Mr. Speaker, as regards the business of the House for next week, I just wish to point out that we shall follow the Order Paper as printed. The budget debate will be introduced by the hon. the Minister of Finance on Wednesday when he delivers his Budget Speech.

Mr. Speaker, I move without notice—

Agreed to.

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

My reason for moving this motion is point no. 6 of the hon. the Prime Minister’s twelve-point plan. It reads as follows—

Die Burger of 18 March 1980 added to this—

I shall come back to this statement, but first I want to seek clarification about what constitutes “unnecessary and hurtful” discrimination. During the no-confidence debate the hon. the Prime Minister gave us a definition of that. I quote from Hansard, 6 February 1980, col. 222—

In other words, all measures which do not threaten the community life of a particular community, and which are discriminating, are hurtful and unnecessary and must be removed. The hon. the Prime Minister also said, according to The Cape Times of 3 September 1979—

For that reason, the acceptance of this motion could lead to a constructive debate between Opposition and Government, because both accept that discrimination exists, that it must be removed, and that, in the words of the hon. the Prime Minister, we “must have the courage to spell out what we mean” when we speak about this. Where could we do this better than in a Select Committee which can make recommendations about how we can systematically get rid of discrimination? We already have such a Select Committee which is deliberating about the constitution, and therefore we may just as well have one which can deliberate about how to get away from discrimination. Such a committee is also necessary to eliminate public confusion which is mainly caused by Government spokesmen. There is a great deal of confusion. I want to refer to a report in Rapport of 16 March 1980 under the heading “Oopstel of nie: Pretoria bly in die sop.” I quote from the first paragraph—

Then came this interesting statement—

Never has a Government been so confused, bungling and lacking in direction about what does or does not constitute discrimination as this Government at this stage. The one moment expectations are created and the next the expectations are frustrated. People get confused and behave in a contradictory way. Confusion created against the background of the twelve-point plan of the hon. the Minister may have serious consequences for good relations and may also create a credibility gap which may hamper reform and orderly change. This public confusion is a symptom of division and tension in the Government itself which can totally paralyse attempts to remove race discrimination. I want to illustrate that. I want to refer to sport, for example, and to quote the hon. the Minister of Public Works from the book entitled Treurnicht aan die Woord. Under the heading “Ons speel nie saam nie” he wrote the following in Hoof stad on 9 October 1970—

The hon. the Minister went on to say in Credo van ’n Afrikaner, in the chapter entitled “Aan die Gematigde Jong Afrikaner”, on page 108—

Then, on the other hand, we have the standpoint of the then hon. Minister of Sport and Recreation in response to a question by the hon. member for Sandton. The question put to the hon. the Minister of Sport and Recreation by the hon. member for Sandton appears in Questions and Replies 1978, Vol. 76, col. 254—

The Minister of Sport and Recreation:

1. (a) 21 February 1978.
2. (b) The letter reads as follows—

1. (a) That no permit or other legal permission is needed by any player to play on any court in South Africa or to join any club.

There you have it. And only this week, on Wednesday, 19 March 1980, the present hon. Minister of Sport and Recreation replied to a question put by the hon. member for Sandton.

Mr. D. J. Dalling asked the Minister of Sport and Recreation—

The Minister of Sport and Recreation:

The question which arises from this is a simple one: What guidelines should be followed in removing unnecessary, hurtful measures which cause bad feelings? Is sport a part of our community life which requires essential discriminatory measures or is it not? And what is the hon. the Prime Minister’s reply?

What do you say?

I shall come to the answer.

The second illustration of this problem is the Immorality Act and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. The hon. the Prime Minister said in Die Burger of 26 September 1979—

I quote once again from a book entitled Afrikaner-Liberalisme, in which the hon. the Minister of Tourism says the following—

Here again, the one standpoint is that it is in fact possible to make improvements in this regard, while the other one asks for essential discrimination to preserve community life. Which standpoint is to serve as a guideline for moving away from discrimination? But what is the whole principle of moving away from discