon. the Minister of Defence said here yesterday, return to his shanty because he had done what was required of him for that Party, but even to-day the reward is still not forthcoming.

I think the United Party will want to wash its hands of the whole affair to-day. They will say that it was never their policy to do such things or to make such propaganda. That may be true. But the agents they sent to do that work did not mind what they did. They did not mind what the battle-field looked like when they left. They were not concerned about the attitude amongst the people who would have to remain behind there and who had to continue to live together in future. They paid no heed to that at all. For them there was only one purpose, i.e. to get hold of a vote, to get hold of a seat, at all costs. It did not matter to them what price had to be paid for it.

One would think that such intimidation and suspicion-mongering was a thing of the past. But it is so deeply-rooted in the tactics and conduct of the United Party that we have over the past few days seen this phenomenon cropping up here in the House in various places. I am pleased the hon. member for Cape Town (Gardens) is here this morning. He is one of the respected members of this House. When we were discussing the Commission’s report here the other morning, the question being dealt with was why the Indians did not give evidence. What was the hon. member’s remark? He said they were afraid the Security Police would victimize them. Here something which we had in the past is cropping up again, the intimidation which was so rampant. The people must be intimidated. Suspicion must be sown amongst the people to the effect that, if they want to co-operate in any way with the National Party and the Afrikaner, at some time or other they would have to suffer for it, they would have to pay for it. I want to maintain that even the hon. the Leader of the Opposition cannot be exonerated from this. Did he not insinuate here that the Coloured Persons’ Council might perhaps after a while be abolished and that that mouthpiece of the Coloureds might also be removed? Even at this moment we still have the intimidating stories which that side tells so that the hair of the Coloureds actually straightens out and stands upright. That sort of thing is not entirely a thing of the past yet.

T can understand very well why the Indians, and many Coloureds as well, did not appear before the Commission, and why they were actually disinterested spectators. Their make-up is entirely different from ours. There is something different about them. I should like to say that there is a difference in nature between us and the Coloureds. I cannot for one moment accept that they would act in exactly the same way as we would in the same political situation. Consequently I would like to make the assertion that in the first place they are not so much interested in the franchise, but rather in improved living conditions. That is what they would rather have. When the legislation in regard to the removal of Native representatives from this House was being discussed here years ago, someone—I think it was Professor Schoeman—who had travelled through the Native areas, who had interviewed many of them and who was an expert on them, said that he had only found a few who had come to him with inquiries in regard to a vote. But he found thousands of them who wanted very much to ride in a motor car. This reveals their needs to us. They would like to share in the civilization of the Western world; they would like to have the comforts we have. They are not primarily interested in whether they can make their mark, which has never meant anything to them. Strangely enough, it is the Whites who realized what power lies behind those crosses and who are so interested in the Coloureds’ vote and who want to do everything in their power to consolidate those votes behind them. This is apparent from the actions of the hon. member for Houghton and of her Party in this case and in the past.

But, Mr. Speaker, surely we are not merely abolishing Coloured representation in this House; if we had taken such negative steps then I would have said that the Opposition had many grounds on which to criticize us severely. But look what we are giving them in its place, bearing in mind what I have just said, i.e. that the majority of the Coloureds are not primarily interested in the vote but in improved living conditions. That is what we must bear in mind.

We are giving them a Coloured Persons’ Council, and we are giving them control over various aspects of their national life. Take education for example. What more does any person who wants to do something for his nation, who is interested in the future of his people, want than the right to be able to guide the training and the education of his people in the direction in which he would like it to be guided? Through the establishment of this Council which is replacing what we took away from them, we are placing the Coloureds in a position to have their children educated in a way best suited to their nature. The same applies to welfare services.

If one discusses the matter with welfare workers, many of them will tell you that the well-to-do Coloureds are not interested in doing welfare work amongst the Coloureds. If one stands in the street with a collection box, collecting funds for the Coloureds, then it is the well-to-do Coloured who walks past, and one has to, as it were, buttonhole him to get him to make a contribution. One can understand this quite readily; it is because that welfare work was not primarily their responsibility, but with this legislation we are placing that responsibility: squarely on their shoulders, and it will be they and they alone who will be responsible in the first place for welfare work amongst the Coloureds.

Sir, there are tremendous problems such as the abuse of liquor amongst the Coloured population, an evil which is really dragging many of them down into the depths. There is also the problem of shiftlessness amongst the Coloureds. The task is now being handed over to the Coloureds to try and find a solution to these problems themselves, and here I want to add that the Whites will be only too eager to give them guidance and support in this regard, because after all it is we who are providing the funds for that in the first place. I believe that with these three measures we are going to create a new dispensation for the Coloureds, and that they will in the end be much better citizens and far more satisfied with the higher standard of living which this will bring them.

I am sure the House was amused by some of the fairy stories of the hon. member for Mossel Bay. What the hon. member did not explain, having said what a great evil the “gemeenskaplike lys”, was, was how suddenly the Government’s own creation, that is to say a separate roll, has also become a terrible evil. Sir, I feel that I ought to say a word as well to the hon. member who spoke before the hon. member for Mossel Bay, namely, the hon. member for Houghton, who took a left-handed and a right-handed swipe at other members on this side of the House, not to mention a backward one at the hon. member for Peninsula.

The hon. member says that we have been frightened out of our principles and that the abolition of representation on the Common Roll is an abandonment of principle. Well, Sir, I think reasonable men may differ on this. We have not abandoned any principle. The principle that is involved in our stand is the principle that there should be representation in this House for members of every race group. That is the principle, and that is the principle that we are trying to uphold here to-day.

A very flexible principle.

Sir, as long as you have principles you can apply them and you have to apply them according to the circumstances which prevail at the time. Sir, I hope the hon. the Minister of Defence is going to come into the House. We have in fact asked him to do so because I am going to deal with what he said here. The hon. the Minister of Transport must not say things of that kind when one of his colleagues is guilty of what Barney Barnato was guilty of and that is to say: “Look, these are my principles, but if you do not like them, well, I have others.” That is what is happening here as far as that hon. gentleman is concerned. So far as changing one’s mind is concerned, I think the hon. member for Houston should perhaps not have raised this matter because when the last election for the Coloured Representatives in this House was held in 1961 the Progressive Party said: “Oh no, we are not going to take part in those elections; we could not possibly be associated with an election on a separate roll; it is against our principles.” So they did not take part, and then in that same year the Progressive Party was decimated and rejected by the white electorate, leaving only one Progressive Party member in this House, the hon. member for Houghton, Then, like Barney Barnato, they changed their principles. They suddenly found that they had other principles because it was not possible for them to get Members of Parliament in this House through the normal way. I hope therefore that this sort of accusation by the Progressive Party will now be forgotten.

Sir, I want to start at the beginning and remind the hon. the Minister of what he said when he introduced this Bill. He said that separation was a traditional way of life in South Africa. Sir, you will remember well, as everyone in this House will remember who took part in the passing of legislation to change the status of South Africa from that of a dominion into a republic, the preamble to that constitution. You will remember well, Mr. Speaker, as will other hon. members, that the preamble of the Constitution contained the “gees”, if I may use that word, of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. The preamble of that constitution starts: “In humble submission to Almighty God, we declare that whereas we are conscious of our responsibility towards God and man; Are convinced of the necessity to stand united; Are prepared to accept our duty to seek world peace,” and then come the following—

The Constitution that followed reflected what is in that preamble; it reflected Coloured Representatives sitting in Parliament. That is surely part of the tradition and the history of South Africa, and if it was not, then that preamble means nothing at all. And you know very well, Mr. Speaker, as does every other hon. member who took part in those debates, that this was a very important part of our discussion. The representation of the Coloured people in this House was enshrined in that Constitution but now it is to be jettisoned: it is to be cut out. You can amend an Act of Parliament and the Republic of South Africa Constitution Act is an Act of Parliament, but it is more than that. Surely our Constitution is more than that. It was a solemn pact that we made. This is our contract; this is the beginning of the Republic, and the Constitution was supposed to express the history and tradition of our land. The position appears to be that as far as this Government is concerned our traditions change according to what is politically expedient at the time. Are our traditions and our history changeable with a change in Prime Minister, because that is what appears to be the position? Sir, what is the value of the assurance of any Nationalist Prime Minister concerning the rights of any people any longer? To what depths have we sunk in our public life when because it suits them to do so, a dead Prime Minister’s confidant can attempt to avoid the public utterances and assurances of their former leader by now making out that he was in fact misleading the public, that he was lying to the public, when he said he had no intention of removing the Coloured Representatives from this House? To what end was this done by the hon. the Minister of Defence in this House? To serve his new master and his ideas, at the expense of his last master who is now dead and can no longer speak. Sir, what base political barratry is the attitude of this Minister!

Order! The hon. member is going too far.

I withdraw the word “base”. The Minister of Defence when he was Minister of Coloured Affairs, introduced the Coloured Persons Representative Council Bill, this Act which it is now alleged by hon. members opposite is to take the place of the rights that the Coloured Representatives have in this House. One must remember that they are saying that this Bill, of which he was in charge, was to take the place of those rights, but during the second reading of that Bill I asked him whether he would answer two questions: Are the Coloured Representatives going to stay here? That is in Column 4259, 1964 Hansard. The answer was: “Yes”. I then asked whether Coloured people would be able to sit in this House, and the answer was “No”. True, I was cad enough not to believe it. I said that I accepted his word that they would not go now, immediately, but I did not believe him when he said they would not go eventually. But the hon. the Minister of Defence, in making out that in fact this was to be a temporary arrangement, is condemned out of his own mouth by what he said in that same debate. The hon. member for Bezuidenhout said in Column 4175—

To which the Minister of Coloured Affairs replied: “I give it now”. There can be nothing more clear than this. Then the hon. member for Bezuidenhout went on and said—

To which the Prime Minister replied: “I have already said it here”. That was on 14th April, 1964, during the second-reading debate of the Coloured Persons Representative Council Bill. Sir, how can the hon. the Minister of Defence now come along and say that no such assurance was given, or that it meant something else? “Permanent” means “permanent”. But it is worse than that. When the hon. the Minister replied to the debate he then took this matter up in col. 4352. He said—

And then we had what is so significant and quite incredible, namely that the Minister then went on to give extra assurances, to give added weight to that assurance. He then quoted the passage from Hansard of 23rd January, 1962, col. 94, of what the then Prime Minister. Dr. Verwoerd, had said, the very passage which my hon. leader quoted in this House yesterday in order to point out that this assurance was given by that Minister. That is very significant. How can the Minister of Defence in the face of that possibly say what he did? Frankly, knowing what I do of the late Dr. Verwoerd, I cannot believe the hon. the Minister of Defence. Such speculation on the part of a Minister of the State is not only reprehensible but it is a very sad reflection on the depths to which our public life has sunk, that this can be done in the interests of party-political expedience. The hon. the Minister of Defence acted very extraordinarily yesterday. One wonders whether he does not need some medical attention. He said that the outburst of the Leader of the Opposition and those sitting around him was typical of members of the Opposition and their forbears, who ever since the days of Queen Victoria had exploited the Coloured people.

What a rotten statement to make, about his needing medical attention !

I think he needed a tranquilizer. The Minister made a vicious attack upon my Leader. No one can make such an attack and get away with it. What was the object of mentioning Queen Victoria and our forbears? Was this designed to promote unity between the two language groups?

But I want to ask hon. members what interest they have taken, those who speak so piously about the Coloured people. What is their interest in the Coloured people? Under the Separate Representation of Voters Act, a Senator was appointed to represent the Coloured people. The person who was appointed died nearly two years ago. He was the late Senator Olivier, and nothing has been done to replace him. All the Government has to do is to nominate someone in his place but he has not been replaced, and I wonder whether they will ever replace him before this Parliament dissolves, when of course it will fall away altogether.

In this ill-conceived proposed legislation, this Bill, we have had talk of a white Parliament, and we hear in speech after speech that this is to be a white Parliament and that the people here must represent only the white people and only the white interests. That is the goal of hon. members opposite.

We never said that it was to represent only white interests.

Yes, it is to be a white Parliament and so we abolish the Senator who is appointed to represent the Coloured people, and who is appointed by the Government because of his special knowledge of the Coloured people. That is going to be abolished. What would he represent except Coloured interests?

What do they do to achieve this object? They go to the Constitution Act and hack out all references to the Separate Representation of Voters Act—like a hen foraging in the farmyard, so they are pecking away at our Constitution. But after having pecked everything out they left section 29 (2) (b). This is a very interesting section. It provides for the nomination of senators by the State President. Let us now have a look at section 29 (2) (b). It says—

Here follows the important point—

Where is the white Parliament now? This is the object of this operation—to appoint those Senators not only on account of their knowledge of the wants and wishes of the Coloured population but also to serve as the channel through which the interests of the Coloured population may be promoted. Is this going to remain? Or is this to go as well? Is there to be another mutilation of our Constitution? Is there still something more to be hacked out of it because it is politically expedient for the Nationalist Party? Or did they forget about this provision altogether? Or is it perhaps the intention that the promotion of Coloured interests should come through the Senate only and not through this House also? Is that what is intended? Or has the Government so little regard for our Constitution that it is unaware of the existence of this provision? Or does it indicate perhaps that in appointing people to those posts the Government has no regard to this provision at all? One would like to know the answer because one wonders about these things. And if the Government is aware of this provision, is it also to be removed? Are we going to have yet another Bill placed before us to remove this particular provision? And if so, will it remove only this qualification or are there going to be five or four less Senators than there are at the moment? Or is it intended that the Senators should represent only white interests? These are the things we should like to know, and I hope the hon. the Minister will give us an answer. One wonders what this Government means. One sees the mess it has got itself into. “What a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!” It is not the first time, but here the Government is in a hopeless mess. As a matter of fact, the Government has got itself into such a mess that it is going to have to send out the hen into the farmyard once more in an endeavour to see whether something more cannot be pecked out.

You are talking absolute nonsense.

Will that hon. member then get up and tell us what all this is about? What are these Senators going to do then? Are they going to remain, or are they not going to remain? And if they are going to remain, are they going to act as a channel for the promotion of Coloured interests? We should like to know. I want to say this, that section 29 does reflect the preamble of the Constitution. It does indicate something best suited to the traditions and history of our land. That is the way in which it always was and that is the way it should be now. The object of a Member of Parliament is the object stated in section 29—in other words, to promote in this Parliament the interests of those who have elected him. That is why it is stated like this in the Constitution; and that is why we are fighting this Bill.

One cannot compare, as hon. members opposite have tried to do, the rights and privileges to be enjoyed by the Coloureds in their Coloured Representative Council with the rights and privileges they can enjoy through their being represented in Parliament. The Coloured Council is an instrument through which the Coloured people can participate in the activities of government. That is the channel through which they can take part in the administration of the various matters concerning them as a group, matters of peculiar interest to them. We decentralize these administrative powers for the benefit of the group because otherwise they cannot participate in Government. That is why one has to have a body such as this in order to do it. But that is something quite different from representation in Parliament. Parliament itself is not an instrument of government. It is, rather, the place where the people through their representatives can scrutinize and debate and, if necessary, check the exercise by the Government of its powers. Let us examine our own position as Members of Parliament. Am I as a member here participating in government? Of course I am not. I am only part of the consultative process—that is all. I am here to represent certain people and to express their views. But I do not have any part in government. That is done by members of the Cabinet and by members of the Civil Service. They do the governing.

This brings me to my main point, namely that the Coloured Representatives are here on that basis. They are here to benefit Parliament and its members. They are here to tell Parliament what the views of the Coloured people are. We want to know and we should know what those views are if we are to legislate for them, in the same way as we should know the views of the Bantu and of the Indians if we are going to legislate for them. That is the function of a member of Parliament. And if a member does not fulfill this function he will be out at the next election. It is not a point of growth—rather is the communal council the growth point. Representation in this House is not a growth point for anything. It is merely a process of consultation. Representatives of the Natives were in this House from 1936 to 1959—for 23 years three representatives of the Natives in the Cape sat in this House and four Senators for the whole country in the Other Place. And they told Parliament what the views of the Natives were. As I say, they were here for 23 years. During that period their numbers were not increased. There was no suggestion even that they should be increased, although they themselves would have welcomed it. But that never came to pass. The function of a Member of Parliament is to consult with Parliament and not the Government. About this there is confusion, deliberate or otherwise, in the minds of hon. members opposite. As my hon. Leader pointed out yesterday, they seem to equate consultation with the Government, i.e. with the Minister, with consultation with Parliament. They seem to think Parliament is the Nationalist Party’s caucus. Well, it is not. That the Government should want to consult with them and that Parliament should want to consult with them are two different things. The confusion in the minds of hon. members opposite in this regard is very dangerous. The attitude abroad amongst hon. members opposite as far as this is concerned is a dangerous attitude. I want to tell them that they should have more regard for Parliament than they show by their attitude in this Bill because here they are depriving Parliament and themselves of the benefit of hearing the views of the Coloureds through their representatives when we have to make decisions affecting them. In the 1950s the courts were considered to be thwarting the will of Parliament. It was then that we heard a lot about Parliament, that the “volkswil” through Parliament should be protected. I say, Sir, the “volkswil” through Parliament must still be protected. But the “volk” can have no “wil”, they cannot express their opinion if they are not properly informed, and Parliament is being denuded by this step. I wish the same attitude would apply now as in the 1950s.

This is the end, as the hon. member who has just sat down said, of an era in our political history. It is marked, as were all the other aspects of this chapter in our history, by a disregard for proper respect for our Constitution and our democratic agencies which the whole ugly history of the Nationalist Party’s struggle against the lives of the Coloured persons representatives, reflects. The humiliation and shame which our courts, the democratic process and our country suffered as a result of the high court of Parliament, was part of this. The enlarged Senate was also part of the same ugliness, and the dénouement of the tragedy here in the end is the repudiation of promises and assurances, solemnly given by a Prime Minister of this country, by the persons who during his lifetime associated themselves with those assurances.

Sir, we have reached the lowest depths and the hon. the Minister of Defence has led the way. This Bill is the end, not only of an era in our political history, but of an era in our political honour.

Mr. Speaker, I listened very attentively to the hon. member for Durban (North). I do not intend replying in the same vein, I shall concentrate my attention on other points. However, I shall, in the course of my speech, reply to certain aspects which he brought forward. During this debate it has become clear to me that there is a very deep-rooted difference in attitude and approach to this entire question of race relations between these two sides of the House. I am deliberately saying these “two sides of the House”, because there is no real difference in approach between the standpoint of the Progressive Party and that of the United Party. To my mind the proof of this is this very feeling of bitterness which prevails between them, for as you know if brothers—or should we in this case say, if brothers and sisters—fall out, the feeling of bitterness is greater than when the subject of dispute is principles. The subject of dispute here is degrees of conduct between them, and not the principle. The basis of their standpoint is that they believe that we in South Africa are one, multi-racial nation, whereas we on this side believe that in South Africa there are various nations, that we are not one great multi-racial nation with one fatherland, we consist of one fatherland with various nations. We have various Bantu nations; we have a white nation; and we are lending the Coloured nation assistance in the difficult process of becoming a nation.

Do they have citizenship in South Africa?

They are a nation in South Africa; they have full citizenship in this country, and that is the principle behind the standpoint of this Party, of this Government.

Full citizenship?

I am coming to that. I am now dealing with the political emancipation of the Coloureds. That is the subject I want to discuss, and hon. members must please not be so hasty. This debate has revealed a deep-rooted difference in approach. Now I want to know from the Opposition: Do they differ from me when I level the accusation at them that their approach is that we are one nation in South Africa, which consists of different colour groups and races? Or do they disagree with me? Am I charging them with something tangible or not?

The Coloureds are a separate group.

I am astonished at the tremendous silence on that side. I shall come to the hon. member for Newton Park in a moment. He is the only one who is trying to furnish a reply, although he cannot furnish me with one.

[Inaudible.]

Are they a separate nation?

They are a separate group.

Yes, they are a separate group, but are they a separate nation?

May I ask the hon. member a question?

No, I am sorry, I do not have the time. The hon. member can put his case later on. I have now put a question to them, and they are maintaining an absolute silence in regard to this matter. We are making no secret of it; we believe South Africa is our common fatherland, and that there are various nations. We are engaged in developing that pattern of various nations alongside one another in a common fatherland, South Africa.

Do you believe in a South African nation?

Of course I believe in a South African nation. In South Africa there are various peoples, but not, as you believe, one nation. Mr. Speaker, there is a tremendous difference between what I am saying, and what the hon. member, who is becoming so serious now, is saying. That hon. member is merely trying to evade a reply which hon. members on the opposite side owe me. We believe that whatever we do in this country, we must help the Coloureds, who are a nation of heterogeneous descent, in the difficult process of becoming a nation. We regard it as our moral, our bounden obligation towards those people. Hon. members on the opposite side see the Coloureds as an appendix to the white nation. That is where we differ, and it is a profound difference. The hon. member maintains that I do not know what they said, but I am going to tell him what the hon. member for Bezuidenhout said. That hon. member referred to the Coloureds as the brown Afrikaners. Is the hon. member satisfied, or does he deny saying that? It was the hon. member’s point of view that the Coloureds are the brown Afrikaners. We say, however, that South Africa consists of various peoples. The word “Afrikaner” is the designation given to the population group to which I belong, namely, the white South African to whom the Afrikaans language and traditions are peculiar.

Does that include me?

I do not know. I do not know to what group you belong. You must decide for yourself. We are one great white nation, with two languages and two cultural groups. I am referring now to the language and cultural group to which I belong. You must therefore decide for yourself to which group you belong. The Coloured is no brown Afrikaner, nor does he want to be one. No man wants to be labelled as an appendage to another group. Neither the Whites, the Coloureds, nor the Bantu want that. From experience we know that no population group wants to be an appendage to another group. We know that the Bantu in South Africa desires not only to be known in general as a Bantu, but as a Xhosa or a member of whichever other race group her may belong to. The same applies in the case of the Coloureds and the Indians in South Africa, as well as the Whites. The Government acknowledges the Creation, which established various ethnic groups in South Africa, and the Government is building our ethnic composition on that pattern.

May I ask the hon. member a question?

No, I am sorry. The hon. member made an interjection a moment ago to which I still want to reply. On this pattern of the ethnic composition in South Africa we are building up an ethnic unity. The hon. member for Houghton referred to the level of civilization of the Coloureds who have the franchise, and who will now lose it. This legislation has absolutely nothing to do with levels of civilization. I wish it would get through to the hon. Opposition that what is involved here is not the level of civilization of people. South Africa consists of separate nations. The Government does not want to integrate these people or make them part of the white nation. Nor does the Government want to make them an appendage to the white nation. The Government does, however, want to help the Coloureds towards nationhood, so that they can develop an intrinsic self-respect as an independent nation. I want to tell hon. members on the opposite side that the Coloureds are at present developing a national pride of their own. The Government is helping them to do so. There is another matter I should like to reproach the Opposition with. To be continually undermining a person’s national pride by telling him, “If you cannot belong to another nation, you are an inferior person”, is an immoral act. Hon. members must come to my constituency and go about in the reserves there and they will hear what those Coloureds have to say about the people whom we call, “try-for-Whites”. They call them the “climbers” (opklimmers) and say that they want to have nothing to do with them. They ridicule and scorn them because they are trying to be something they are not. The whole basis of the Government’s and the National Party’s policy is our acceptance of the realities of South Africa. I have said that I shall reply to certain points touched on by the hon. member for Durban (North). Unfortunately he is not present at the moment. I take it that after all the bitter things he had to say, he has gone to have a cup of sweet tea to sweeten his throat. I really do not blame him for doing so because I think that after one has said such bitter things one must go and drink something.

He discussed here what our Constitution has to say about this matter. He said that the Constitution of the old Union of South Africa spoke of a constitution “best suited to the history and conditions of South Africa”. To my mind the best proof of that is the very fact that we still have a number of different peoples in this country and that we are not one mixed nation, which one would not really be able to recognize. One would not know, if such a nation had to be classified into one of the three main ethnic groups of the world, whether it was White, Black or Oriental. In South Africa to-day we have clearly definable races and peoples, and that proves the strong desire on the part of the people of South Africa not to integrate. I am glad to see that the hon. member for Durban (North) has now returned. As I said, the different peoples in this country have not become one, and in that I see clear proof of something which the hon. member for Durban (North) has never been able to recognize, namely that here in South Africa various peoples are developing, and that in respect of them emancipation over a period of years must take place. Surely it is generally accepted that the white nation is at this moment the guardian of the non-white nations. I shall dwell on this again later on, and I shall then have something to say about the social, the economic as well as the political emancipation in this country.

The hon. member also said in his speech that senators concerned would also disappear now. He wants to know what is going to become of them. How is consultation going to take place? Did the hon. the Prime Minister not furnish a very positive reply to this? Did the hon. the Minister of Coloured Affairs not reply to this very positively in his speech? [Interjections.] He did. Let me tell hon. members on the opposite side what he said. He stated that we would not at present divulge what the basis of consultation was going to be. We are not divulging it at the moment because we first want to consult with the Coloured Persons’ Representative Council and that that consulting body will be established after consultation with the Coloured Persons’ Representative Council. [Interjections.] He said “after consultation with the Coloured Persons’ Representative Council”, so that the Government can be given an indication, and can be assisted in adopting a resolution in regard to this very difficult matter. [Interjections.] Yes, of course the United Party wants us to consult them, and then we will not know what to do because they will give us four different pieces of advice! We do not know from day to day what the hon. Opposition’s policy is. They do not have advice for themselves. They have told us, We do not always know where we stand.

When the hon. member for Mossel Bay reproached that side with what they had said in the days of the Common Voters’ Roll, the hon. member for Newton Park stated that they were no longer arguing about that matter that it was a thing of the past. Well, to me it sounds very much like taking precautions. I think that if we accost them again in the year 1970 and reproach them with what they had said this year in respect of the representation of Coloureds TV Whites in this House of Assembly, they will tell us, “But surely this is the year 1970. Why are you discussing things that we said in 1968? Surely those are things of the past”. We cannot help recalling what the various standpoints of the Opposition have been. We cannot help recalling what the hon. Opposition did in years gone by. I still remember very clearly what I saw in Grabouw on election day, in the days when I was still a young boy. There I saw poor old farm labourers arriving at the polls on election day in big black Packard motor cars. Then those old Coloured men, whom I knew so well, said to me, “Little master, to-day at least I am an important man, because look, I have the vote.” We remember those days. We remember what a political football was made of the Coloureds and how they were kicked about. At that time the Coloureds did not realize what was happening to them, because they did not know any other system. But approach the Coloureds today and ask them whether they want to return to the old Common Voters’ Roll, and hear what their reply is. Hon. members need only glance at the Commission’s report. Their reply is, “No, we do not want to. It does not work out. At that time we were being deceived”.

Now you say the separate roll does not work out either.

Yes, the separate roll does not work out either, and that is why we are going to give the Coloureds something better. In two years time the hon. member for Newton Park will also say we must not speak about what happened two years previously and that we should rather argue about something new. I can understand very well that if I had been sitting on that side I would also have gone to a lot of trouble to get rid of my past. After all, you know that the skeleton in the cupboard can sometimes cause great embarrassment and many problems.

I spoke about the three components of becoming a nation, of building a nation. The first is economic upliftment. Now I want to ask hon. members on the opposite side the following question. Have they ever, when the Government came forward with a new project, admitted that it was in fact in the interests of the Coloureds? When we removed the Coloureds from the slums and let them live in their own residential areas where they could live together like civilized people and as a nation without being regarded as intruders, did that side support us? Or did they present a distorted picture of what we were doing and say to the Coloureds, “You are being taken from your homes and thrown into another place”? They no longer dare to say that to-day. Of course not. Because it does not work out. They cannot tell the Coloureds a thing like that to-day because he will reply, “I am not a baboon”. The Coloureds do know that these projects were well meant. When we uplifted the Coloureds in the field of education, when we gave them their own schools and their own university, do you recall, Sir, what we were forced to hear across this floor? Do you remember the dust clouds which were raised in this beautifully clean Chamber? They were the dust clouds the Opposition was kicking up. After all, they sometimes do the impossible. At that time we were forced to hear how we were going to suppress these poor people, exploit them and supply them with inferior training and inferior facilities. Will hon. members on the opposite side repeat those things today? Will they repeat them? No, they will not. The hon. members are sitting without saying a word now, and they cannot be blamed for doing so because if I had been sitting on the opposite side I would also have been sitting in silence

About your legal or illegal treatment?

We have treated them honestly and fairly. We have given them the fairest treatment. Fair and honest treatment has never been illegal, and the hon. member ought to know that if he knows nothing else.

Were you in Parliament then?

The hon. member is evading the issue here; he should rather stand still and take his medicine. The Opposition requested this debate, and they must not be so over-sensitive now. It is they who are debating this Bill, they are the people who have accused us here of immorality and when we tell them what they did in the past in regard to similar legislation in the emancipation process, then they must not be oversensitive about it. We have now come to the third leg of the process of emancipation of the Coloureds, and this is the political leg. The emancipation process stands on three legs. The first two are the economic and the educational, and as far as those two legs are concerned, I challenge the Opposition to tell me that we have not treated those people honestly. I shall say nothing for a moment to give hon. members on that side an opportunity of saying to me, “No, you will not”. Zip! They are now as quiet as a mouse. We are now coming forward with the third leg, and they are kicking up a great cloud of dust and saying that we are immoral. If we should come forward in three years’ time and show them what we have achieved with this, then the hon. member for Newton Park will tell us: “Surely that was in the past; you must not rake up old issues.” Mr. Speaker, these are not old issues, these are old United Party men with old United Party stories we are raking up. We come now to the political emancipation of the Coloureds. We are giving them their own council. We are not merely taking away here; this is no mere negative step; this is one of those major positive steps in the emancipation of the Coloureds in South Africa. At the same time as we are taking away Coloured representation in this Parliament, we are passing another Bill in terms of which we are giving the Coloureds their own representative council. We are giving them governing powers and we are also giving them administrative powers. Do hon. members of the Opposition want us to do what is being done abroad? Must we do what they did in the Congo, i.e. come forward one day and tell the people: “To-morrow you are free and then you must govern yourselves.”

Are you going to free the Coloureds?

We are emancipating the Coloureds politically.

When?

We are engaged on that now. The hon. member is a Rip van Winkel. He does not know what we are engaged on. I maintain that we are engaged on a process of emancipation. Does the hon. member understand that?

What kind of freedom did the Congo receive?

Does that hon. member want us to apply the emancipation process immediately? Surely that is ridiculous.

No more than he wants to apply his integration policy immediately.

If the hon. member is dissatisfied with this process of gradual emancipation, does he want immediate integration in its place?

We do not advocate integration.

As far as the United Party’s policy is concerned, there is simply no objective. We indicate our course clearly, and it is the principle of autogenous nations in South Africa.

Where is the Coloureds’ country?

The objective of our policy is autogenous nations. That is our course and we are developing in that direction. No one can see the objective of our policy at this early stage; it is foolish to expect anything like that, but we are indicating our course very clearly. We are moving in a definite direction. Nobody can go to the nation and level the accusation that the National Party Government does not know where it wants to go to. The National Party’s objective is clear. We are building different nations in our common fatherland. We are engaged on a pattern which is new to the world, and that is why it is suspect, but people who come to South Africa and study this pattern, admit that South Africa has something which the world has not seen before. Surely hon. members of the Opposition know that integration is not working anywhere in the world. It is not working in America, it is not working anywhere in the world, and it will not work in South Africa either. The United Party’s entire policy is heading for integration. Hon. members on that side know that their policy can only lead to one thing, and that is integration.

Mr. Speaker, I would just like to indicate briefly to hon. members what many of the Coloureds themselves think of their franchise. In the reserves, in the Coloured rural areas in Namaqualand, in my constituency—and this rural area covers 1.25 million morgen—the Coloureds have a system which they described as their citizenship. In those rural areas one finds citizens and tenants (bywoners). Citizenship is an hereditary right, or one can earn it by good behaviour as long as one is resident there. One can apply for citizenship. Under their system the citizen has to pay certain taxes, whereas the tenant lives there free of charge. The citizen also has the right to elect his governing board. The citizen has certain political rights within that reserve. All the Coloureds have to do to obtain franchise is to approach a magistrate or someone else and fill in a registration form, but one-third of the names of the people who are entitled to vote do not appear on the voters’ rolls. Why not? Because the franchise means nothing to them.

Because they know that that council (raad) means nothing.

Sir, that is a very important admission, i.e. that the people here in the House (Raad) mean nothing, because that is what I am talking about now. That hon. member has really made a very important admission now. I know that hon. member to be an honest person, but sometimes he speaks rather hastily. The Coloureds are not registering for the franchise to send representatives to Parliament because the franchise has no value for them; the hon. member is quite correct. But that citizenship has a tremendous value for them. I know of Coloureds who work in Cape Town; I know of Coloureds who have been working on farms for many years, and who have never exercised the privileges of citizenship, but the first thing they do at the beginning of the year is to pay their citizenship fee. I have had these citizens in my employ for many years, and what happens? Come January, they ask you to send their citizenship fee, whatever it may be—and it is a considerable fee—away immediately.

What are you afraid of?

I am not afraid of anything. If the hon. member could understand Afrikaans he would realize that I am proving that this citizenship is of value to them and that the other thing is of no value at all to them. If the hon. member cannot understand me at all, I shall translate what I have just said into English for him, if Mr. Speaker would allow me to do so.

What did they tell the Commission?

They told the Commission that their own Coloured Persons’ Representative Council was something of value to them and that their citizens’ council was something of value to them. What happens every day in practice, proves that those things are of value to them.

Before I resume my seat I just want to refer to the hon. member for Karoo, who said in the course of his speech that he was regarded as being a very good member. He told us how much he meant to his people. I found it exceptionally interesting, because I actually represent two constituencies; I represent the Whites of Namaqualand, and to a very large extent I also represent the Coloureds. If I ask the hon. member’s voters why they do not go to their M.P., they reply that they have never seen him and that they do not know who he is. They then come to me and ask me to do something for them. Sir, we know politics. We know, and all the M.P.’s on that side know, that the M.P. to-day has, to a very large extent, become a public liaison officer who has continually to convey the representations of his voters to the Government and other bodies. I now want to put this question to hon. members on that side: Are the Coloureds’ interests going to be served better by four members here whom they never see and who never come near them, or are their interests going to be better served by 60 representatives who live amongst them and who can convey their representations?

But did the hon. the Minister not say that the work which was being done here by the Coloured Representatives was commendable?

Yes, we commend the work which they have done. I have no objection whatsoever to the work they have done. I am merely comparing it with better work which can be done. I am not insinuating in any way that the present Coloured representatives have not done their work. After all, the four Coloured representatives sitting here could never have looked after the interests of all their voters in the extensive areas they represent. The alternative is to have 60 White representatives for those people in Parliament.

Can you look after the interests of all your White voters in Namaqualand, plus the interests of the Coloureds?

I cannot accomplish that, and that is why I am so grateful that those Coloureds are now going to have their own representation in future. It is an impossible task. I am grateful for the assistance I am now going to be given here. The hon. member admits that four people cannot look after the interests of all the Coloureds in the country. Does he therefore want 60 White representatives here in the House of Assembly on behalf of the Coloureds?

No, he wants non-Whites here.

Or does he want 60 non-Whites here to represent the Coloureds? Sir, the hon. member should really be consistent. He must reply to me, and not snatch things out of the air here. [Time expired.]

Sir, in reply to these hon. gentlemen who are airing their ignorance on my left here, let me say that I am one of the few gentlemen in this House who represent Coloured voters.

How many?

Does it matter how many? I do represent Coloured voters.

Half a dozen.

They must not come here and air their ignorance. Let me say to the hon. member who has just sat down that I think he is a little bit of a Rip van Winkel himself, judging by what he said here. I think he thought that he was back in a debate which was held in this House a little while ago on the report of the Select Committee on the Prohibition of Improper Interference Bill. I think he forgot altogether that we were discussing legislation which has been presented to the House; in fact, he freely admitted it, but, Sir, I want to reply to some of the things that he said here. He referred to an “eindpunt” in their policy and he said that we had no “eindpunt” in our policy. We asked him directly what was the “eindpunt” of the policy of the Nationalist Party and he said that it had no “eindpunt”.

I said that the final outcome of your policy would be integration.

I agree with the hon. member that their policy has no “eindpunt”. The Nationalist Party policy has never had an “eindpunt”.

You do not understand Afrikaans.

They have not even been able to see a year or two ahead. They are opportunists; their whole policy is based on an adjustment according to circumstances.

Whenever they find themselves in a corner they go to the right or to the left, whichever way suits them best. Let me say here and now that this side of the House does not stand for integration in South Africa. That allegation has been denied often enough in this House and it has been denied often and often outside and I cannot understand why hon. members on that side will never get it into their thick skulls that we do not stand for integration. Sir, I want to cross swords with the hon. member when he talks about “Bantoe-volkere en ander-soortige volkere” in South Africa. What exactly does he mean by this? I think he is playing with words.

Peoples. Do you understand that?

Very well, “Bantu peoples”. But then he talks about the Zulus, the Amaxhosa, etc. What are they?

They are peoples.

What about the Welshmen, the Scots, the English, the Irish, the French; what are they? Are they “volkere”, to use his term?

They are a white people.

He says “hulle is ’n wit wolk”. What is the difference between a conglomeration of Scots, British, Welsh, French and various other nationalities and a conglomeration of Amaxhosa, Amazulu and the rest of it? Sir, there is no difference. This is a sign of the confused thinking on that side of the House when they try to justify their illogical policies.

The hon. member also referred to the question of developing “ ’n eie nasietrots” amongst the Coloured people. This is a very high-sounding ideal. It is something which I do not think one can dispute, but according to the way in which this hon. member sees it, there must be a centre of gravity; there must be a centre around which this “eie nasietrots” can be built.

Of course.

The hon. member agrees with me. I want to ask him what that centre of gravity is in terms of the policy of the Nationalist Party. Have they got or will they have their own land, their own “tuisland”?

They have their own culture.

Will they have their own legislative assembly, their own parliament, which will be able to deal with their own affairs in their own land? It has been pleaded for by hon. members opposite. Even this hon. member referred to “reservate” for the Coloureds. This is a new concept, as far as I am concerned.

It has been there for hundreds of years.

Where?

You do not know South Africa.

We are not coming to the concept where this Government, in terms of what this hon. member has said, is going to put these people into Reserves. All the Coloured people are now going to be herded together in Reserves. That is what he said, and he goes on to talk about “burgerskap” which they will have in these “reservate”.

It already exists.

Is this Government now suggesting dual citizenship for the Coloured people? Have they presently got dual citizenship? Now I cannot get an answer. I want to go further in regard to what the hon. member said about “reservate”. I want to know where they will be, when they will get them, and what they will be like; and when are they going to get their freedom, in the words of the hon. member himself, like the Congo? I will deal with the other points raised by the hon. member during the course of my speech.

We are sincerely happy to hear that, because ever since you have come to this House you have never made a speech but have only asked questions.

The short title of this Bill is the Separate Representation of Voters Amendment Bill. I want to suggest to the new hon. Whip on the other side that the short title should perhaps have been “Bill to provide for the Non-representation of Voters in Parliament”, because that is what it is going to be. That is what is meant by this Bill. These people are presently voters in this House, and after this Bill is steamrollered through by the Government they will still be voters in the Coloured Council but they will have no representation. They will not have any representation at the seat of government, the point where it matters. This Bill does away with representation in the only legislative body in this country. The Minister, when he introduced this measure, told us that the Coloured people had had representation here for over 100 years, and that they had enjoyed this privilege as a right. Now this Government is using every excuse to get them off. This Government has said that every population group must develop independently within its own group, or in the words of the Minister, that we must have “eiesoortige ontwikkeling”. The Minister and other hon. members opposite claim that this is “the traditional way of life” in South Africa. I want to disagree with those hon. members and say that this is not so. South Africa is, and always has been, a unitary state. The history, the nature of the administration, and even the constitution of the Republic, as was pointed out by the hon. member for Durban (North), have made t e independence of groups, as the hon. member for Namaqualand likes to call them, in South Africa impossible, even if this was truly desired by all the people in this country.

Order! I think the hon. member should get back to the Bill.

Sir, may I say that we are all common citizens of one land, and this Bill strives to separate us and to remove some of those common citizens from the right to have representation in this House. These common citizens that I am talking about are today perhaps even more inter-dependent than they have ever been.

What do you mean by “common citizens”?

Are we not all South Africans? In fact, this Government has practised this policy of apartheid …

Order! The hon. member must come back to the Bill.

Then let me put it this way. If apartheid had really been the traditional way of life in South Africa, there would not have been any Coloureds and there would have been no necessity for the legislation we are considering to-day. I want to say, further, that as we have these Coloureds their development can only take place together with that of the Whites in South Africa. The Coloureds have always bad a say in the government of our country. It was only after the Nationalists came into power that their rights and privileges were curtailed, and I think that has been admitted by the Minister and by other speakers. The Prime Minister, on a previous occasion in this House, and the hon. the Minister now, have claimed that now, for the first time, 900,000 Coloureds are being given the vote. But the vote for what? I know I cannot discuss other legislation that is before the House, but they are getting the vote for a body which is not the same as this body, which does not have the power of this body, a body which is going to be a very poor sop to the Coloured people for their loss of rights.

That point has been advanced over and over again.

Speakers opposite have also claimed as an “inalienable right” that each group has the right to live and strive according to its “traditional way of life”. Recent history has amply demonstrated the falsity of such an assertion. The “inalienable right” that has been claimed by the Coloured people, according to the report of the Select Committee, is the right to participate fully in the government of their country, the country which they share with other non-Whites and with the Whites in South Africa. Complete separation in the political sphere is not accepted by the majority of the Coloureds. I think the evidence before the Select Committee shows that this is not accepted by the Coloured people, nor is it accepted by a large number of Whites in this country. We could perhaps understand the thinking of the Nationalist Party, and we could perhaps understand the reason for this Bill, if the Government was to create this as an all-white Parliament representing only the Whites in South Africa and legislating only for the Whites. But Parliament legislates for all South African citizens, white and Coloured, and also for the other non-Whites, whose “inalienable right”, if the Government wants to use that phrase, is the exercise of their democratic privilege, which is inherent in a parliamentary system such as ours, to vote for representatives to represent them in this House, which is, as I said before, the highest governing body in the land.

I have allowed the hon. member to make these general remarks, but he must now come back to the Bill.

In this Bill we are faced with the provisions that representatives of the Coloured people who are sitting here now will, firstly, have their period of office extended; secondly, if any vacancies occur, they will not be filled; and, thirdly, their lives will terminate with the life of this Parliament. We find, further, that there will not be any further representatives for the Coloured people elected to this Parliament at the end of that period, and that also includes the Senator who is appointed to represent the Coloureds in the Other Place. But in terms of our Constitution, there are five Senators nominated to the Other Place for their knowledge of and acquaintance with the Coloured people. I want to know from the Minister what the position is of those five Senators in terms of this Bill. No mention is made of them. Is it the intention of the Government to retain those five Senators because of their knowledge of and acquaintance with the Coloured people? If this has been asked before. I did not hear it and I would like to hear the Minister’s answer.

There is another question which is not answered here and on which I should like to hear the Minister. What is to be the position of those Coloureds in Natal, to whom I referred earlier, who are still on the Common Roll?

Read the Bill and you will see.

I have read it, but I cannot see it there. Perhaps the Minister might enlighten me. As I said earlier, this Bill provides for the extension of the lives of the existing members and not to fill the vacancies. I want to protest most strongly against this. I say it is a principle of democracy that the voters should be allowed to pass judgment on their representatives. Some of these persons were elected as far back as 1961. The effect of this Bill is now to extend their lives until 1971, which is a doubling of their normal life of five years. I want to say that this is an extremely dangerous principle with which this House is toying to-day, namely, the extension of the life of a Member of Parliament to ten years. As was pointed out previously, will this not happen again to all of us when this Government finds itself in danger of losing control of this country?

In conclusion, I want to say that I find this Bill completely offensive as these Coloured people share the same culture, languages, customs and religion as we of the white group. Many hon. members have quoted evidence of the change of heart and the change of policy on the part of the Government. I want to quote, in conclusion, words which were used in this House in 1930 by the late General Hertzog, when he said this—

Sir, I agree with the late General Hertzog; I reject this Bill completely, and I support the amendment of my hon. Leader.

I would like to take up the hon. member who has just sat down on a question relating to the Constitution. It is quite obvious that the Constitution arranged that the political power could be transferred from Great Britain to the Government of South Africa. There is nothing in the Constitution that I know of that says that the nonwhite people have an inalienable right to take part in Parliament. In fact, it was one of the terms of Union that no non-white people would sit in this House. General Botha said if this was not so, there would have been no Union. But the Constitution did say, however, that the Coloured vote and the Bantu vote in the Cape could only be removed by a two-thirds majority of both Houses sitting together. That was legally done. The courts said it was legal.

Legally?

Yes, legally. It was constitutionally done. [Interjections.]

Order!

Mr. Speaker, it was said of the old Bourbon family of Europe that while they had learnt nothing, they also had forgotten nothing. After 20 years of National Party Government, when we are doing nothing more than carrying out the mandate which was given to us by the electorate to solve the problem of South Africa on the basis of separate development …

When did you get a mandate from the electorate to remove the Coloured representatives?

We received the mandate in 1948, and with every successive election, to carry on and to govern on the basis of separate development, and this Bill marks the continuation of that policy. I see no tragedy here. The outside world is being made to believe that there is a tragedy here, but there is none. I see a pattern unfolding. In 1948 the National Party was elected by the white electorate of South Africa and given a mandate to carry out this policy. In a world where nationalism, not only white nationalism … [Interjections.]

Order!

… is awakening, I can understand that the United Party cannot understand the feeling of nationalism of the non-white people and the desire to be themselves and to rule themselves, because they could not understand the national aspirations of their own white people. In 1960, when the National Party went to the electorate and asked for a mandate for a republic, the United Party completely misunderstood the feeling of the electorate and they opposed it. Not only did they oppose it, but I remember how shocked I felt when, during the republic referendum campaign in Pinelands, the Leader of the Opposition made a speech in which he warned the farmers in the Western Province that if they voted for a republic the peaches and plums would rot on the trees. [Interjections.] In other words, the highest ideals of the nation were equated by the United Party with an export market in fruit.

I can understand that the United Party does not understand the nationalism of the Blacks. It was the National Party that solved the extremely difficult problem of black nationalism in South Africa.

Now we come to the Coloured man. The United Party defends the status quo, the so-called right by Coloured people in the Cape—males only, not the women, and only in the Cape—to vote on the Common Roll, which, as everybody knows, was imposed upon South Africa by Great Britain. And this is what they are defending. In 1945 a book was published by B. K. Long, a member of their party, in which he said—

Order! The hon. member must come back to the Bill.

That was when the Coloured voters were still on the Common Roll. After that, as we know, they were put on a separate roll. In 1966 the hon. member for Peninsula quoted from a letter which he had received from a man who the hon. member said “opened his heart as to the sordid manner in which he was drawn by the Progressive Party leaders into conflict with the law”. I want to requote a portion of that letter, that portion recorded in Hansard, Vol. 18. Col. 3178. The relevant portion reads as follows—

When I heard this in 1966, it seemed to me that that man was not only appealing to the hon. member for Peninsula. He was appealing to this House to save him and his people from this wicked and cruel exploitation by the Progressive Party. It is very necessary that this step be taken. The time has come to end Coloured representation in this House. It is in the interest of the Coloured people themselves, because the Government is going to give them something much better. It is true that we as white people want to be ourselves and have our own Parliament. The Coloured also wants to be himself; he also wants separation from the Bantu; and he also wants a place where he can live himself out as a Coloured man. I believe that the legislation before us is going to open for the Coloured man a new dispensation for his greater happiness, his fuller development and a greater racial peace in South Africa.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member who just sat down I believe said that the British government forced the 1910 Constitution on South Africa.

I did not say that. I said the entrenchment was forced on us.

Well, that is part of the Constitution. Of course, Sir, there is no truth in that. Our National Convention drew up our Constitution. The entrenchment was a bargain arrived at by the different provinces and colonies—call it a compromise if you like—and it was accepted by our people, the same as was the Constitution, and the Constitution was accepted by the British government. The British government did not force anything like that on us at all.

Why were those sections entrenched?

Because we knew what was going to happen. And why should those provisions not have been entrenched? We believe in entrenchment. Indeed, why are our language rights entrenched? They are entrenched and they should be entrenched. At a later stage in our history the Nationalist Party also entrenched our language rights because they should be entrenched. The other sections were also entrenched, and for very good reasons, as we found out subsequently.

The hon. member for Green Point said yesterday there was no proper motive for the introduction of this Bill now before us. He referred to a number of motives which were mentioned here, but he said there was really no real motive behind the introduction of this measure. It certainly was not motivated by this report of the commission, because the report shows clearly that the evidence given before the commission is completely against any suggestion that that evidence affords a reason for the introduction of this measure. The hon. the Minister told us the Coloured people were not interested in politics, and in proof thereof he stated that only about 33,000 Coloureds were on the voters’ roll. But I think he should know, and I am sure he does know, that at election times the Coloured people do take a tremendous interest in the politics of this country, just as the white people do. White people mostly take an interest in politics at election time, and in the same way Coloured people also take a tremendous interest in our politics when elections are held.

The fact that there are so few registrations is not because they do not take an interest in political matters. It is due in the first place to the fact that they are frustrated by this Government’s policies and the manner in which they have been treated. In the second place many of them are not registered because this Government has gone out of its way to make it extremely difficult for a Coloured person to register. This is one of the main reasons. This Government did its best to keep them off the roll. They have to register at a police station during the police station office hours, and those were the same hours when they had to work, which made it very difficult if not almost impossible for them to reach a police station during the registration hours. Apart from that, many of them do not like the idea of having to visit a police station to register and they prefer to register at other offices. I believe this Government did nothing whatsoever to encourage them to register as voters. In fact, they did their best to handicap them wherever possible.

The hon. member for Malmesbury accused the hon. member for Peninsula of making an “opruiende toespraak”. The hon. member for Peninsula condemned this Bill in no uncertain terms, and we agree with that. His speech was anything but inflammatory. We on this side, the same as the hon. member for Peninsula, certainly have the right to criticize measures such as this Bill which we believe are not in the interests of the people of South Africa. But whenever we criticize legislation of this nature, hon. members on that side tell us we are un-South African. I think it is an autocratic attitude to adopt to say that if we on this side criticize legislation in this House we are doing South Africa harm. It is our privilege, as the Opposition, and it is our duty to criticize measures before us if we are so inclined. We have the right to disagree with legislation, and in spite of what hon. members on that side say and think, we on this side will continue to do so where necessary. We will continue to fight Bills which we believe do more harm to the image of this country, both inside and outside South Africa, than any criticism which we can make. I do not believe for one moment that a Bill of this nature which removes the last remaining political rights—which are small enough—of our Coloured people, which removes their representation from this House, can do the image of South Africa any good in the outside world, not to mention amongst those people in our own country.

I already said I do not believe this Bill could possibly have been motivated by the commission’s report. My hon. Leader mentioned that there were something like 27 witnesses, including political parties and bodies, which testified, and who categorically stated they were not in favour of the abolition of Coloured representation here. They strongly advocated that these representatives should not be removed from this House. A few witnesses, seven or nine, were in favour of the proposed abolition, but they were mostly individuals. The main Coloured political parties stated unequivocally they did not agree with the suggested removal.

The hon. member for Malmesbury quoted from Mr. Fortuin’s evidence. Mr. Fortuin belongs to the Conservative Party. The hon. member tried to show that Mr. Fortuin was not completely in favour of political representation for Coloureds in this House. Well, I have gone through Mr. Fortuin’s evidence and I think that on something like six occasions he stated unequivocally that he wants representation for the Coloured people in this Parliament. In this connection I put the following question to him (see page 129 of the report)—

He was not keen to answer the question and the Chairman told him that the commission should like to know. He then replied as follows—

This is a man who supports the Nationalist Party policy of separate development, Mr. Speaker. He went on to say—

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

Afternoon Sitting

Mr. Speaker, when the House adjourned for lunch I stated that the evidence in the report of the commission was overwhelmingly in favour of the rentention of the representation in this House of the Coloured people. All the political parties of the Coloured people gave evidence before this commission, namely the Conservative Party, the Federal Party and the Labour Party. The Conservative Party, with Mr. Petersen as chairman, stated categorically on page 130 of the report:

Mr. Fortuin, also a very prominent Coloured man, went on to say that if you take something away from a person he has a grievance. He said that Dr. Malan promised that the Coloured representatives would not be removed from Parliament. He went on to say:

I take it that he was referring to the previous Minister of Coloured Affairs.

I just want to ask the hon. member on behalf of which party Mr. Fortuin spoke.

Mr. Fortuin spoke on behalf of the Conservative Party. I am dealing with the Conservative Party now. Before proceeding, I want to say …

Order! The hon. member commenced his speech in English.

Mr. Speaker, just before the House adjourned for lunch I quoted from the report and said that it was what Mr. Fortuin had said, but I made a mistake because Ds. Steenkamp said that. I want to take this opportunity of rectifying that error.

Mr. Fortuin said that Dr. Malan promised that the Coloured representatives would not be removed from Parliament. He went on to say that that assurance was also given to the Coloured people by the late Dr. Verwoerd as well as the Minister of Coloured Affairs. I presume that he means the previous Minister of Coloured Affairs, Mr. P. W. Botha. He said that you must have Coloured representatives in Parliament but at the same time he said that you must not have two voices. I refer to this matter because it was raised by the hon. member for Malmesbury. He gave us to understand that Mr. Fortuin was not in favour of Coloured representation in Parliament on the basis of this statement. According to the evidence that statement was made because he did not want the representatives in Parliament to be elected by the general electorate. He wanted them to be elected by the council. According to him if they were elected by the council, they would then speak with one voice. He insisted that they must have representation in this House. It is not a case of Mr. Fortuin meaning that they must not have representation in Parliament. That was how the hon. member for Malmesbury interpreted what Mr. Fortuin had said.

Did Mr. Fortuin not say that experts should be appointed to represent the Coloureds in this House?

That is not the point at the moment. I know about that. The point is that they want representation in Parliament. Mr. Fortuin went on to say that they should have six representatives, namely four for the Cape and two others. He stated emphatically that they should have six representatives. On page 138 of the report he says:

In other words, he maintains that the Coloured people feel so strongly on this issue, and to that extent do they insist on having representation in Parliament, that if he were to fight an election he would be rejected if he advocated the abolition of this representation. He continues:

They regard it as a matter of good faith. What a shock this will be to them if they now find that the representation in Parliament on which they have insisted and which has been promised to them will now cease to exist. I think that that will be a tremendous shock to the goodwill and good faith that exist between these different race groups.

I now come to the Federal Party, whose chairman is Mr. Tom Schwartz. He too insists on representation in this Parliament. On page 146 we read that the chairman asked him whether it was the late Prime Minister who said so, to which Mr. Tom Schwartz replied:

He stated emphatically that they want this representation maintained. On page 147 he goes further and again states that they not only want representation in Parliament but that that representation must be by Coloured people. On page 148 he also says that if they were to advocate the abolition of their representation in Parliament, he might as well disband his party. This shows how strongly they feel and how strongly the Coloured people and their supporters feel about this. On page 149 of the report he again says that he would have to disband his party if he were to advocate t is. There is no question whatsoever that the Coloured people feel very strongly on this representation. They want to be able to exercise full political expression and to be able to play a part in the government of South Africa. They also want a voice in Parliament. The other members of this deputation, and I think there were five of them, also categorically stated that they supported the statements made by Mr. Schwartz, the chairman. He also said that the late Dr. Verwoerd had said that it was not the policy of the Government to remove the Coloured representation from Parliament. These people had faith in Dr. Verwoerd in regard to this and they feel strongly about it. They feel that this promise was made to them and they want the Government to abide by it. The members of this deputation under Mr. Tom Schwartz are not supporters of my party. In fact, they are strong supporters of the separate development movement. On the whole they are supporters of this Government. They were subjected to very heavy cross-examination and in spite of that, they were firm in their attitude that Coloured representation in this Parliament must remain. There again, what a shock it must be to Mr. Tom Schwartz and his Conservative Party to find now that the Government is coming with a Bill in order to remove the representation that they have in the Central Parliament.

I now come to the Labour Party under Dr. Van der Ross. He states quite categorically that he prefers the Common Roll. He is prepared, however, to accept the separate roll but under no circumstances is he prepared to have the representation of the Coloureds in this Parliament abolished. He also refers to Dr. Verwoerd, who made it plain that he had no intention to remove Coloured representation from Parliament. It is well known amongst the Coloured people that this was the view of Dr. Verwoerd and of the Nationalist Party. They regard this as a promise made to them and it will be a shock to them to find that this Bill is here before Parliament. The hon. the Minister told us that the Coloured people were not very politically-conscious. Sir, I can assure you that these people are fully politically-conscious; they know what they are talking about and they know what they want.

I now want to come to two white witnesses who gave evidence. One of them is Ds. Steenkamp, who is the Moderator of the N.G. Sendingkerk. He has worked amongst the Coloured people for 40 years and he knows them. He knows their wants, he knows their wishes and he knows their aspirations, and he categorically states that the Coloured people should have representation in Parliament. In fact, he goes further and says that they should be represented by Coloured people. Then I come to Ds. Botha, who has also worked amongst the Coloured people for some 16 years. Ds. Botha states that he has made an intense study of the Coloured people over many years. At page 162 he also states definitely that they must be represented by Coloured people; that their representation in Parliament must not be abolished in any circumstances, and that it would be much better if they were represented by their own people.

Is that your choice also?

The hon. member should surely know by this time what I feel and what my policy is. Mr. Speaker, you can go through the evidence and you will find that a great proportion of the Coloured people who gave evidence and a large number of the white people who gave evidence, insisted that Coloured representation in the Central Parliament must be maintained. I am sure that these two gentlemen to whom I referred a moment ago are not supporters of my party. They are supporters of the Government’s policy of separate development, but they are emphatic that the Coloured people must be represented in the Central Parliament. Sir, they are people who know the Coloured people. They are fully acquainted with their wants and their desires. I have no doubt whatsoever that the vast majority of the Coloured people in this country want representation in the Central Parliament. I am absolutely convinced of that, and I am absolutely convinced that it is in the interests of all the peoples of this country that they should have that representation, and I think it will be a sorry day for our relations with the Coloured people if that representation were abolished. It will be a shock to the good relations which exist to-day; it will be a shock to their faith in the white man and I hope that the Government will reconsider its attitude.

Then I just want to discuss one little matter which was raised by the hon. member for Mossel Bay. When I was speaking in a previous debate I mentioned that many of the non-European people were intimidated. I was speaking about the Indians in that particular instance and I expressed my regret that so few Indians had come forward to give evidence before this commission. Mr. Havemann asked one of the prominent Indian witnesses, Mr. Poovalingam, why the Indian people were apathetic. The witness’s reply was—

In other words, that is my information, that the Indian people are intimidated …

That is why they would not come forward.

… and I am prepared to say that there are also many Coloureds who are afraid.

In conclusion I want to repeat that I am convinced that the right thing is that the Coloureds must have representation in this Parliament. It would be a very sorry day if that representation were abolished.

It is being claimed today that Britain is a toothless bulldog. But it is not only England that finds herself in this embarrassing position. Here in our country an old relative of Great Britain’s is experiencing a tremendous amount of trouble with its teeth. It is the United Party.

A toothless mongrel.

They may have a few teeth left, but those have become blunt. Ezekial said that the old men had eaten unripe grapes and that the children’s teeth had become blunt. Sir, that is exactly what has happened to the United Party. The present and the former leaders of the United Party picked unripe fruit from the tree of relationship politics, tasted it, threw it away and grabbed another. As a result their teeth became blunt, so blunt that they can no longer bite but only bark, and it is particularly in their conduct as regards the political rights of the Coloureds that this fact is reflected so well. Sir, in the past 15 to 16 years the United Party has had no fewer than four policies in this regard, and they all differed drastically from one another. Just to refresh the memory of the more junior members of the United Party: in the fifties they had the do-not-want-to-know or the do-not-want-to-tell policy. They did not want to tell us whether or not they would reinstate the Coloureds on the Common Voters’ Roll. At that stage Dr. Friedman packed his bags and left the sinking ship. In 1958 the U.P. stated that the Coloureds would be reinstated on the Common Voters’ Roll, but that they would be represented by Whites in this House. In 1962 the U.P. came forward with their race federation policy. This is what the U.P.’s Manifesto for Better Race Relations, dated August 1963, has to say about this race federation on page 3 (translation)—

The 1962 policy stipulated further that the Coloureds would be reinstated on the Common Voters’ Roll and that they would be represented in this House by their own people. Then we came to 1967, and then we had “the Daddy of them all”, the greatest abdication in the political history of South Africa. The race federation, which in 1962 was held up to their supporters as being such an excellent policy, was exchanged for a territorial federation, irrespective of the bitter experiences that attended this type of federation all over the world, and irrespective of the warnings they issued in 1962.

Where do you get “territorial federation” from?

In spite of the fact that up to that stage they had been putting up a fight to the last trench for the retention of the Coloured vote on the Common Voters’ Roll, in spite of their solemn promises to the Coloureds, do you remember, Sir, what the hon. member for Constantia said in 1955? He said—

In spite of those promises they decided in Bloemfontein on 25th November, 1967, that the Coloureds would be placed on separate voters’ rolls. I now want to put this to the hon. member for Gardens: That was the undertaking you gave the Coloureds in 1955. If you are men of your word, as you pretend to be, why are you and the other U.P. members of the Cape still sitting in U.P. benches in this Parliament, where your Cape leader said that if that were to happen, the United Party would lose 12 members? However, you are still sitting here to-day. Mr. Speaker, in 1958 the U.P. propagated integration on the Voters’ Roll and apartheid in the House of Assembly. In 1962 they advocated integration on the voters’ roll and in the House of Assembly, and in 1967 the United Party advocated apartheid on the voters’ roll and integration in the House of Assembly. And then the hon. the Leader of the Opposition has the audacity to accuse the National Party of “somersaults”. Let me tell him what one of his old stable companions, Colin Eglin, has to say—

They are becoming more progressive than the Progressives.

Sir, if one seeks to ensure the peaceful co-existence of the various races in this country, there is one predominant requirement i.e. that one should be honest towards each group. Every group in the country must know where it stands with one and what one plans for it. To this day the Coloureds still do not know where they stand with the United Party. The United Party has never been honest with the Coloureds, and it is not only I who say that. In 1952 the Natal Mercury wrote—

Listen to what was said in a letter to the editor published in The Star dated 20th November, 1967—

But the United Party’s bona fides, as far as the Coloureds are concerned, are also belied by their own statements. To-day they are the people who tell us that we are treating the Coloureds so badly, but in 1966, in the constituency of Graaff-Reinet, they attacked me because the Government was building such fine schools for the Coloureds at Aberdeen and in Graaff-Reinet. On 23rd November, 1967, the Leader of the Opposition said the following in Rondebosch (translation)—

But, surely, then the hon. the Leader of the Opposition is not honest with the Coloureds. This statement of his proves indisputably that in spite of the promises, the Coloureds will never be permitted under the United Party’s policy to develop to their full potential.

Up to what stage will they be permitted to develop under your policy? That will never happen.

The United Party believes in vertical integration, with the Whites at the top and the Coloureds at the bottom Such a policy did not succeed in America, and what reason have we to believe that it will succeed here in South Africa?

I shall go further. On 2nd November, 1966, a voter of mine the hon. member for Walmer, who unfortunately is not here to-day, told me the following—

Why does he want to fight for that? After all, we all admit that. It is generally accepted that the Coloureds form part of our Western community. But then the hon. member for Walmer continued and said—

Why does the U.P. not want to fight for that, for this right which it does not begrudge the Coloureds? He says that if the Coloureds want to fight for that, the United Party will welcome them here, but the United Party will not raise a finger to help them to get here. The United Party leaves the practical implementation of its colour policy in the hands of the Coloureds knowing only too well that under the present circumstances the Coloureds would never be able to make the grade on their own. The road along which the United Party wants to lead the Coloureds, is a road leading nowhere; it is a road which can only lead to frustration. The legislation before the House at the moment is the logical consequence and the result of the National Party’s policy of separate development. Speakers opposite kept on harping on the so-called conflicting statements made by Dr. Verwoerd and the hon. the Minister of Defence, but even if their argument is valid, any such amendments are still based on the policy of separate development and still lead to the road we have envisaged for the Coloureds. We have not been dishonest towards them. This legislation has been provided, not because we think we are better than the Coloureds, but because it is our honest opinion that it is in the interests of the Coloureds that they should enjoy their political rights separately from the Whites. This has been the trend in South Africa since the earliest times.

Order! Would the hon. member kindly refrain from reading his speech?

I am merely quoting from reports. I say that since the earliest times it has been the trend in South Africa to move in this direction as far as the Coloureds are concerned. Sir, I want to take you back to 1893. At that time there was talk …

May the hon. member read it now?

Yes, the hon. member may quote, but he must not read his speech.

In 1893 there was talk of a Malay, Ahmed Effendi, standing for Parliament, and there was a strong possibility that this Malay would be elected to Parliament. The then Government immediately launched legislation through Parliament in order to put obstacles in the way of his being elected to the House of Assembly. I have the Hansard in front of me and I just want to read what was said at the time. Rhodes said—

That was Rhodes, who was certainly not a member of the National Party. Hofmeyr said this—

Schreiner said—

Merriman voted against it and said—

In 1903 a commission was appointed, the South African Native Affairs Commission, which sat from 1903 to 1906, and this commission, the members of which were certainly not Nationalists, reported as follows—

The point I want to make is that this has been the trend over the years. It was felt that these people should not sit in the House of Assembly. I just want to quote a brief passage from the book written by B. K. Long, where he refers to the change—and he was a United Party supporter—and says—

I say that the legislation before the House now is a result of a trend which has been in existence in this country since the earliest years and in respect of which the voters of the country have proved from time to time that they want it that way by returning the National Party to the House of Assembly with greater majorities at each election.

I cannot refrain from mentioning the contribution the hon. member for Karoo made yesterday. If I were to use the right word to describe it, Sir, you would send me out of the House, but I just want to tell the hon. member for Cape Town (Gardens) the following. The hon. member for Cape Town (Gardens) says that he stands by the hon. member for Karoo, who ended his speech with the following words—

What purpose did these words serve in this House? Will somebody from the United Party rise and repudiate the hon. member for Karoo? That was intended for consumption abroad. It can only damage the reputation of the country if such words are used, and it serves no purpose as far as the discussion of this legislation is concerned. The hon. member for Karoo said we were treating the Coloureds like dogs. I do not wish to quote a National Party source; I want to quote what Dr. Van der Ross said, and as you know, Sir, he is not a supporter of apartheid. On 2nd April, 1967, he said the following (translation)—

The hon. member for Karoo also said that the only people who would vote for us, would be those appointed by the Government to positions, but I just want to read from The Star—

And they voted for apartheid. The U.P. claims that only those Coloureds whom we appoint to councils, will support us. I shall read from the Sunday Express dated 5th March—

And this is not a National Party newspaper. But despite that the hon. member for Karoo says that we only have the support of those few Coloureds whom the Government appoints to this Council, but here the Sunday Express states that we have achieved a “break-through” as far as a large percentage of the Coloureds is concerned.

I do not have any time left. In conclusion I want to quote what was published in the Cape Argus about what was said by Professor Murray of the University of Cape Town—

Yet that side says that we are taking away the rights of the Coloureds. On the contrary, we are granting them more rights, and that is why it is a great honour to me to-day to be able to support this legislation here in this House to-day.

Mr. Speaker, I am surprised at the speech made by the hon. member for Graaff-Reinet. I really expected something much better from him.

What do you know about the interior, seeing that you were born amongst the Bantu?

Perhaps I have not quite the personal contact which the hon. the Minister has had with Coloureds, but I know the Coloureds very well. The hon. member for Graaff-Reinet started off by referring to Britain; he linked the United Party with Britain and said that the United Party “se tande het stomp geword”. I intend dealing with the speech made by the hon. the Minister of Defence later and I have asked him to be sent for, and I hope he will be here by the time I reach that stage of my speech. Meanwhile I will hold over my reply to him and I deal with the “stomp tande” charge then.

The hon. member for Graaff-Reinet spent some time dealing with the United Party’s change of policy. What I want to point out to him is this. There is a big difference between us changing our policy and the Nationalist Party changing its policy, for this one reason: Throughout we have stuck to one principle and that is that the other racial groups must also have representation in this House. We have stuck to that principle. The Government, on the other hand, has departed from principle altogether, and our attack on them during this debate has been their lack of principle. I do not know where the hon. member gets his information about what our policy is. If he comes to me I will give him some literature to read. He says we now stand for a territorial federation.

That is nonsense.

He is confusing Dr. Verwoerd’s policy with ours. Dr. Verwoerd spoke about a territorial federation, a commonwealth with the Prime Ministers meeting in a high court. That was Dr. Verwoerd’s policy. If the hon. member has been under a misapprehension I think he should go back to his constituents and tell them he wants to join us here on this side of the House. He accused us of abdicating from our undertaking to put the Coloureds back onto the Common Roll. We did not abdicate from any undertaking given to them. As hon. members said, we fought to keep them on the Common Roll and we fought this because what the Government was doing was to apply their law unconstitutionally and illegally. The United Party spent many years and a lot of money fighting the Government, and every time we won. Every court held that the Government had acted unconstitutionally. One thing I will say for the hon. member for Graaff-Reinet is this: He was never a member of the High Court of Parliament.

I was—I was a “judge”; “ek was ’n Juts’.”

They have forgotten all about that. We fought on principle then, and eventually admittedly we were beaten with the enlarged Senate and we then accepted the position. As far as this allegation of abdicating is concerned, when we changed our policy as regards the Coloured voters being on a separate roll rather than on a Common Roll, we made it quite clear at Bloemfontein why we did that. We said we had changed our policy because the Coloureds themselves had now come to accept the position that they were a separate group after so many years of Nationalist rule. They were prepared to accept the position and they preferred to be on a separate roll. They had become used to it. We made it quite clear that we were released from any obligation there might have been to put the Coloureds back on the Common Roll because of the actions of this Government.

Now, the hon. member for Graaff-Reinet is an attorney and I am surprised that he should read letters written to newspapers as evidence against the United Party. I wonder who wrote those letters. I hope the hon. member is not blushing. Who wrote those letters? Nobody knows who wrote them

You can have them all; you can read them.

We know the Nationalist have “ghost” letter writers in the English Press. If it comes to letter reading, we can certainly beat the Nationalists because we get many more letters against the Nationalists and saying most scandalous things against the Nationalists, more so than they can ever say against us.

The hon. member also attacked the United Party for the following reason. He said that when once he stood in an election somebody in his constituency accused the Nationalist Party of spending too much money on Coloured education.

The hon. member for Durban (Point) was there.

Again I wonder if the hon. member was not thinking of a previous election when he attended a United Party meeting and heard Nationalist Party members attacking the United Party for spending too much money on the Coloureds, because that was the attitude of the Nationalist Party all the way through, namely that the United Party was spending too much money on the non-Europeans.

The hon. member also read from some speech made by some member that the Coloureds stand close to our hearts. I remember listening in this House to a speech by a Nationalist Cabinet Minister who said that “Five million hearts will beat as one”. I repeat: “Five million hearts will beat as one.” That was said by Dr. Dönges.

What is wrong with that? [Interjections.]

How do you have five million hearts beating as one? The hon. member wants to know what is wrong with that. Well, then I ask him: Will 18 million hearts beat as one? Does the hon. member for Brakpan now say 18 million hearts are going to beat as one? Is that what he says?

Now he is blushing.

If they all feel the same way about this country, yes. [Interjections.]

The whole purpose of Dr. Dönges’s speech was to show that the Coloured people were standing with the white people. That was the whole purpose of the speech, that we were being treated as one. That was the purpose of his speech.

Admittedly right.

“Admittedly right,” the hon. the Minister says. Exactly. Well, if that is so, if five million hearts are beating as one, and we will all stand together—if that is what Dr. Dönges meant—why treat them like they are being treated now? Why give them this slap in the face?

Do the hearts of all the Common Market countries beat as one?

I have heard some foolish statements from this hon. the Minister, but never as bad as this! He asks whether all the Common Market countries’ hearts now beat as one. What nonsense is that?

If they beat as one?

But they don’t. [Interjections.]

If they did, would it mean they are regarded as belonging to one nation? [Interjections.]

Order! The hon. member should be allowed to make his own speech.

We have had various reasons given for the introduction of this measure into the House, and it has been said it all stems from the report of the commission of which I was a member. What justification for this measure do we find in the majority report of the commission? Let us just read what they do say in clause 14 on page xvi, talking about the careful consideration and study of the memoranda and the evidence:

Where are they going to evolve to? What is the final step? Where are they going to go to? Here the Government takes a backward step by denying them rights which they at present enjoy, and they say that it is a forward step! [Interjection.] They then go on to pay tribute to the present members representing the Coloureds:

Well, if that is so, why must they now be removed? If the commission was in earnest, and if the Prime Minister was in earnest, because he also paid tribute to them in this House, why then must they now be removed?

Now, Sir, what evidence was there before this commission that there was an “unfortunate exploitation” of the political rights of the Coloureds? Not a bit of evidence! The only evidence we have, was that there was certain malpractices as far as the voters roll was concerned, but there was not a bit of evidence in this report suggesting that there was “unfortunate exploitation”. Then they go on and remark that it “will before long give rise to seriously disturbed and troubled relations”. What is the evidence we heard from all the members on the Government side about the relations between the Coloureds and the Whites? Everyone remarked how good the relations are. In fact, they are proud of the good relations between the different race groups. If that is so, why change the system which has brought about these good relations? Is any hon. member here going to suggest that the relations are bad between the Coloureds and the Whites?

They can become even better.

Sir, we are told that they are better than they have ever been, and they could not be improved.

They can be improved, of course!

This hon. member says they can be improved. I hope he will tell us in what way they can be improved.

Then they talk in section 15 about a “lasting settlement”. Who decides whether it is lasting or not? We were given the impression that when the Coloureds were put on the separate roll, after listening to assurances given by the Prime Minister and others, that this was the lasting settlement. Dr. Verwoerd in reply to the hon. member for Bezuidenhout said this was permanent. Does “permanent” not mean “lasting”?

How long do you want it to be?

The representation here? We advocate that the representation be continued.

But you want to change it from white to Coloured. Does your party then not want to change the present position?

We are talking about the principle of representation in this House. As I said, reading the recommendations of this commission there is nothing one can find to justify what this Government is now doing. We want to know what the ultimate goal is. Every member on the Government side talks about what they have in store for the Coloureds. What have they in store for the Coloureds? We thought we had certainty from Dr. Verwoerd and from the Minister of Defence, who was then Minister of Coloured Affairs. They told us what the policy was. Now we find that they meant something different altogether. I will not go into that part any further, hoping that the hon. the Minister of Defence will come back. The present Prime Minister has shown only evasion. All he does is evade, and we cannot get any direct answers from the hon. the Prime Minister on any question that we put to him. Unfortunately he is not here this afternoon. We wanted him to commit himself to say what his ultimate goal with the Coloured people was. We have already had one statement from the hon. the Prime Minister. This is what he said in 1966 (Hansard, vol. 17, col. 2657)—

As regards the question of where this road lying ahead for the Coloureds will lead to, my reply is that we shall see how far they develop, what their capacity is, what responsibilities they can carry, with due consideration of the fact that they do not have a homeland of their own in which they can live and develop.

Now what does all that jargon mean? It means nothing at all. We want to know from the hon. the Prime Minister whether he intends giving them a homeland? These questions were also put to Dr. Verwoerd, but we got no definite reply. I want to know from this Prime Minister whether he agrees with Dr. Verwoerd that you can have a state within a state, and whether he too proposes to have a commonwealth. Does the present Prime Minister propose to have a final settlement along those lines? If the expansion of the council by giving it more power is such a big thing for the Coloureds, why do we not give them as much as we gave the Bantu in the Transkei? Why do we not give their council the same powers? Why must the Coloured people be treated as inferior to the Bantu in the Transkei, after all that was said for them by hon. members on the other side and hon. Ministers?

Have you read the Bill?

Yes, I have read the Bill. Has the hon. member read the Transkei Constitution Act? It was an unanimous recommendation of the commission that the chairman of the Coloured council should be elected, as the chairman of the Transkei council is elected. The people in the Transkei have the right to elect their own chairman and chief minister. The Coloureds, however, are not given that right. The Government will nominate the chairman of their council. The Transkei cabinet can introduce any legislation they like into their House. It has to get the final assent of the State President before it becomes law, in the same way as our laws. The Transkei cabinet however can introduce legislation. Can the Coloured Council do this? Of course they cannot. The introduction of their laws are subject to the approval of the Minister.

On what legislation is the hon. member speaking now?

I am dealing with the case put up by the Government that they are giving the Coloureds through the representative council more than they have ever had.

The hon. member must come back to this Bill. The other Bill is a separate one, on which the hon. member can make a separate speech.

But, Sir, the hon. Minister of the Interior, who introduced this Bill, linked the two Bills. Other speakers on the Government side too have linked the two. They go together and are part of the pattern. The hon. the Prime Minister said that the Coloureds had never really enjoyed political rights, and therefore they were really losing nothing. In any event, the Government was giving them other political rights in this council, for which every Coloured will have the right to elect members. Previous speakers have thus linked the two bills together.

I want to make one final point on this issue. The members of the Transkeian Legislative Assembly have absolute privilege. They can say what they like in their Chamber just as we can in this House, without any action being taken against them. That does not apply to the members of this Coloured Council.

Order! The Coloured Council is not under discussion now. The hon. member must return to this Bill.

You might know something about the Bantu, but you do not know anything about the Coloureds.

I challenge the Minister of the Interior to get up now and say that anything I have said about the Coloured Council and its powers is incorrect. He does not know what the powers of the council are. He talks in ignorance.

I now want to deal with the speech of the Minister of Defence yesterday when he replied to my Leader. The Leader of the Opposition accused the Minister of Defence and the late Dr. Verwoerd of having acted deceitfully, if what the Minister of Defence had said was true. Mr. Speaker, you will remember that the Minister of Defence had said that although he and Dr. Verwoerd were giving assurances to the Coloured people that they will not lose their political rights in this House and this Parliament, they actually intended doing away with these rights as part of their positive action. I will give him his due—he did say that he did not want to take part in this debate. I say that it is a pity that he did, because all he did was to lower the prestige and honour of the white man. All this ranting and raving here yesterday and his insinuations and allegations did not conceal the fact that he did not reply to the allegations made against him. He tried to justify his attitude by referring to a speech that he made in Port Elizabeth at a Nationalist Party congress.

At Port Elizabeth?

It was in 1965, but I am not quite sure where it took place. At any rate, it was at a festival congress of the Nationalist Party. He is now trying to dodge the issue by raising the question of where it was held. He was trying to prove that although they were saying that they were not going to take the vote of the Coloureds away, they were nevertheless thinking of it and that the public should have been forwarned because of the speech he made in 1965. He said this—

I might say that in his speech he used the word “gedwonge” that is a forced compromise—

Firstly, I want to say that the Minister in referring to this speech again yesterday said that my Leader had attacked him at De Dooms, I think.

Not as a result of that speech.

No, but he had attacked you. The Minister said: “Hy het na De Dooms toe gery en my daar oor my waarskuwings aangeval”. Whatever the place, it concerned the warnings my Leader had issued. I want the Minister to listen intently and then reply to a question. He went on to say: “Daarna het hy op ’n gekose komitee gedien. Hierdie beer wat so ’n hoë respek het vir ’n mens se woord”. On what committee did he serve after that?

[Inaudible.]

You used the word “hy”. The impression gained from this is that after my Leader had attacked the Minister he went to serve on a commission or a committee. The Minister’s speech in this regard appears quite clearly in Hansard. To attend to the other warning the hon. the Minister gave, I want to quote what he had to say—

I now want to ask the Minister, which member on the Government side, be it Minister or an ordinary member, got up in this House and justified the measure which we are now discussing because the Opposition had presented the Government’s policy as being illogical? This is the speech the Minister read to us to justify the attitude that they are now adopting. What justification have they brought to prove that this representation is being abolished because we have attacked their policy as being illogical? What did the Prime Minister say in this regard? What reasons has he given for introducing this Bill? He said that Coloureds had never had political rights.

That is correct.

That happens to be quite wrong. The Prime Minister did not say that this was being done because the Government’s policy had been attacked as being illogical. The hon. the Prime Minister made a lengthy attack on the United Party for changing its policy at Bloemfontein. The Prime Minister spent his time attacking the United Party. He never mentioned that we had accused the Government of having an illogical policy. He said that this would be done because of the increased representation given by the representative council and the link which is to be created. Nobody knows what that link is going to be. He did not say a word about the Government’s policy being attacked as illogical. This Minister made a vain attempt to try to excuse what he has done. What did he succeed in doing? He only succeeded in reducing the stature of the white man in this country. How can we expect any of the non-white groups in future to respect the word of the white man given from this Parliament? How can we expect that after the speech made by the hon. the Minister of Defence? He does not attempt to hide the fact at all. In fact, he is quite proud of it. He said that in the meantime they were working on a positive plan for the Coloureds. I want to say that he did South Africa an unpardonable wrong. That Minister cannot expect anyone to accept his word in future.

Do you think I care whether you accept my word or not?

He may not care what I think about him, but I want to tell him that we are always accused by the Government side of giving a bad name to South Africa because of what we say about this Government. Anybody reading about what this Minister had to say about his word and the late Prime Minister’s word will realize that we do not need the Opposition to give this country a bad name. He is the Minister of Defence. He is the man who has got to enter into contracts where only a gentleman’s word is given. They do not have treaties in matters of defence because a gentleman’s word is sufficient. This is the gentleman who expects to have his gentleman’s word accepted. He expects this after his behaviour and after telling us what he did and talking with his tongue in his cheek. He, and the late Prime Minister, who is not here to defend himself, were talking with their tongues in their cheeks. Why did he say that they were doing it? He said that they were doing it because the Opposition would exploit the position. That is why they did it. They did it because they were so afraid—and that brings me back to the “stomp tande” the hon. member for Graaff-Reinet spoke about—of our congress that they went out and told deliberate lies for fear of meeting us on that ground. It is shocking what they are doing to the Coloured people. This hon. Minister must take the responsibility for this because he was the Minister who gave the assurances together with Dr. Verwoerd. He must take full responsibility for what is done if the Coloureds resent it as they will. How can they not resent what is being done to them? I would refer him again and ask him to bear in mind a speech made by his colleague, now the President of the Senate, when he was Minister of the Interior. He must bear in mind what they are doing to the Coloured people and the breach of promise the Coloured people are suffering. He must also think of the deliberate lies told to the Coloured people. I should like to remind him of what the then Minister of the Interior said after the Sharpeville crisis—

We all remember the tense time of crisis through which we went at the time of the Sharpeville risings. He went on to say—

This, Mr. Speaker, was in 1960.

[Time expired.]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member who has just sat down, amused me a little, but the predominant impression I retained of his speech was, as the old English proverb says, that his bark was worse than his bite. He raised one or two matters here to which one can reply. However, the rest was a succession of nibbles here and nibbles there, nibbles which cannot hurt at all. He wanted to know what course we were following as regards the Coloureds, and I just want to tell him what course we do not intend to follow. We do not intend to move along the road of political integration, nor do we intend to move along a road leading to biological integration. Since he claimed that in comparison with the Bantu of the Transkei the Coloureds were being treated in an inferior way. I should like to ask him how he arrived at that conclusion. The Coloureds are amongst us. They are granted the right of ownership in our midst. They are getting a Council which has a sphere of activities and functions which is as extensive as that of the Government of the Transkei. As regards his objection to the so-called superiority of the Transkeian chairman as compared with the chairman of the to be established Administration of the Coloured Council, I just want to tell him that the chairman of the Administration of the Coloured Persons’ Representative Council is being entrusted with an enormous amount of money for which he will be responsible. That is why it must be possible for the State to exercise control over his actions. As regards the Transkei, the spending of the funds allocated to them is to a large extent still in the hands of the Department of Bantu Administration and Development. But I shall leave this matter at that.

Once again reference was repeatedly made to the late Dr. Verwoerd’s so-called assurances in this House. I just want to tell the hon. member that a word to the wise is enough, and if that is the deduction made by hon. members opposite, it makes one wonder whether they really understood Dr. Verwoerd at that time. If they could not even understand the hon. the Minister of Defence yesterday when he explained that he had meant the Commission on which members of the United Party, the Leader of the Opposition’s Party, served—they want to split hairs as to the meaning of words—then I wonder whether they understood Dr. Verwoerd correctly at that time. I really do not think so. The late Dr. Verwoerd was the last person to whom one could attach the label of rigid political thinking, and that is what the Opposition wants to attach to him through their claim that he would have adhered to a so-called assurance in the light of changed circumstances. I repudiate that entirely.

Sir, one cannot discuss this Bill if one does not return time and again to the concept of reassessment, which it is in point of fact, of the political rights or the kind of political rights the Coloureds have been enjoying in the Cape. It is a fact that the white representation of the Coloureds is disappearing and that there is a diminution of political rights of this particular kind. But in order to understand the logic of such a measure and to see it in its proper perspective, one must in the first place, when one comments on this, view the basic points of departure of the Parties in this House in respect of race or ethnic relationships and how they—to put it this way—are going to affect our kaleidoscopic image of various ethnic groups in Southern Africa in the future.

The National Party’s policy of multi-national separate development is a dynamic one and its proceeds upon the view that the arrangement in respect of the political development of the non-white ethnic groups has not yet been cast into a final form. The National Party has accepted the responsibility for the emancipation of all these ethnic groups. It accepts this responsibility and it shows it to the world and it propagates it with an open mind. Also attendant upon this realization is the need for a nation or an ethnic group to adjust—and we are dealing here with adjustment—as it grows and develops and as it gradually shows the ability to accept, staff and utilize correctly its own administrative institutions. Such a thing must be done from the bottom. It cannot come from the top, and that was one of the major mistakes of the past.

What happened in the past to the political rights of the Coloureds? They were sham solutions which were given from time to time and continually changed over a period of 100 years. They were in respect of a group of people who were different fundamentally, and it was a kind of participation in government which was given a head at the top without a body, or a neglected body which did not always know where its head or tail was. There were never any real political rights. Mr. Speaker, if I repeat a few things that have already been said here, then I ask you to have a little patience with me because one cannot repeat a truth too often, and if one is dealing with people such as hon. members of the Opposition, then one has to repeat it over and over again and rub it in on their sensitive spots. No arguments raised by that side of the House can blow up the rights enjoyed by the Coloureds into something which has the appearance of being constructive. Proceeding upon this view that a body has to be cared for if it is sick and if it is immature, the National Party has since it came to power in 1948 continued to do its duty in accordance with the way it saw the needs of these ethnic groups, in accordance with the experience it had gained in the past.

It is now being said that at this stage the Coloureds are being deprived of their last political rights and that they are getting nothing or fewer rights in exchange for them. What are they getting in exchange? I think that in exchange for those rights, they are getting at this stage a political position the foundations of which have already been built up through hard work over a period of six to seven years, and they are becoming their own political masters, in the first place, in the field of local government. Let hon. members opposite tell me now that rights in regard to local government and free elections do not constitute political rights. After all, they form the basis on which government is founded. That is where any nation ought to start if it has not yet been trained in government. In this way they are most certainly getting their political rights. Exercising such rights is less complex at this stage and the Coloureds can deal with them much better. Six years ago there was only one independent local government or local body with any measure of independence in the Cape, and that was the Health Committee at Pacaltzdorp in George. To-day we have 56 consulting committees in the Republic; we have managing committees, and in the rural Coloured areas the Coloureds have eight advisory boards and ten managing boards. The Coloureds have gained additional experience over the years and they are prepared for the day when they will receive political rights which, at their stage of development, they may exercise in the sphere of education, in the sphere of finance, in the sphere of rural areas and settlements and in the sphere of social and community welfare and pensions. Now they can develop in the direction of eventual self-government, and that is why Mr. Fortuin, one of the members who gave evidence before the commission, said that it was only since 1948 that they had been hearing people referring to the Coloured nation.

We have now reached this stage where the Coloureds are being granted a system of government in which they can emerge, where they can make themselves useful and accept responsibility, but at this stage we are saddled with a politically dualistic system. Who are the leaders who will really be speaking on behalf of the Coloureds to-morrow and the day after? Mr. Speaker, it is an appendix; it is chronically diseased and has to be removed. In referring to points of departure in regard to our approach to these rights which at this stage are undergoing a change in this legislation, we must also consider the United Party’s basic race approach. At its Bloemfontein Congress the following slogan was adopted: “One country, one nation, one loyalty.” I call this the hotch-potch policy. The supposition is that with the aid of the principle of group representation in a Central Parliament, one may hope to retain for ever white control in the future. Besides, this idea that the Coloureds can represent themselves, is after all really in conflict with this very strong plea for white representation, and therefore there is an inconsistency in the United Party’s policy in this regard as well, and that is why this is also a cul-de-sac.

If one wants to arrive at the right goal with any policy, one has to take the right road. If one has the wrong point of departure of “one country, one nation and one loyalty”, then it is to me a wrong beginning, because one does not accept the multi-rational nature of, the fundamental differences among, the ethnic groups here, and with that wrong beginning one will eventually arrive at the wrong goal. That is why I have difficulty in believing that these pleas, this sacrosanctity, these moral utterances, are based on a sympathetic understanding of the problems of the Coloureds. I do not think that moral considerations constitute such an important fact here. I think we must seek the actual reason, and the actual reason becomes evident from a report which appeared in the Sunday Times dated 29th October, 1967, and in which the following was written subsequent to the congress in Bloemfontein—

Are you not aware of that?

Sir, here we have the vulture policy once again; here once again we have a wrong view, a wrong evaluation of what is going on within the National Party. Here we have the reason for this change in policy, i.e. to see whether one can find a split, whether one can cause a rift in this Party, or whether by means of such opportunistic action, if I may call it that, one cannot take over the government of the country—the divide and rule principle. If one comes forward with such points of departure, one reaches the stage where, on the one hand, one pleads for a Coloured Council that has to be elected—and agrees with it—and, on the other hand, for elected representatives in Parliament. Mr. Speaker, as against the United Party’s point of departure as regards this Bill and the removal of the so-called political rights which have been in existence for a century, we have the Progressive Party’s basic view which is very clearly going to lead to eventual biological integration. But they, in turn, have a different way of doing things; they want to scoop off the cream consisting of the best of the Coloured nation, and they are a much better “promise” party than the United Party can ever be. The hon. member for Houghton is in the act of leaving this debating chamber. I would have liked to pay her a compliment; I suppose I can still do so while she is standing nearby. Since the hon. member for Karoo was so ready with his challenges yesterday—he is becoming a chronic challenger—he might as well challenge the Progressive Party to share the platform with him and to join him in fighting an election.

He is a progressive himself.

Yes, but he falls under the caucus of the United Party. I think he will find out that they are going to outbid him by far with all the suns the moons and the stars they will promise these young people—I say “young people” because I regard the Coloureds as still being a developing nation and as children in a certain sense. The hon. member will find that he will fall out very badly. His challenges are extremely comical. It is astonishing that a member such as that one wanted to know yesterday why more rights were not being granted to the to be established Coloured Persons Representative Council. I think he failed to look at the tremendous scope, at the details, of the task this Coloured Persons Representative Council has to accept. If he had taken the trouble to read through the Bill, he would have seen that these people would hardly have enough people to carry out these functions; of that I am convinced.

And he is without a job.

What I found the strangest of all, is that according to him this Council has to be granted more rights already, but the Council has not even been established as yet; the Council does not even function as yet, and already he wants to grant more rights to this body. After all, there must be development before such a council can prove whether it can carry out all these functions. The hon. member also said that the Council would receive a certain sum of money and that once the money was spent, the Government would say to the Council, “There is no more for you; you must fend for yourselves now”. Has the hon. member not noticed over the years how the allocation to the Department of Coloured Affairs, which built up these people’s position for them so that they could take over something which was already in progress, was increased from year to year in accordance with the needs of the Coloureds as they develop? Does he think that in this respect, too, we are so rigid that from year to year only a certain sum of money will be granted to these people and that they would have to make do with that? To my mind this is a rather misshapen form of logic, if I may put it that way. Now, we have basic differences in our points of departure, and that is why it will not be of any use to us to be at cross-purposes. There is just one thing that is to be deplored, and that is the kind of labelling which one finds and which becomes very personal at times. I do not know whether this is perhaps unparliamentary, but this morning the hon. member for Houghton seemed to be like a vicious lynx which was even more vicious because she was caught in a trap. Among these people who gave evidence before the commission-there were many whose evidence was used and blown up as coming from people to whom we ought to listen. Some of them are people who in everyday life are considered to be of very high repute in the ecclesiastic sphere. We had a certain Professor B. Engelbrecht who spoke extremely well on the Christian approach and their view in respect of the Coloureds, and who even said that he believed that it was not wrong for a political party such as the National Party to try to retain its authority. But listen to what is stated in the editorial of the publication Pro Veritate, of which Professor B. Engelbrecht, who gave evidence, is the editor. The editorial is concluded as follows (translation)—

Disgraceful!

I do not think that these are words that are fitting to be used by a person who gives himself out to be one of the spiritual leaders of our country. But it is people of this kind that we must listen to. This is the sort of disposition one finds, a disposition which is deeply rooted in one and which comes to the fore in this way. Can we therefore listen to that type of evidence if this is what is prevailing in the minds of these people?

I want to conclude. If the Opposition expects us to accept their view as being sincere, i.e. that they are also seeking the good of all the people of our country, then they will wait a long time before they apply to us such epithets as this one about oppression, which they are laying at our door. I repudiate it because it is entirely wrong. Then we shall in any case never be able to reach a settlement and we shall never be able to understand one another. But I can understand the grief and the grievances that are at the root of this vehemence. The white representatives who are to disappear from the scene, have a personal interest in their position here, but they must also be fair and admit that their constituencies are not of such a nature that they can do their work properly, because they are hopelessly too big. I should like to ask the hon. member for Karoo how many times he has visited the north-west in the years he has been the representative for that area. In my own constituency I have hundreds of his voters, and some of them, educated people, ask me who their representative is.

He prays for television so that they will be able to see him.

Let us be fair now and let them admit that personal interests should not play a part here. But it seems to me as though such interests play a rather big part here. I could not fail to notice in the evidence before the commission how the witnesses were continually asked the following: Do you not think that the white representation should at least be continued for another while until one day? But one wonders when this “one day” will be. It will probably be when the present representatives are too old to sit here. I honestly feel that we can expect co-operation from these people. If Tom Schwartz must realize when his time has passed, then they must also realize when their time has passed as regards this particular position in which they find themselves. The Progressive Party also feels resentful, and I can understand that. That little Trojan horse from the story of Helen of Troy which they brought in here, simply does not want to multiply; it is barren. We shall not allow it to multiply either; we are going to give it “the pill”. Then, finally, there is still the last group of people—apart from the United Party about the grievances of which I am not at all worried, because the United Party is tired and disheartened. But the last group of people who feel resentful—and to a certain extent we can understand that—are the ambitious Coloureds who regard themselves as leaders, and amongst them there are some who have qualities of leadership and who are indeed leaders. They are a small group of people who want to leave the vast majority of their people—their human hinterland—in the lurch, and who want to integrate with the Whites; they are people who, along with the Progressive Party, regard themselves as the cream and who will bring about a much more dangerous and unjust form of apartheid among the Coloureds themselves. On the thin wedge of political integration they gradually want to enter this Parliament, because as long as we retain the white representatives here the possibility does after all exist that they, too, may enter this House. Then they want to bring about political integration in that way, and then they will become totally isolated from their own people. Is that right? They will definitely abuse the anomaly which exists here at the moment, and they find it regrettable that it has to disappear at this stage. But I should just like to address this message to them. Last year, on 4th April, the hon. the Prime Minister told the Coloured Council that there was more work for every leader amongst his own people than he or she could do in a lifetime; one may not dissociate oneself from one’s own people.

When the white representatives of the Coloureds disappear from the white Parliament, we can expect there to be agitation at first. We can expect there to be grievances at first. This prediction that was made by the hon. member for Karoo, will come true to a certain extent-for do we not know the history of the “Torch Commando” and the United Front? At the moment they are in their graves, but we shall have them again. However, they will gradually return to dust, because it is my contention that, as the Coloureds move away from those who want to abuse them and as they move closer—even if it is in a way which looks like coercion—to the people whose intentions towards them are sincere, because they are demanding something for themselves but they do not want to deprive the Coloureds of anything, the Coloureds will accept this dispensation. They should simply be left in peace and then they will positively assist in shaping their own future, a privilege which was denied them all the years under the dispensation that obtained when the United Party was in power.

I do not want to follow up on what the hon. member for Gordonia said, but since the hon. member stated so clearly that what the Coloureds are now going to get, when their representatives in this House have been abolished, will be better than what they had before, I would just like to put this question, since the hon. member also spoke about the definition of the rights of the new Coloured Persons Council. Suppose that in regard to liaison with the Central Parliament, the new Coloured Persons Council requests that their representatives in this House be retained, what is the reply to that?

They will not get them.

The hon. member for Potchefstroom says that they will not get them. In other words, what it amounts to is that the new Coloured Persons’ Council is now being told: We will now consult with you in regard to what liaison with the House of Assembly will consist of, but you may not request direct representation there. That is what it amounts to. It is quite clear that there is not only confusion and an absence of clear thinking on the part of the Government in regard to what the Coloured representatives must expect, but that they are not even definite as yet in regard to what the new Coloured Persons Council will be allowed to ask for.

I should like to confine myself to the persons whom this legislation deals with, and who are involved in this matter, and who form an integral part of our population in South Africa as a population group and not as a nation. I want to begin by quoting from J. S. Marais, “The Cape Coloured People, 1652 to 1937”. He states—

J. S. Marais was writing about the period 1652 to 1937. What he did not deal with is the fact that the process which led to our having a Coloured population group began as far back as 1488, and that is why Mossel Bay is such an important place in the history of the Coloureds, because it is there that Bartholomew Diaz landed in 1488, and it is on record that he traded an ox from the Hottentots and took in supplies of fresh water before continuing on his way. I understand that early in 1489 the first Coloureds were born at Mossel Bay. I am trying to go back to the origins of the situation as we have it to-day. I once asked an hon. member what he would suggest as a reason for there being in South Africa since the earliest days of the establishment of civilization at the Cape, this separation between White and Coloured, firstly between the Whites and the Hottentots, and subsequently between the Whites and the Coloured groups which developed. His reply was that it came about as a result of the strong element of Calvinism displayed by our forefathers of that time. How logical the reply is I leave to you to decide. But what we have found is that our same forefathers who came here in 1652 also, to a large extent, colonized the East Indies. We find that Commander Jan van Riebeeck was transferred from the Cape to the East Indies, and other governors came here from the East Indies, and colonists came here from the East Indies or departed thither from here. We find that in South Africa separation developed so that to-day we still talk of a Coloured population, whereas in the East Indies there was total integration. It is merely attributable to the fact that in the East Indies our forefathers came into contact with a population which adhered to the Mohammedan religion and which therefore applied the hygienic teachings of Mohammedanism, and were on a much higher level of civilization and hygiene than the Hottentots at the Cape. But this separation existed, and in the process of the migration from the Cape into the interior after the settlement had been established, we found, and it is recorded in history, that the bastard population was continually being driven ahead of the Whites advancing into the interior.

What has that to do with it?

It has a great deal to do with it; just wait a minute. We know the history of Adam Kok, a manumitted slave. He settled in the Piketberg area and died in Namakwaland, where his son took over from him. That group of bastards, as they called themselves, eventually ended up on the banks of the Orange River, from whence one group migrated to where Rehoboth is to-day. Chiefly as a result of the smallpox epidemic, the original population of the then Cape Colony disappeared almost entirely. The Hottentot as such has disappeared entirely. Mention is no longer being made of Hottentot tribes. The only tribe to which overt reference can be made is the Griquas, but they have nothing to do with a Hottentot tribe. Until the year 1843 they called themselves bastards. A certain Scottish missionary, with the name of Campbell, found this name repulsive and persuaded them to accept the name of Griqua, which is actually a corruption of the Hottentot word Chiqrikwa, which means white man. Then this population group became a reality, and it is no longer possible to associate them with any other native tribe or population group. The existence of this mixed population group was politically acknowledged in 1853 when the Cape received representative government. I do not want to go into this history, because all of us are probably acquainted with it. They were established in 1873 when responsible government was established. In the meantime that population group played a very important role in the distribution and development of the white civilization in South Africa and the perpetuation of the Afrikaans language. They also played a major role in the military field as regards the protection to the white Western civilization in South Africa. [Interjection.] I am not going to slow down; I must speak quickly, because I do not have the time to sketch that history here. I sometimes find it remarkable to see how ignorant some people are, particularly of the military role which the Coloured population has played in our history. Few people know that for 80 years the Cape Corps formed the bulwark between the white civilization in South Africa on the one hand and the Xhosa on the other. This state of affairs and the recognition of that population group was re-established in 1910 when the National Convention reached a compromise to the effect that the Coloureds in the Cape Province and Natal should remain on the Common Voters’ Roll.

Such a great deal is being said about irregularities. I do not want to dwell on the question of the Common Voters’ Roll, because that is something of the past. We are dealing now with the measure at present before the House. The hon. Minister of Defence has mentioned here how people went about with cans of wine, etc. I do not deny it. He was at that time a party organizer in Caledon, and that is probably what he is referring to. I am going to confine myself to what I myself know. My own experience is that the irregularities which were committed in obtaining Coloured votes at elections were not confined to one political party. That was not the case at all.

What did you do?

I shall come to that. I do not want to hurl reproaches at random now or rake up old issues because that will avail us nothing. But as a result of certain criticism which was leveled by hon. members on the Government side, I should just like to set the record straight. J remember only too well how I, just after the result of the by-election in Hottentots Holland in 1948 was made known, had to go to speak to an old student friend of mine who was then working in the National Party offices in Keerom Street. I was then a student again after the war. When I arrived there the chairman of the Coloured Committee and other Coloured members of the National Party Committee of Elsies River, were there to receive their pay for the work they had done in that by-election. This happened on both sides therefore. I was an organizer and official of the United Party for nine years. I began in 1948 in the constituency Hottentots Holland. I remember only too well how, on the day when I came to an agreement with Sir De Villiers Graaff, the then United Party candidate, I received from him a copy of the Electoral Laws Act. His instructions to me were, “Study the Electoral Laws. It does not matter what you hear from other persons or what you know; act in accordance with the Electoral Laws, and remain within the scope of the Electoral Laws.” Those were his instructions to me, and I am saying that in all honesty here. I have tried to comply with those instructions. I do not deny that at previous elections irregularities took place in that constituency. But such irregularities were committed by both sides, and I can prove that. On the day of the general election in the Strand, in the Hottentots Holland constituency, there were two tables for Coloured voters at the polls. One table belonged to the National Party. The chairman was a Malay with the name of Baderoen, and his secretary was Sylvester. The other table was for the United Party supporters. There were a number of strange things to be seen there. The supporters of the National Party’s Coloured Committee vaunted a broken-off spade handle, while the United Party supporters had a bucket full of earth with a small spade in it, and they were saying, “To-day the “Graaf” (the spade) is going to dig up the earth.”

I do not know what happened elsewhere, but I can testify here to-day that at that time I drew up the election accounts for the Hottentots Holland constituency and it was not necessary for me to disguise or conceal one penny, or to cook the books in any way. I acted strictly according to my instructions. I knew what the standpoint and instructions of the United Party candidate was, and I acted accordingly, and I say that there were no irregularities. But we cannot deny that irregularities occurred on both sides in those years. I myself objected to Coloured voters on the list. In those days the Steenbras pipeline was being built. I recall that there were many Coloureds in the Coloured labourers’ camp at Firgrove. I had their names removed from the list because they were not competent to vote there, the reason being that they were not resident there—they were only temporary sojourners there while the project was under construction.

I remember how I once attended a meeting of the Boland General Council of the United Party. It was under the chairmanship of an ex-senator. There a certain man, who subsequently became a member of this House, stated that if they wanted to register a Coloured person, they merely gave him a bottle of wine. Another person said he gave them five shillings. I thereupon got up and walked out, and just outside I met Sir De Villiers Graaff. He asked me why I was leaving the meeting, and I told him what had been said there. I told him that I wanted nothing further to do with the matter, because those were not my methods. I say again that the fact that such irregularities did occur is no justification for what is happening here to-day.

What did Sir De Villiers Graaff then say?

He repeated what he had told me in 1948 when he gave me those instructions. Time went by and we reached the stage where the Coloureds were placed on the separate voters’ roll. Then the election of the Coloured Representatives took place in 1958. I took part in that election. I can tell the House of the frustration, the doubt and the lack of confidence which prevailed amongst the Coloureds, because they did not understand the position. Then there was also the boycott movement which wanted to have nothing to do with the election. Initially I had four opponents. One withdrew before nomination day. At the election I therefore had three opponents, and I won the Outeniqua seat. I got to know my constituency and the people I represented, from Umzinkulu up to Caledon and from Aliwal North up to Port Elizabeth. At the outset I was a member of the United Party Caucus. After the election of 1958 when I had been declared elected, I travelled through my constituency and went to address meetings at one place after another. I held meetings at places such as Caledon, Riversdale, yes, throughout my constituency. Each time the chairman of the meeting introduced me as the first Member of the House of Assembly who had ever returned after an election to the people whose votes he had previously asked for. At first I was somewhat embarrassed at hearing these words, but in time I realized that they were the truth. In any case, this separate representation became a reality. It is the only representation the Coloureds have had in this House up to now. They have made use of it. That boycott movement was broken, and it disappeared. Some of those people subsequently became my best supporters because they made use of the services which I could reader to them as their legally elected member of the House of Assembly. Let me just add the following. That constituency is a thousand miles long, and the election cost me £933. Hon. members can form their own conclusions as to how the money was spent.

Over a period of time I came to recognize clearly the frustration and despair of the Coloured people. Group areas were declared from place to place. There was no alternative, as far as those people could see. However, that is a thing of the past. Let us take places such as Oudtshoorn, Mossel Bay, George and Knysna. There I had to lead deputations to the local town councils to ask them to approach the Group Areas Board with the purpose of obtaining alleviation for the Coloureds, because what the resolutions of this Board amounted to was simply that all Coloureds had to get out of the towns. In all the places which I have now mentioned, active development began to take place with the coming of the Verwoerd era, so that to-day there are fine Coloured townships there. Now it is the white town councils who are trying to hamper the policy of the Government, as happened recently at George. These town councils consist mainly of businessmen who do not want to see Coloured businesses developing in the Coloured residential areas. But at that time, when the Group Areas Board was sitting there, the slogan was merely, “The Coloureds must get out of town!” After the coming of the Verwoerd era the people began to realize what positive advantages separate development implied. A change of heart occurred. They accepted that they were now being directly represented, and that they had access to their own member. They began to accept the policy of positive development, and something took the place of what they have lost. They appreciated being transferred from their slums to new, clean houses. They were hygienically accommodated in new areas. I can state that that change of heart took place, and I encouraged that change from place to place. Members of the Security Police can testify to that, because I always welcomed them at my meetings.

Thank the National Party.

I shall come to them. Let me first finish my story—do not anticipate me. I am talking now about those days when there was active development. Goodwill was reciprocated. When goodwill developed on the part of the Coloureds, it also developed on the part of the Whites. Prominent Whites, learned men, influential people, began to realize that the Coloureds had become an integral part of the population of South Africa, and they also began to propagate this idea. Another approach began to reveal itself. At subsequent elections the political parties realized that seats were at stake. As regards interference, I do not want to repeat the story, but I merely want to say that in 1961 it was brought specifically to my attention that such interference was in fact taking place. I realized the consequences of that, and warned against them. I read the speech made by the hon. member for Karoo during the discussion of the Muller Report, and I also listened to his speech yesterday. His speeches, the words he used, and the blame which he directed at that side of the House, put me in mind of the day in Piketberg when I was about seven, eight years old. In those days there was a certain Coloured rugby team which called itself the Lily Whites, and that is what the hon. member put me in mind of. It is the duty of the hon. member to protest against this measure now before the House. But he knows himself what intrigues he was involved in in respect of Coloured persons in order to get a seat in this House. When he now states that he may as well leave because “he will be more profitably occupied elsewhere”, one wonders why he struggled and intrigued so hard and tried to out-manoeuvre me in order to get in here!

I should like to react briefly to the exclamations of “Daantjie Scholtz” which were heard here. I just want to say that I did help Mr. Scholtz in that election. The National Party had nothing to do with it. On the contrary, whenever I sought assistance from the National Party, they either refused to help me or were reluctant to do so. This happened when trained, experienced white organizers inundated the Coloured Commissioners of Oaths in various places and tried to convince them with all kinds of bluffs to transfer postal votes to them. We had to look for Whites to deal with the postal votes, and because we could not of course approach the United Party, we had to approach the Nationalists. The climax was reached when the Progressive Party won the provincial seats in 1964. I do not want to dwell on that because there has already been enough discussion of this matter. I only want to say the following. The Progressive Party only did what other parties had done before them—only they did it much more thoroughly. Then the Improper Interference Bill was introduced. I now want to dwell on this for a moment. What caused me concern during the discussion of the Muller report here, and again during this debate, is the fact that Dr. Verwoerd’s name was mentioned across the floor here. In the past, when the removal of the Coloureds from the Common Voters’ Roll was being discussed here, there was no surviving member, except General Smuts, who had sat in the National Convention, and who knew the spirit in which that compromise had been entered into. Reference was made here to the dead hand of the past. To-day reference is already being made to Dr. Verwoerd, in the spirit of the dead hand of the past. I feel unhappy about that, because on two occasions I had the honour of having an interview with Dr. Verwoerd. The first was somewhere in 1964. It was in regard to a minor matter, and it did not last longer than 15 minutes. I walked out there with a new idea of the man, whom I had got to know merely through the image of the man presented by a certain section of the Press. I came out there with the firm conviction that I had been dealing with an absolutely honest man whose intentions were open and above board, whether I agreed with him or not, and one who would never have broken his word. This has always been my honest conviction.

In March, 1966, as a result of a report in Die Vaderland that the new Coloured Council would elect members of the House of Assembly, and a remark which I made to an hon. member who is no longer a member of this House, I received a message that the hon. the Prime Minister would like to speak to me. The day when I was called, I was unfortunately absent. When I was ultimately able to go to his office, it was after the results of the provincial Coloured elections in 1964 had been made known. I spent a half an hour in the Prime Minister’s office. I was amazed at how well informed he was, even as regards the political position and the tendencies amongst the Coloureds in the various constituencies. He questioned me concerning my views in regard to future Coloured elections, and I gave them to him honestly. There the hon. the Prime Minister stated clearly to me, the following words. I think I am almost correct in every respect when I repeat them from memory. “In my opinion the Coloured Representatives must be independent. I do not want to know what the policy of the National Party, the United Party or the Progressive Party is. I do want to know what the needs of the Coloureds are, what the Coloureds are thinking, and what the Coloureds are feeling. If there is criticism, then I want to hear that criticism, but I want to know that the criticism is coming from the Coloureds and not from a political party which is already known to me.” That is how I acted before the time as well as since. When I express this criticism to-day, I hope that the Prime Minister and the Government will accept this criticism in the spirit in which it was prescribed to me by Dr. Verwoerd. We discussed Coloured representation at length. The question in regard to future Coloured representation also came up for discussion; I raised it. The reply furnished to me by the then Prime Minister was that the Coloured representation in the House of Assembly was not the point at issue. His problem was how to keep white interference out of Coloured politics. He referred me to what he had already said in the House in 1964. In all the ten years I have been a member of this House, I have never been so seriously and honestly convinced as I am about what I am going to say here now. I believed the then Prime Minister and accepted his word as that of a man who would keep his word at all costs. He referred me to what he had already stated in 1964 in the House. Let me declare before God and man that I am speaking the truth. I challenge any Minister or any person to tell me that I am telling a lie. On the other hand I shall never accept or believe that between March 1966 and the tragic day of 6th September, 1966, Dr. Verwoerd altered his standpoint, his view or deviated from his word. In fact, at the moment when the tragedy played itself out here, the following happened. The bells of the House were ringing and I was on the point of extinguishing my cigarette and walking in when I saw the hon. member for Newton Park walking up. At that time the Improper Interference Bill was being discussed. I waited for him to catch up with me. I was standing facing the dining room and said to him: “Myburgh, what is your party going to do about this legislation?” His words to me were: “We are going to oppose it. It seems to me Verwoerd only wants Nationalists here to represent the Coloureds”. Trusting in the Prime Minister, as I knew him, and as he had revealed himself to me, I became somewhat annoyed—I think the hon. member for Newton Park will remember this—and said to him: “Man, you are talking absolute nonsense. I believe absolutely in Dr. Verwoerd’s honesty in regard to the Coloureds.” A few seconds later there was a shout behind me. It was the hon. member for Maitland. We ran into the Council Chamber.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to conclude with the following. As I stand here I feel absolutely convinced that it was never Dr. Verwoerd’s intention, within this short period of time, to bring legislation of this nature before the House. No matter what is said by anyone to the contrary, it is my absolute conviction and belief which results from what he said to me personally. The second thing I want to state here with absolute conviction is the following. Inter alia I want to refer to the hon. the Deputy Minister, who was chairman of the Improper Interference Commission, and his disappointment at there being so few Coloureds or Coloured organizations who came to give evidence. From my constituency there was only one Coloured of whom I know, namely Mr. King of Heidelberg. When he holds a meeting, it is attended by approximately six people. He is a follower of Mr. Schwartz. The voters of the Outeniqua constituency, and the Coloured population as such, trusted to their member to represent them before that Commission in this House. If reproaches are hurled in regard to the neglect of the interest of the constituency. I can say that the hon. member for Klip River—he is not present in the House—was amazed when he officiated at a Group Area Inquiry at Kokstad and I represented the Coloured population there. When he officiated at the District Six Inquiry in Cape Town, I went on my own, because I know Cape Town and I have represented them there. I did not miss one single meeting of the Separate Facilities Commission nor the Heunis Commission. I did not miss a single meeting of the Separate Beach Area Committee, of which the hon. member for Klip River was chairman for most of the time. In my thousand mile long constituency, I speak here on behalf of every voter and every Coloured who is interested in the political future and the general future of the Coloureds, except a few lost souls here and there, as one finds everywhere. I am speaking on behalf of the majority of my voters and the Coloured population of my constituency. In the first place they accepted the words of honour of the late Prime Minister, Dr. H. F. Verwoerd. Secondly, they do not want to lose their representation in this House. [Time expired.]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know the hon. member for Outeniqua well, nor have I known him for a very long time. I did not know what to expect when he started making his speech. Last year I listened to him on one occasion and his speech was reasonably constructive. Consequently I find it a pity that he had to speak here this afternoon for 20 minutes on the unsavoury aspects of his representation, the so-called irregularities and everything that it involved.

Did I start that? I was replying to your side of this House!

I am speaking to the hon. member in his capacity as a representative of the Coloured people, and I say that I found it a pity that he had to devote so much time to that matter. During the last five minutes he was more constructive and told us what he had done in the interests of his voters. I think he was much more constructive than his colleagues who participated in this debate yesterday. We shall come to them later.

When the hon. the Leader of the Opposition moved the adjournment of the debate on the Coloured Persons Council yesterday, one wondered what the real motive behind that was. It did not take a very long time to determine that. Since then the conviction, about which we had a great deal of clarity right from the beginning, has grown, namely that we are dealing here with a trilogy, three pieces of legislation, of which the one at present under discussion affords the best opportunity to the hon. the Leader of the Opposition and to the United Party of building up a psychosis, of creating an atmosphere here, which would give them some protection against the hon. member for Houghton and her Party. What they are trying to do here. Sir, is an attempt to convince this House and the readers outside that the United Party is the Party which really represents the interests of the Coloureds here. Because you see, Sir, they are dwindling from the right and from the left. The fact of the matter is that the people who are disappearing from their ranks to the left are going to the hon. member for Houghton. Consequently it is only logical that the United Party will do everything in its power to try to convince this House that what they are engaged in here is of much more importance than the Progressive Party. Consequently they suddenly tried to hamstring this legislation. But one wonders, when one considers yesterday’s spectacle and the quarrel amongst the members about the irregularities and everything else which had occurred there, why these people are so keen in trying to give themselves out as being in special need of Coloured support rather than any other support. On page 141 of the Muller Report one of the witnesses gave a very striking and appropriate reply to the hon. member for Yeoville. He said—

Here we have numerous other examples to show to what extent the United Party and its henchmen have in fact failed the Coloured.

I want to come to the hon. member for Karoo who, unfortunately, is not present at the moment. He made a statement here yesterday which simply astonished one. After having associated himself with his Leader and numerous other speakers who tried to convince us that the people who had given evidence were not the leaders of the Coloured community, he made the following statement towards the end of his speech—

Sir, what else did this hon. member say which was not confirmation of what happened in the front benches last year when Dr. Van der Ross came under discussion here and when there was a sharp exchange of words about his price. The hon. member for Karoo said exactly the same thing yesterday. He said a person would not get into the new council without his supporting the Government’s policy. In other words, as soon as he supported the Government’s policy, he would get into the new council against the wishes of his people. Consequently such a person would be accepting a price. The word “price” was not used by the hon. member for Karoo but I say that that was the deduction we made yesterday while he was speaking. I obtained a Hansard copy of his speech in order to ensure that I had not misunderstood him. Sir, as long as we are faced with this type of approach on the part of the United Party I ask myself, if they are not honest and sincere as regards their view of the needs of these people even at this stage, when will they adopt an honest and sincere attitude towards these people?

Much was made of the fact here, and I have already referred to this, that the leaders of the Coloureds were not the ones who had given evidence. In addition hon. members opposite gave out that they knew the Coloureds, that they knew his needs, that they knew exactly how he felt. But the more this discussion progressed, the clearer it became to me that their knowledge of some of the Coloureds was based on their political interest and on really nothing more. When the hon. the Leader of the Opposition spoke some time ago during the general debate on the Muller Report, and again yesterday he too emphasized this matter. At the time of his first speech I had not yet had an opportunity of reading the report, and if it comes to that I could have been influenced by what he said. Subsequently, however, I perused the report looking for confirmation of the statements made by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition. Statistically it is correct that more people gave evidence in favour of the one side and fewer in favour of the other side. But in this report I found quite an amount of evidence which presented the Coloured to me as I had got to know him when I was a young boy in the Western Province years ago. I also recognized the Coloureds from their evidence as I subsequently got to know them in the Transvaal. I should like to read a few examples from this report. When one of the witnesses thanked the Commission for the way in which he had been received—on page 145 of the report—he said, inter alia—

Witness, Tom Schwartz, who has often been quoted, gave the following reply to a question put to him (page 156)—

Then one of the members of the Commission put the following question to him—

To this the witness immediately replied “Yes”, without any qualification.

I also want to quote to you the reply given by a witness to a question by the hon. member for Peninsula. We find that on page 175 of the report—

I want to quote another witness, one whom you know better, to show to you what the Coloured witness really meant. I wanted to quote from Hansard, but that report is too long and I have consequently decided to quote a short summary of that speech from The Cape Times. I am referring to the speech made by the hon. member for Peninsula when he was letting off steam in the front benches last year. I think The Cape Times gave a very correct summary of his speech. I quote—

Mr. Speaker, here we have the case of a witness saying, “But these things must be explained to them”. At that time the hon. member for Peninsula admitted here in a very long speech that a change had come about in the attitude amongst the Coloured community and he said, “provided its benefits were demonstrated to them”. Later he said, “provided they were treated fairly”. When we see the matter in this light we do not find it strange that the Government too has experienced that things are going better with these people as far as their attitude towards the Government is concerned.

We must admit that the road traversed by the Government up to the point where we are dealing with this legislation to-day, has been a difficult one. It has been a difficult road because so many political obstacles have been placed in the way of the Government intentionally. I want to mention a few of these obstacles. The hon. member for Cape Town (Gardens) said during the 1964 debate—

The United Party begrudge these people independent development. Later in the same speech the hon. member said. “The result of this legislation may be that the Coloured may develop a new … ultra-nationalism”. What actually happened in practice? The Coloureds did not develop an ultra-nationalism, but in fact developed a natural nationalism. Nothing happened to cause a mass uprising on their part.

The hon. member for Sea Point stood here in 1964 as if he was addressing a Sunday school class and told the full Biblical story of King Ahab and Jezebel. He then made the following shocking statement, “If we do not conduct ourselves properly and pass legislation in order to get the Coloureds on our side, it may well be that our blood will be licked up in the streets of our capital”. Statements like these make hon. members opposite believe that there is dissatisfaction amongst the Coloureds. It is that kind of leadership which makes hon. members opposite believe that something will happen which will create unrest and strife in this country, and that the Government will be embarrassed in that way.

The hon. member for Yeoville wrote the following in The Cape Argus of 23rd February—

In this way hon. members continue to create unhappiness, strife and uncertainty amongst the Coloureds.

The few examples quoted by me prove clearly that if we want to see the goodwill of the Coloured in its right perspective, the Government need have no fear at all that this legislation will not succeed. But there are basic differences. The hon. member for Yeoville often refers to “fundamental differences” in his speeches and writings. On the basis of the Government’s knowledge of the Coloured and its approach to their problems, we do not know of a single example in the world where any government has to contend with something similar to South Africa’s Coloured problem. Here we are dealing with a social reality. We are dealing with the social reality of the existence of a white community with a Western culture. Secondly we are dealing with the existence of another social reality and that is a Coloured community with a Western culture within the White community with its white Western culture. Thirdly we are dealing with the social reality that these two groups, both following the Western culture, differ from each other. It is from this difference which exists that the Government derives its strength to-day to come forward with legislation of this nature for us. This reality of two separate groups with the same Western culture, but which are different, is the cause of our having to deal with a practical social reality, and that not only in social life, but also in the political sphere. While we have to study state-craft from German, French and other European textbooks at this stage, the time will arrive when countries will come and ask us for textbooks. They will ask us for information about the way in which we tackled our problem. The time will arrive when new political concepts and new administrative methods will be sought from us, because there are going to be other countries which will have the same problem.

I want to mention another matter. That is the fact that the opposite side of this House obviously does not accept the fact that the Coloureds form a separate group that must be dealt with and cared for separately in the political sphere. I want to mention three examples. In an interview with Dagbreek on 19th November, 1967, the hon. member for Yeoville said the following, inter alia (translation)—

Later he said—

A little later he said that he accepted them as a group in the social sphere. He said that the United Party did not want to integrate the Coloureds, they recognized separate residential areas, etc. But the United Party said that the fact that the Coloureds were undergoing a change in their mental attitude, was to be regretted. I want to quote, from the simple mouth of the people, what one of the witnesses said on page 140. He said—

In conclusion I want to quote somebody else, a man to whom the opposite side of this House has also referred. He is a man who undoubtedly knows the Coloured. I am referring to Dr. I. D. du Plessis. In respect of the Coloured’s identity of his own he said the following on page 327 of the report—

Here we have three premises. We have the one from the mouth of the people which is that we are going to start in our own house. A man who knows the Coloureds says that this feeling of identity is growing stronger and stronger, and he is saying that this is for the good. In contrast to that we have the political voice from Yeoville which says that this is to be regretted. This is our problem when we come to this House with three pieces of legislation such as these in succession. We are not dealing with the abolition of the representation of a few people in this House only. We are dealing with the solution of the entire Coloured problem. We view this matter in its entirety and in all its facets. Consequently this attitude of a few of the Coloureds who displayed this fine and good attitude towards the members of the Commission, will be the attitude we shall adopt in the future in the application of this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, it seems to me that we have now reached the stage in this debate when it has become useless to set one argument against another. Apparently the merits of arguments are no longer applicable. For this reason then I also do not intend to follow the hon. member for Westdene in his flights of thought along the lines of social culture and the other matters which he mentioned.

I want to approach the matter quite differently. Mr. Speaker, I say right away that I shall not take up the time which you would normally have granted to me, because what I want to say I can say within the space of a few minutes. I had not intended to take part in this debate, but I have been sitting here for two days, listening attentively to what has been presented to us here. I have now come to the conclusion that my children will ask me one day what my reaction was when this matter came up before the House. I therefore do not want to cast a silent vote. I want to state my attitude so that it may be recorded, and in case anyone should ever be interested in it, it will be there to see.

We are dealing here with a matter which forms part of a much larger programme being enacted here in South Africa over the past few years. This is but another scene in a picture which has been unfolding before us over the past 10 or 20 years. I think that we must see it in that sense. Neither do I want to approach the matter as a politician, because the moment one views it as a politician, one has a specific role to fulfill. I want to see it as an ordinary South African who is intensely interested in what happens to my country and my people. If I approach the matter in this way, there are just a few quite ordinary questions which I must ask myself. The first question which I must ask myself is: Does the legislation at present before the House give more than it takes away? This is the question I have to ask. I am not talking to the outside world now. I am concerned with my own conscience. This is a matter of conscience. I can lie and deceive and tell the outside world whatever I like, but I can never do that with my own conscience, because I have to live with it to the end of my days. But what does my conscience tell me? My conscience tells me that we are here taking away more than we are giving. Other members may have other kinds of consciences, and in that case their consciences may tell them something else. I am now speaking of myself, because what I am submitting to you is more in the nature of a personal confession.

But then I also ask how the Coloureds will accept this legislation. By the grace of God my skin is white and not brown. But if my skin were brown, how would I have reacted to this? Would I have felt that I was receiving more than what was being taken away from me? No, I should not have felt that. That is why I cannot support this legislation, especially not when I view it against the history of my own people. After all, we are descendants of those hardy old Voortrekkers who were prepared to brave the dangers of a wild interior rather than subject themselves to a system which restricted the full development of their personal rights to any extent.

Do you want to retain the status quo forever?

The hon. the Minister must just listen. I did not interrupt him when he was speaking. If I were therefore to support this legislation it would be a negation of my own heritage and of my past. If I were to support it, and this is what my conscience tells me, it would be a violation of the future of those who come after me. I myself, and this my conscience also tells me, am not prepared to be a party to this form of violation.

Then there is a second simple question which I must ask myself. It is: Do I have a free choice in this matter? Am I not already committed? If I examine what General Hertzog and Dr. Verwoerd said—and this has already been bandied to and fro across the floor of the House—it is clear to me that I stand committed. I do not have a free choice in this matter. If words have meaning, then the meaning which must be attached to Dr. Verwoerd’s words is surely very clear. That is how the hon. member for Outeniqua and I accepted it. That is how the Coloureds accepted it. That is how the outside world accepted it.

What about your Leader? After all, you did not follow Dr. Verwoerd or General Hertzog; you followed your Leader.

I am speaking of the promises which they made.

[Inaudible.]

No, the hon. the Minister must listen for a while now. I am speaking of the promises made by Dr. Verwoerd and I say that the impression created outside was that he meant them. Now there are people who say that he did not mean them in that way. But I must judge according to the impression which was created outside. I accepted that he had made a promise. I frequently had to go overseas at the time and people then asked me what South Africa’s standpoint was. People criticized what was happening in South Africa. Many said that the Nationalist Government would never retain the Coloured Representatives in this House, but what was my reply? I said that Dr. Verwoerd had promised that they would remain here. If there is one lesson which is clear in Africa, it is that the white man never beaks his promise. The Coloureds also accepted that he meant what he said. It is now being said that he meant something else, but I must judge according to the impression which was created outside. When Dr. Verwoerd made these promises, he spoke not only as the leader of a party or as Prime Minister. He spoke on behalf of the white man of South Africa. He also pledged my word and good faith. Therefore I must oppose this legislation, because if I support it, I will break my own promise and cast my own good faith into the dust. Then I will be kicking my own promises around in the dust.

Now I ask, if people under these circumstances are prepared to do what the Government is now doing, why are they doing it? What is their motivation for proceeding to this step, because there must be exceptionally strong motivation for doing so? I listened attentively and here and there in the speeches it began to filter through. But one finds the best indication of this in the writings of Dawie, because Dawie has become the ideologist of the Nationalist Party. Dawie himself naturally stands committed in this matter, because a few years ago he made strong pleas for the Coloureds to be represented here by their own people. We now hear very little of that. For the sake of convenience it is completely forgotten. But Dawie recently drew up a manifesto which, according to the Beeld, was issued to members of the House of Assembly and to Nationalist Party organizers to convey to them this new dispensation and to explain why this step was being taken. I read it because he tried to motivate this standpoint. He began with quite a number of matters, but one could see that he had little relish for them. Eventually the final dénouement came for which we had been waiting. He said that if there were four Coloureds in this House, they might vote against the Government. Here is a Government with 126 members which has become afraid that four may vote against them. Here is a Government which says that it is becoming stronger from day to day. It says that it is going to get more members and now it has suddenly become afraid of four members who may vote against it. Here is Goliath who has now become afraid of David even before he has taken up his arms. If this is the fundamental motivation, I know that I dare not support this legislation.

Now I want to project my thoughts into the future a little. I shall now read what a newspaper will say in five or ten years’ time. The editor of Dagbreek recently spoke of his own Press as a slavish Press which followed slavishly and did not protest when they should have protested. He then mentioned a number of things about which he should have protested. He also wrote about this constitutional issue with which we are dealing at the moment, namely, the question of the representation of the Coloureds. In five or ten years’ time we shall read what the editor of Dagbreek has to say about this matter now before the House, if he is still there—and we understand that he has been severely reprimanded by the hon. the Prime Minister and others and that that is why he is as quiet as a mouse.

I now come to my final thought. The hon. the Minister has great powers in his hands as far as the Constitution is concerned. The hon. the Prime Minister, who is not here at the moment, also has tremendous powers which are conferred upon him (by the Constitution. I stand here as a novice, but I do not need years of experience in this House to say what I want to say now. What I am going to say now I can feel intuitively and my whole being encourages it. Great South Africans have sat in those treasury benches. They were people who performed great deeds for South Africa and who had great ideals. But for me this legislation now before us does not testify of great thoughts. It is pettiness that is involved here. We are holding a funeral address here. We are burying more than we are aware of. We are not only burying a few Coloured representatives. We are burying the white man’s honour, good faith and promises. Those who are responsible for this and who now want to take this step, as well as those who sit still and do not protest, will have to shoulder the blame in equal measure in the years to come.

Before I say a word or two about what the hon. member for Hillbrow said I just want to try and rectify something which the hon. member for Gardens said here earlier this afternoon. He made an attack on me in regard to something which I had supposedly said yesterday. This is the first time to-day that I am participating in the debate. If a man gets such a drubbing, he eventually becomes so confused that he no longer knows who he is and it seems to me the hon. member in the garden is trying to pick apples from a pear tree.

There is no one who will tempt him.

I should just like to express a few ideas with reference to what the hon. member for Hillbrow had just said. He spoke in the first instance of his children. Mr. Speaker, I also have children. Fortunately my children will never have to feel ashamed of their parents and I will never have it on my conscience that I did not try to ensure the future of my descendants here in South Africa. The hon. member also spoke about a conscience. I think that if there were ever a group of people whose consciences were worn thin then it is the hon. members of the Opposition. Talk about not keeping one’s word! They are the last people who can talk about not keeping one’s word. What about the word of their own Leader? He is the man who broke his word to the Coloureds. Why does he not talk about that? He now wants to drag in our deceased former Leader here.

The Minister of Defence did that.

Sir, the hon. member for Yeoville makes me laugh. Last week he went to address a meeting in Pretoria and he is the man who at that meeting spoke again of Nazis and the actions of the Government. The hon. member is supposed to be such a vehement opponent of the Nazis. Did the hon. member say something like that at that meeting?

I do not know what you are talking about.

I am sorry I do not have the newspaper report here. Did the hon. member speak there about radio broadcasts, and the education of children as it took place in Nazi Germany?

Yes.

The hon. member is supposed to be such a great opponent of Nazism. I now want to ask him where he was when the war was in progress and when the fight against Nazism was being waged? Where was he hiding; why did he not go and enlist and play his part like a man? Now he sits here and has a lot to say.

He was a key man.

Where were you?

I did not enlist because it was against my convictions. I was never too cowardly (papbroekig) to stand up for my convictions, but I know of a coward …

You have a cheek.

The hon. member said here that this powerful party was now afraid of four Coloured representatives. Mr. Speaker, it is they who are afraid that they will now lose the last few votes they had, because where did those people always vote? The hon. member spoke here about a funeral. I almost shed tears when he became so worked up, because this is only the beginning of the funeral service on the United Party. I have been listening to this debate here during the past few days. The arguments put forward by the United Party here were nothing but a continuation of the struggle for integration which has been in progress here since 1948. Their policy is nothing but a policy of gradual and general equalization between White and non-White here in South Africa. It can only lead to political integration, and that is what they want.

Who said that?

Hon. members on that side are advocating it every day; after all, they want to vote with the Coloureds; they want to vote with the Bantu, and they want to come and sit with them here. If their policy is carried into effect, it can only lead to social integration and ultimately to biological integration. Under the policy of the United Party the Coloureds as an autogenous population group with an identity of its own and its own will to survive will simply be swallowed up by Bantu who would ultimately take over this Parliament if the United Party should come into power.

Why don’t you try to be honest sometimes?

The United Party is only trying to rouse hate and vindictiveness against this positive measure of autogenous development.

Order! The hon. member for Musgrave must withdraw that remark about the hon. member.

Mr. Speaker …

Order! The hon. member must withdraw it.

I withdraw it.

Since 1948 the United Party has been opposing this policy of autogenous development tooth and nail. We know, and they also know that it is the only policy which offers every population group security, and when this Bill takes effect, it will once again be proved that the word of the National Party will occupy a place of honour. The National Party has given its word of honour to the Whites here in South Africa, and the Whites have passed a damning judgment on the United Party. That is why the United Party will always sit in the Opposition benches and will continue to decline and diminish. But the word of honour of the National Party will occupy place of honour because the National Party gave its word of honour to the Coloureds that they would also occupy their rightful place in this country and that they must also accept responsibility in other spheres in respect of the development and expansion of South Africa. The representation of the Coloureds here in the House of Assembly is nothing but a curse for the Coloureds, because it gives them the impression of power, which is nothing but a false illusion. Surely it is an accepted fact that the responsible Coloured accepts the policy of separate development here in South Africa. They would also like to see it implemented, and to-day we have the position that we have people here in the House who are not interpreting the feelings of the Coloureds, people who do not support the policy of separate development, people who do not stand for the retention of the identity of the Coloureds, but whose policy can only lead to a Bantu-controlled Parliament where the Coloureds, as well as the Whites, will disappear.

Sir, in 1964, the prophets of doom on that side of the House predicted that the establishment of a Coloured Persons’ Representative Council would increase the rift between White and non-White and that the National Party was building a dividing wall between White and non-White. I wonder whether they still maintain that to-day. They cannot say that, because never before have the relations between all the population groups here in South Africa been so amicable as they are at present because the Coloureds have taken in all sincerity the helping hand which the National Party held out to them. They have shown through their co-operation and their spirit of goodwill that for the first time in the history of South Africa they are recovering their self-respect and own identity. But the United Party is still continuing to oppose the National Party’s policy of separate development. I challenge the United Party to go to the Coloureds and to ask them whether they want to return to the position as it was before 1948, before the National Party came into power.

We have asked them, and they do not want to.

The United Party has lost contact entirely with the Coloureds. They do not know what the feelings of those people are. Go and ask the Coloureds whether they want to live amongst the Bantu again, from whence the National Party removed them. I represent a constituency where there are all of 12,000 Coloureds, and I am continually receiving requests from those people to the effect that Bantu should be kept away from their area and that those Bantu who have received identity cards classifying them as Coloureds should be reclassified. There are Indian traders in that area, and the Coloureds are continually asking that those Indians be taken away. Why? Because they want to develop themselves and subsist there as a distinctive group. We had the case there of an Indian doctor who wanted to practise in the Coloured area. At the request of the Coloureds, that Indian doctor was prohibited from practising there. It was not the Whites who asked for that; the Coloureds themselves asked that he should be prohibited.

No, there is no fault to find with this Bill; the fault lies with some of the representatives of the Coloureds in the House of Assembly. Here we have for example the hon. member for Karoo who is a member of the United Party, who was elected under the auspices of the United Party, and who is a member of the United Party Caucus. How is it possible for him to arrive at objective judgments in regard to the interests of the Coloureds? Surely he has to do what his Leader tells him to do, and we know what a false trail his hon. Leader is following. The hon. member may not adopt an impartial attitude. Mr. Speaker, I should like to read out portion of the evidence which was given before the Muller Commission. I am quoting from a memorandum which the hon. member submitted to the Commission—

Here it is not only a matter of his interpreting the feelings of the Coloureds, but if these words are not an incitement of non-Whites against Whites, then I really do not know what incitement is. The hon. member for Outeniqua told us here to-day how the United Party had intrigued behind the scenes, and yesterday you heard the same thing expressed here by other hon. members. The Coloureds, under the United Party policy, will always be castaways—and they know it—but since 1948 the National Party has gradually created opportunities for the Coloureds to become self-respecting. Under the policy of the National Party the Coloureds are not being suppressed and treated as an appendage, and their votes are not being misused on polling day. We have let the Coloureds start from scratch and build up their own political development. Opposed to that we have always had the United Party which discriminated against the Coloureds. We know that when the Coloureds were on the Common Voters’ Roll together with the Whites, it was the United Party that discriminated against them. They did not want to abolish the qualification vote in regard to the Coloureds, and we know how they have made another about-face now in regard to the Coloured vote. Even at this stage they are still discriminating against the Coloureds. If their intentions in regard to the Coloureds were honest, and they are pleading for representation here for the Coloureds, then they would not have acted in such a discriminating manner as to want to give the Coloureds a mere eight representatives in this House of Assembly. They should at least have been honest towards those people. Opposed to that the National Party is honest and sincere towards the Coloureds and the Coloureds know where they stand in respect of this Government. The Government has decided to expand the Coloureds’ political rights by means of this representative council. It is a positive step in the Government’s programme of separate development.

It is no more than right that it is the birth right of a nation to enjoy political rights, but justice cannot be done as far as this is concerned if it is not cast in the mould of development along its own lines, and that is the course the Coloureds here in South Africa have to adopt to achieve their own development. They ought not to be excluded from responsibilities in regard to making their own contribution to the welfare of this country, and here we are now affording the Coloureds the opportunity of developing the Coloured Persons’ Representative Council into a full-fledged political mouthpiece of the Coloured population. This council is composed in a democratic way. Those representatives are elected by and for the Coloureds themselves. Surely it is logical that the representatives of the Coloureds cannot have two mouthpieces. How can they have representatives in this House who say one thing, and at the same time have representatives in the Coloured Persons’ Representative Council who say something else? We know that the responsible Coloured supports this policy of the Government. May I read a letter from a very responsible Coloured living in Boksburg? This letter is dated as long ago as September, 1966, and he says the following (translation)—

This is what a Coloured had to say. [Interjection.] Here is a long list of associations in which the writer of this letter plays a leading part. He is a very responsible man. But does the United Party not also want to learn this lesson from our history, and do they not want to learn from what happened in other countries? I am asking them to show me one country where there is racial peace, where white and non-white are sitting in the same upper house of representatives. After all, it is a fact that 5 per cent of the Coloureds are being represented in Parliament, or even less than 5 per cent. Plus-minus 33,000 out of a total of 700,000 voted, whereas with this positive step of development the Coloureds are now for the first time going to have full political representation. But it is not only the Coloureds in the Cape, it is also the Coloureds in the Transvaal who are now, on an equal footing with all the other Coloureds in South Africa, going to meet the future, a future which will bring them only happiness and prosperity. I can say that those Coloureds will never look back or return to their old course. I want to ask the next speaker on the United Party side to tell us whether they are going to do away with the Coloured Persons’ Representative Council which they have opposed tooth and nail? Are they going to do away with the local governments which the Coloureds have been granted? Are they going to do away with those Coloured areas which have been created? But I want to make this prediction here to-day. It will not be long before the United Party will thank this Government for what they are doing to-day as a positive step in the development of the Coloureds.

The Government Party is rapidly becoming a “has been” party. They have quite lost the road for the future, and speaker after speaker harks back to the past. Now we have the hon. member for Boksburg even daring to rake up the war and the particular contribution of a leading and respected member on this side of the House in that war.

He himself started it at that meeting.

Let me say to him, and I hope that every other Government member will take note of this and will thereafter respect the fact, that the hon. member for Yeoville on three occasions attempted to join the Forces in the last war. On the first occasion he was taken down by the hon. member for Vereeniging and attempted to join the Forces, and I challenge any hon. member opposite to show that that is not so, including the hon. member for Vereeniging. But after he had been rejected on medical grounds, he made two further attempts to join the Forces and was unsuccessful, and thereafter he did his duty in other respects to which he was called.

Apologize.

May I put a question?

If the hon. member wishes to apologize, I will certainly yield to him, but if he wishes to dispute what I have said I will ask him to face the challenge we have issued. I would say this to hon. members opposite. We respect the fact that they had a certain view about the war. They took the view that the Nazi Government in Germany was a great and fine government. Fortunately, with the passage of time the scales started dropping from their eyes and they came to have an insight into the situation, the same as we had.

Order! I have allowed the hon. member to reply to the allegations made by the hon. member for Boksburg as far as the hon. member for Yeoville is concerned, but the hon. member must now confine himself to the Bill.

I will do that. I am just grateful that the scales fell from their eyes. I will deal with other things raised by the hon. member for Boksburg, but I want to deal at once with the question he raised when he repeatedly referred to the “erewood van die Nasionale Party en sy eerlikheid en opregtheid”. Let it be stated absolutely clearly here that the one party which is going back on the principle it has held since its inauguration is the Nationalist Party. Since 1912 when the Nationalist Party was inaugurated, they stood for representation of the coloured people in this House. It is perfectly true that they changed after the time of Gen. Hertzog and said that that representation should be given in a different way, the very same change that this party is making. This party has likewise moved away from the position which Gen. Hertzog held; but this party of ours to-day stands for the representation of those people in this Parliament as they always have done. Therefore, though the method by which that representation may be expressed is different, in fact the principle of that representation is as solid to-day as it ever was. But the same cannot be said of the party opposite. I should like to add that whether it was, as the hon. the Minister of Defence said, a compromise that at one time hon. members opposite supported separate representation in this House, the fact is that they did support representation then, and even in 1948 they approved of representation for the Coloureds in this House. It is from that position that they are running away to-day and are abandoning their principles.

In the course of this debate we had many reasons advanced why this is a good Bill and I would like just to examine some very shortly and then advance certain reasons which I believe are the truer reasons. It has been hinted by some that it is the desire of hon. members opposite to see the Progressive Party out of this House. I do not accept that. No less a person than the hon. the Prime Minister did his best to boost the sole representative of the Progressive Party during the 1966 elections.

He issued a manifesto for her.

I am informed that he issued a manifesto for her. He did his very best to boost that representative and to ensure her return, because he hoped that this would embarrass the United Party thoroughly in its activities. So I do not accept that this is the reason why this has been done. While I am referring to the Progressives, I would have expected a little more graciousness from the hon. member for Houghton. Where the United Party stands for a policy which would enable Progressives to get back into Parliament by virtue of the coloured vote, I would have expected her to acknowledge that attitude and the firmness of principle in accepting that position, notwithstanding that she believes that it would be to our detriment if that were done.

It is interesting to note that you stand on the same principle.

We do not stand on the same principle at all. I thought the Minister knew that the Progressives did not stand for separate representation for the Coloureds. [Interjection.] We stand for the principle of representation for which that Minister and his party have stood since 1912, a period of 56 years, and he is the unhappy Minister who is having to abandon that principle and pilot this Bill through the House.

There is another reason that has been advanced. We have said that this is clearly against the wishes of the coloured people. My leader and others have said that it is against the weight of the evidence that this representation should be done away with. The hon. member for Randfontein unfortunately is not here now, but he appeared to misunderstand the concept of weight of evidence. Of course, he is not a lawyer. I am sure we would not have had the same argument from the Minister of Justice. The expression “weight of evidence” is a well-known legal term. The hon. member for Randfontein appears to think that we were simply counting those who stated that they were in favour of retaining the representation and subtracting from them those who were against. But it is well known that the expression “weight of evidence” involves an evaluation of the evidence, weighing whence that evidence comes, who gave it, what is the substance of the organization or institution which advanced that evidence, how did it stand up to cross-examination, and how impressive were the witnesses who gave it. It is on that basis that this side of the House has used the expression, and I suggest that it cannot be seriously contended that on that understanding of the expression the weight of evidence is not overwhelming. Any court would have said it is overwhelming that the coloured people want this representation to be retained and that it is in the interest of the country as a whole that it should be retained.

But judges sometimes differ in their evaluation.

Yes, but what we are saying is that no judge would differ from another on this evidence.

The third reason advanced for the abolition of these coloured representatives from this House is that the coloured people are being used as a political football. In one of the Nationalist organs in the Transvaal there recently appeared a cartoon by which they tried to demonstrate this. But this was also the argument which was used for taking the Coloureds off the common roll. The allegations made here about malpractices in the elections—and I am sure that most of these allegations were unfounded—were not shown to have occurred under the present set-up, save in so far as certain wrong registrations are concerned. But all the other things we heard of, the allegation amongst other that “vaatjies wyn” were carted around to purchase votes, occurred during an earlier period. Of course, I do not concede that these allegations are true. I am not aware of any convictions in this respect but if there were convictions I am sure there would have been as many convictions of hon. members opposite and of their supporters.

Another reason advanced for this step by the Government is that if this representation is to remain it will prevent the coloured people developing. This goes together with the argument that they are being given something better. These points have been adequately dealt with already. It has been shown how there can be institutions alongside one another, all of them functioning properly. Surely it cannot be said that in the case of the Coloureds this will retard their progress. Member after member came forward with the argument that the Coloureds were getting something better now. But why cannot the two exist side by side? The hon. member for Boksburg, for instance, argued that the new set-up will advance the self respect and “eie identiteit van die Kleurling”. It would help him to regain that self respect and “eie identiteit”. If the new Coloured Representative Council will bring that about we shall be pleased but we feel coloured representation in this House should continue alongside it. I feel that this particular argument is a completely hollow argument.

I want to come to what I believe to be the true reasons for this measure. It has already been said that the coloured voters no longer return Nationalist well wishers to this House. There is no doubt that if ever there was an election the Government hoped to win it was the election in which Mr. Scholtz took part. Everything was thrown in support of him, but to no avail.

Yet they say all the Coloureds support them.

Yes. But the rejection of Mr. Scholtz cannot be better evidence to the contrary. He led on postal votes but when the Coloureds brought out their votes they completely swamped him and returned his opponent.

I believe that the new leadership of the Nationalist Party could not stop the progress of their policy—hence this Bill. There have been conflicting statements in this House about what the attitude of the previous Prime Minister was—whether or not it was his policy to do away with these representatives of the coloured people. On the one hand we had clear statements from the late Prime Minister indicating that he intended to retain his representation even after the so-called coloured parliament had been established. There is much to support this. Many of the supporting facts have already been quoted—inter alia his letter to the Australian Prime Minister. In clause 7 of the Bill to prevent political interference, the Bill introduced when he was still Prime Minister, there is specific reference to the Senators and Members of Parliament representing the Coloureds here. This seems to suggest that he was in fact thinking of retaining this representation. So, as I say, on the one hand there is this clear evidence that he intended retaining this representation. But, on the other hand, we had statements from two hon. Ministers in this House indicating that this was not so and that the late Prime Minister in fact intended doing away with this representation. Even the present Prime Minister when he spoke implied that Dr. Verwoerd intended doing away with this representation. So then one asks whether the whole Cabinet was aware of this situation, which apparently three members of the late Prime Minister’s Cabinet were aware of.

Was this Minister aware of it?

Yes, was he aware of it? I hope that when he gets up, he will tell us …

Let him tell us now; he has been very talkative.

Let him tell us now and put us out of our doubts. Was the present Minister in charge of this Bill aware of it that the late Prime Minister intended to do away with the coloured representatives?

But you know Dr. Verwoerd was dishonest, according to the Minister of Defence.

I shall reply to you when I get up.

He has nothing to say now.

What we have in this situation therefore, are two possibilities: Either the hon. the late Prime Minister had no intention of abolishing coloured representation and we have heard wrong statements to the contrary here, or he did intend abolishing it, in which case he certainly misled the country upon that point. I am going to assume that the late Prime Minister may have intended to abolish these representatives. It certainly is quite consistent with quite a few aspects that we know about his approach. He was a man who was extremely rigid in many spheres, and he could not tolerate anything illogical in this way. First of all, in support of that, we have the statement by the present Minister of Defence, which he read to this House only recently. He said that this was a statement he made in September, 1965. He said that he made the speech, and before he delivered it, it was approved by the late Prime Minister. In the speech he said inter alia as follows:

This was something that the late Prime Minister could not tolerate, anything that he thought was illogical. We know that he was not prepared to receive black diplomats in this country, because this would be illogical and dangerous. Likewise, he was not prepared to receive Maoris in a rugby team here, because it would be illogical and dangerous. So, this is fully in line with the attitude that he did not like the illogicality of this particular representation. Now we find that in some respects all this has changed. We find that black diplomats are received here, in accordance with the Nationalist Party’s policy; one can have Maoris here, in accordance with the policy; but there cannot be this representation in the House. Therefore I say that the hon. members opposite are now in a thoroughly contradictory state in regard to their philosophy. On the one hand they tolerate one thing, and at the same time they cannot tolerate a similar thing. I believe that it is therefore true to say that, in accordance with the philosophy of the new Prime Minister, this Bill should not have been brought forward. But he and his Government did not have the courage to stop it coming forward. This is why it is here and why it evokes little enthusiasm from hon. members opposite. Therefore, in this respect, I think it is true to say that we are no longer on any road. The late hon. Prime Minister had a road. We believe that that road was leading nowhere at all. We believe that the present Prime Minister has gone into orbit on this matter, and that he is quite off the road, and that it is almost improbable that he will ever get back onto it again.

The fact is that we have four population groups in South Africa. The Coloureds, like ourselves, have only got this one country. They are, admittedly, at a different stage of development, but their fate is completely interlocked with ours. They have their own views, wishes, and ideas which should be brought to the notice of the Parliament that decides on their fate. It is essential that they should have a say in the Parliament that decides their fate and controls their future. Die Burger, nowadays, is a much more disciplined organ, and has been brought into line. Die Burger said quite clearly in 1965 that the Coloureds should have “’n eie stem, of stemme, om oor hulle lots-bestemming saam te praat”. That is also what we plead for. In regard to their destiny they should have those voices to talk along with others. It may only be a small say. I think that we, as the Parliament controlling their destiny, have a particular duty to give careful attention to that small say, small as it may be. It is in the nature of democracy that the majority party must listen with very great care to the wishes of a minority opposition party. Unless this is done one gets away from the spirit of democracy. I would like to read to the House what the late Dr. Conrad Adenauer stated on this point in his Memoirs. He said that—

If that is true of democracy, and which country knows it better than the great German people, this is even more true in our situation here. The say of the Coloured people is small and limited, but it behoves us more particularly to ensure that that voice is heard, and to give great respect to that voice. In the words of Dr. Adenauer “respect for other men, and for the sincerity of their desires and endeavours”. It is absolutely vital that there should be respect for their views and their wishes. It may not always be possible to comply with these wishes. Race relationships, however, are a very delicate matter in South Africa. It is difficult enough in a country where the people are homogeneous, but where you have different groups, and moreover, groups at different stages of development, it becomes even more difficult. One should therefore be extremely reluctant to deny any group a say. Secondly, where throughout the history of your country, that group has had a say, one should certainly move completely away from the idea of doing away with such a say. One should completely reject it, because of the injury it can do to the respect, the dignity, the wellbeing and the rights of these people. One should be very careful not to injure their dignity in this respect. I do not doubt that it is partly for this reason that there were bold spirits on the side of the Government who, for long, fought to retain that say for these people in this Parliament. They fought for it, because they knew that one cannot simply deal with a tiresome problem by legislating to avoid it, or to abolish it. They knew that this question of race relations requires that careful evolution, respect and mutual understanding. Those spirits in the Nationalist Party—no mean spirits—wanted very much that that injustice and indignity should not be done. They wanted that that voice should be heard so that attention could be given to their desires.

In conclusion I want to say that this measure represents an appreciable setback in our race relations, especially between Whites and Coloureds. We have had many setbacks over the past 20 years. That must be conceded. If anyone doubts that, I ask hon. members opposite why you have so many coloured people leaving South Africa to go and make their lives elsewhere. We cannot get the true figures from hon. members on the other side. They seem unprepared to divulge them, or make any attempt to do so. We are informed that there are no such figures. These people have been leaving, and this is an indication of their opposition to what has happened here. Another indication is that they are steadily moving away from support of the governing party, so far as elections are concerned. This setback will have to be put right. I make bold as to say that the policy of this side will help that process to start. It will start the healing process, and it is vital that that healing process start immediately.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member who has just resumed his seat, advanced quite a number of arguments which had already been used earlier to-day. However, I want to refer to a few points raised by the hon. member to which we on this side of the House definitely object. The first point is that the National Party allegedly took no further interest in the representation of Coloureds after a certain election had been lost by a certain Mr. Scholtz. It is absolutely untrue that there was ever any intention on the part of the National Party to use this representation for its own ends. These evil intentions only lurked in the ranks of the Opposition. Yesterday the hon. the Minister of Defence, and also the hon. member for Stellenbosch, in a crystal-clear way refuted the Opposition’s arguments as to what had been said and what had not been said in this connection. In spite of that the hon. member for Pinelands comes along this afternoon and tries to improve on it. I maintain that he in no way succeeded in doing so. However, it is not enough for the hon. the Opposition to try to get at the hon. the Minister of Defence in a reprehensible manner, but the hon. member for Pinelands has now even tried to get at the hon. the Prime Minister. He made the statement that the hon. the Prime Minister did not have the courage to stop this legislation. This hon. Prime Minister had the courage to deal firmly with the communists and the liberalists in South Africa like no other person before him. How can the hon. member for Pinelands then say that the hon. the Prime Minister does not have the courage to stop legislation? We object most strongly to the hon. member for Pinelands’s making such a suggestion about the hon. the Prime Minister. We are further astounded at the fact that the hon. member for Pinelands came along this afternoon and quoted what Dr. Adenauer is supposed to have said in connection with democracy. The hon. member for Pinelands speaks of democracy as an ideology which holds sway in the ranks of the United Party. What democracy is there in their attempts to give six representatives in this Parliament to one and a half million people? This is definitely not democracy. When one speaks of democracy, one must speak of the 60 representatives, their own people, which this Government wants to give to the Coloured population. One’s thoughts can take many directions. However, I want to return to what is probably the crux of the arguments raised in this debate. I want to say that the United Party and their liberal associates cannot progress to the point of thinking of the Coloureds as a separate national group with the potential to develop to full nationhood. This is what they stop at every time. We can understand this, because they themselves struggled for decades and generations to think of themselves in terms of nationhood. We had to try for decades to bring this thought home to them. Progress has been made. We can understand that to-day, when we are dealing with the Coloureds here, they are once again finding it difficult to think of the Coloureds in terms of nationhood. As far as members on this side of the House are concerned, it is of course a much simpler matter. We know our history and we know that in the first 50 years of the settlement here in South Africa the Whites consisted of heterogeneous groups. There were Hollanders, Germans and French. The Whites differed as much among themselves as the Coloureds do to-day. Who would have said before 1700 that from those heterogeneous White groups one nation would grow with the deep mutual feeling of alliance which one finds among the Afrikaners to-day. For that reason it is obvious to us that if it was possible in our case, the possibility is by no means excluded in the case of the Coloureds as well.

But there is also another reason why it is so difficult for the hon. members of the Opposition to think of the Coloureds in terms of nationhood. It stems from the fact that even to-day they are still labouring under the old ideas of imperialism and conquest which still lurk in their ranks. England conquered Wales and Scotland. She destroyed their leaderships and then Wales and Scotland were drawn in with England in subordinate positions. That is where the idea originated that one should actually absorb the superstratum of the Scottish and the Welsh into English society. After the analogy of that they are still thinking in terms of absorbing the superstratum of the Coloureds into the ranks of the Whites. But what is interesting is that the Coloureds have begun to become aware of this situation. The Coloureds have begun to discover, and they say this, that it is not in their interests that a small superstratum be skimmed off and absorbed into the ranks of the Whites. The interesting thing is that in proportion to England’s regression, there is a new upsurge of nationalism in Scotland and Wales and they are achieving spectacular election victories in the times in which we are living. This is interesting, and we wish that the members of the Opposition would observe it and take a lesson from it. In South Africa the members of the Opposition and their liberal associates have attempted to create a pattern over the years. They have argued over the years that, if they could absorb a few Coloureds into their universities, churches and associations, more or less on a basis of integration, it would be good for them and for the Coloureds. I want to give them credit for probably having done it with the best of intentions. After the analogy of the fact that they do not think of the Coloureds in terms of a potential nation, but in terms of a loose mass of individuals who do not or cannot really constitute a nation, they have since 1853 followed one policy and pattern in connection with the political rights of the Coloureds, namely that rights should be granted to a small, select circle. They must then exercise those rights on behalf of the Coloured population as a whole. It appeared very clearly from what the hon. the Leader of the Opposition and the hon. member for Durban (North) said that their point of departure is not that they think in terms of separate race groups. They think in terms of one nation consisting of many race groups. That is their point of departure. That is why they are fighting for the retention of this representation. But if they can get away from this basic point of departure of theirs, I feel that they will eventually develop an understanding of what this Government has in mind in removing these Coloured representatives.

However, there is a more deep-seated reason why this Government is so anxious to put an end to this type of representation and to create a new political institution for the Coloureds. It is that this Government has a very deep realization of the fact that each person has a deeply rooted yearning for self-esteem. It is to-day no longer possible to think that one can give certain rights to a small number of people from a specific population group and that they, because they enjoy those rights, can actually carry the honour of that group as a whole. This goal can only be achieved if not only the Coloured as an individual is uplifted, but also the group in which he finds himself. It is an inescapable fact that to give an individual a feeling of self-esteem, one must allow him to develop it in the context in which he finds himself, namely in his group context and his national context. Accordingly one cannot do what the hon. members of the Opposition have advocated until now. This idea of theirs led a distinguished Coloured leader such as George Golding to sum it up in the forties by saying that the Coloureds were the appendage of the White man. In saying this, he put the whole pattern followed here up to that stage, in a nutshell. That disposition led to the development of a strong feeling amongst the Coloureds to try and get away from their own ethnic groups—“to try for White”, as the expression goes. This mentality amongst the Coloureds must be broken down gradually and they must come to realise that they can achieve a real feeling of self-esteem only if they also achieve worth as a population group and possibly eventually as a full-fledged nation. The changes which occurred, especially after the Second World War, inasmuch as worth as human beings was no longer going to be limited to individuals, but was something to which everyone had a right, came, fortunately for South Africa, at a stage when the National Party came to power, because the National Party has the basically correct approach. Step by step the National Party has led the Coloureds along a road which will eventually enable them to achieve those great objectives. This is being said by their own people. It has for example been said by a man such as Dr. Ronald Forgus. He also told the Coloureds: “You will only realize yourselves to the full as human beings if you make good, but you must make good as Coloureds. You must not try to get away from your own people and then make good. You must make good in your own ranks as Coloureds.” The United Party is fighting a rearguard action to-day. They are fighting in the last ditch to-day. Their problem is that they want to maintain an old pattern which is being rejected in South Africa and in the world to-day. They cannot understand these new trends, these new institutions which are being created, because their point of departure is wrong. It is quite in order if they cannot understand everything. But what is so tragic and what saddens one, is this: When this Government established a university college of their own for the Coloureds, the United Party labelled it a “bush college”. At the very stage when the National Party began to build up a feeling of self-esteem amongst the Coloureds, they were engaged in demolition. They wanted to get at the National Party, but in actual fact they are insulting the Coloureds. Because that is what offends the Coloureds. They talk here of how the National Party is supposedly offending the Coloureds, but they forget that at this stage, when the National Party is for the first time creating for the Coloureds political institutions of their own, they are labelling it “parish representation”. First it was “bush colleges” and now it is “parish representation”. This appeared in yesterday morning’s Cape Times. A new invective is being used in regard to these new institutions for the Coloureds.

The Coloureds in South Africa are standing on the threshold of a new dispensation, but it must be preceded by the negative step of the termination of the present type of representation in this House. This legislation is dealing the death-blow to that old pattern, that old train of thought. That old appendix may just as well be cut out now. We can build political institutions of their own for the Coloureds on the road to full nationhood.

Mr. Speaker, we have now listened to many reasons why the Coloured South African should not be represented in this Parliament. First, we heard a lot of bunkum about exploitation, malpractices, and corruption in connection with the Coloured vote; and the wildest accusations were made here against the United Party. I grew up in Paarl in the Boland, and became active in party politics when I was still at school in the early thirties. I studied at Stellenbosch, where I assisted the late Mr. Henry Fagan to defeat Mr. Bruckner de Villiers. I worked in Cape Town as a political organizer and stood as a candidate at Moorreesburg at the time when the Coloured voters were still on the common roll. So I know what I am talking about when I say that if ever there was a party notorious for its underhand activities among the Coloured voters, that party is the Nationalist Party. There is not a single practice, or malpractice—“wynvaatjies” included—of which hon. members on that side have been accusing the United Party, which their party was not guilty of itself. There was a time when the Nationalist Party commanded a very considerable Coloured support, and it also employed agents to solicit support among the Coloured people. There was a time when a prominent member of the Nationalist Party after his election was physically carried up the steps of this House into Parliament by a group of Coloured supporters. Any attack on the United Party for having solicited Coloured support at elections is therefore hyprocisy of the worst possible kind. The simple fact is that when the Nationalist Party started with its extremist policies of apartheid, to get White support, it became impossible for Coloured voters to go on supporting the Nationalist Party, and it is only since that time that the Government party became sour over the Coloured vote and started accusing its opponents of practices of which they themselves were past masters in their time. In any case, I know enough of political practices to be able to say that the exploitation which took place in White elections, especially in respect of postal votes, in the last decade and more was many times worse than any kind of malpractice that ever took place in Coloured elections. Therefore there is no justification in the argument that the right of Coloured South Africans to sit in this Parliament should be cancelled on the grounds of certain electoral malpractices which are common to all elections, White and non-White.

The second argument advanced by hon. members opposite is that Parliament should be for the Whites only. Of course, there would have been good ground for the point of view that this should be a White Parliament if this country had been a country of Whites only. But as things are, this is not a country where there are only Whites. Whites and Coloureds share a common homeland; Coloured people form to-day an integral part of the defence forces of South Africa. In fact, when the 18-year olds were given the vote for Parliament some years ago, the main argument of hon. members on that side was that the man who is good enough to defend his country is good enough to vote for Parliament. They like to accuse others of applying a double standard, and yet they themselves are the world’s masters at this game. Not only do the Coloured people form an integral part—I use the words of the previous Minister of Defence—of the South African defence forces, but they also form an integral part of our police forces. In fact, without the active cooperation of the non-Whites of this country there can be no question of security for the White people. So I can go on, and I say that to insist on a “White Parliament” in a country which is not only White, in fact to deny to the Coloured people every right to a vote for Parliament, to remove a right which exists, is I believe an act of selfishness which marks the decadence to which some political thinking has sunk in our country.

A vote for Parliament is the badge of mature citizenship. Once this Bill is passed we will have a position where every Dick, Tom and Harry from the most miserable country abroad can come to South Africa and in time qualify for a vote for Parliament, but never a true-blood South African who has been classified as a Coloured man.

A third argument has been advanced. It is that only a small percentage of the Coloured people at present exercise the vote. Even in respect of the Whites our system of Parliamentary representation has never been completely logical. Under our present system the value of some White votes is as much as two to times that of other White votes, especially in the platteland. Here we sit as an Opposition. According to the hon. Leader of the House, the Opposition commands the support of 45 per cent of the White voters of the country, and yet we have little more than 20 per cent of the seats. There are many anomalies in our South African Parliamentary system. But what hon. members overlook in respect of the Coloured vote is that while a fair percentage exercise the Parliamentary vote at this stage, the existing law as it stands makes it possible for every Coloured male in the Cape to become a voter for Parliament. With the growth of education there is no doubt that, under existing law, every Coloured male in the Cape Province will in time indeed become a Parliamentary voter. It is therefore not important how many Coloured voters now exercise the vote, and to say that “we are only removing the vote exercised by 30,000 or 32,000”. The important thing is that this Bill seeks to remove, to abolish a right, the right of every Coloured adult male in the Cape Province to qualify for a Parliamentary vote. Let us not forget that 90 per cent of the Coloured people live in the Cape. It is therefore a very extensive, a very considerable right which is being removed by this Bill. It is true that some 10 per cent of the Coloured people who live in other provinces have so far had no Parliamentary vote; but what kind of logic is it to argue that, because ten per cent of the Coloureds cannot qualify for the Parliamentary vote, the right of 90 per cent who can qualify should be abolished? Surely, if the Government regards the existing voting rights of the Coloured people as being inadequate, the remedy is to improve it, not to make it more inadequate by abolishing that which exists. There is, therefore, no merit whatsoever in the argument that, because at the moment only a percentage of Coloureds exercise the vote, all the existing rights and all future rights should be abolished. Another argument is used, one which has emanated from the hon. the Prime Minister, of all people, and that is that now for the first time the Coloured people of South Africa “are really being given political rights”. He was referring, of course, to the new Coloured Representative Council. What the Prime Minister said is clearly not correct. He is a lawyer and he should know better. He should know that the term “political voting rights” has no uncertain meaning. The right to vote for a city council does not constitute a political right in the accepted sense of the term. For instance, in South West Africa, noncitizens exercise the municipal vote, but they cannot vote for the Legislative Assembly or for Parliament, and nobody would say that, because they vote for a city council, they have political rights. Everywhere the term “political rights” is taken to mean the right to vote for the highest political authority, not for the lowest. That is the meaning of the term political rights, and anything less would be regional or local and semi-political.

Ninety per cent of Coloured males of South Africa, as I say, do now indeed enjoy political rights in that they may qualify for the Parliamentary vote. But what are they going to get in return for the disappearance of their representatives from Parliament? Nothing near what one can honestly call political rights. This is not the time for us to go into the details of another Bill, but it is relevant to this point for me to point out that what the Coloureds are going to get in exchange for the removal from this House of their representatives, in exchange for their Parliamentary franchise, is a body lower in constitutional rank and status than that of a city council. The Coloured Representative Council will be entirely dependent on the funds voted by this Parliament. For that matter they will be no more than an agency paying out money voted and allocated by this Parliament, powerless to do more than what they are told to do. Unless such a body has the right to raise money independently, and the power to spend such money independently, there can be no question of calling such a body a governing body. The concept of government and of a governing body rests on the means to direct affairs, at least with some measure of independence. Because this power will be missing in the case of the Coloured Representative Council, it cannot be termed a governing body at all. Its main functions will be advisory and administrative. Its constitutional status will therefore be below that of a municipality. So there can be no question of political rights in the generally accepted sense of the term, no matter how closely they follow the pattern of Parliamentary elections. I say therefore that the hon. the Prime Minister is completely wrong and that the voting rights he proposes to give to the Coloured people cannot be termed political rights. What political rights they have, will be taken away.

There is a fifth argument raised by hon. members opposite, and that is the argument pursued especially by the hon. member for Randfontein. It is the argument of the “two voices”. The Coloured people now have direct representation in the city council; also representation in the provincial council and in Parliament, to say nothing of all the other bodies in which they are represented. But has anybody ever suggested that they are speaking with three or more voices because they are represented at different levels of government? The Whites are represented in countless town councils, in divisional councils, in four provincial councils, in one legislative assembly, and in Parliament, to say nothing of the multitude of statutory and other local bodies. Surely, if it is right for one population group to speak with a score of voices, can it then be wrong for another to speak with “two”? When one deals with different levels of government there can be no question of two or more voices. A provincial council is competent only in respect of matters of a provincial nature, and so will this Coloured Council deal with matters at the level of its powers; whilst the representatives in Parliament clearly will deal with matters of higher national importance which fall outside the jurisdiction of lower and minor bodies. Of all the arguments advanced by the Government side as to why Parliamentary representation should be abolished, this one of the so-called “two voices” is the most ridiculous of all.

Another argument that has been advanced is that Coloured witnesses have shown that they would not be against the abolition of White representatives for Coloured people in this House. The evidence of this kind is so thin that it cannot be put forward as a serious argument at all. The simple truth is that there are many ignorant Whites, stupid people I should rather call them, who believe that members of Parliament are here for their own pleasure and that they are of no value to them or to the country. We have Whites who say members of Parliament are useless; they only sit here for their own pleasure. And so we also find stupid Coloureds who believe that Members of Parliament can be of no value at all to the country. We all meet people in the ordinary course of life who do not understand Parliament and the machinery of Parliament and what Parliament is all about. We just forgive them for their ignorance. But what is unbelievable is that certain hon. members, and especially the hon. member for Randfontein, could come here and actually go so far as to call such ignorant people in as their allies, and on the basis of their opinion try to prove that nearly two million Coloured people are not adverse to the abolition of the Coloured vote for Parliament.

There is a major principle underlying Parliamentary representation. As I have said, it marks the mature citizenship, and only the most gullible man could believe that this principle is of no concern to the Coloured community. But if proof is necessary, let me remind hon. members that this very matter was debated twice by the existing Coloured Council. It twice considered the question of Parliamentary representation and on both occasions they decided in favour of representation in this House and in favour of the representatives being Coloured. I have here a report in Die Burger of the time where the following is said—

—so it was the second time—

I can go on and read more. Here this body established by this very Government, the members being mostly nominated by the Government and carefully selected men, itself on two occasions decided unanimously in favour of Coloured representatives in this House and that they should be Coloured. They stood firm on the principle that they should be represented here. If this is not proof enough for hon. Government members, then I think one can now already say that they will take no notice of what the new Coloured Council will in future have to say.

Finally there is the one argument—I would like to call it the one honest argument—put forward by hon. members opposite, and that is the blatant admission that the actual reason behind the removal is that the Coloured voters seem to prefer the Progressive Party. I do not believe in this view at all. I am convinced that with its policy of direct representation of the Coloured people, if properly put to the Coloured people, the United Party would defeat the Progs. But party considerations are not important here. We are dealing with the vital rights of a people. One thing I rather like about this Government argument is that at least it is an honest admission of the failure of the Government’s policy in respect of the Coloureds. By that they admit they have failed to attract the support of the Coloured people; and as time goes on I am convinced that that failure will become more pronounced in the new Coloured Council. While I like that admission of failure, what is alarming is the open way in which the Government uses the machinery of Parliament to curb a legal democratic party just because it does not like the party’s politics. I can think of no more dangerous development for a democratic system than this. The Government forced the Coloured people to elect White people. White politicians, after all, have a point of view. They were forced to elect White people with political points of view. But simply because the Coloured people exercised their vote in a manner which the Government did not like, the whole right to be represented in Parliament is to be abolished, and Government speakers, even the hon. the Prime Minister, make no bones about it that this is the main reason why the Coloured representatives have to go. I think it is one of the most undemocratic actions ever witnessed in this Parliament, and only a fool can have any further faith in the declared democratic outlook of the Government.

I have not heard one single reason why this Bill should not be opposed, and on the positive side let me say that we oppose it, in the first place, because it abolishes all meaningful political rights for the Coloured community of this country. What they get in return cannot be called political rights in the proper meaning of the word. Secondly, it will justifiably be seen by the Coloured people as a repressive measure and as such it will increase the feeling of unjust treatment which already exists among them. Thirdly, it will adversely affect the White population. It will make the whole White population appear in the eyes of the non-White as selfish and unfair. And as a White man one must rebel against that. What is more, it will deprive Parliament, it will deprive this House, it will deprive us of the benefit of the views and the voices of two million people whom we must govern. Parliament will become more unreal than ever.

Business interrupted in accordance with Standing Order No. 23 and debate adjourned.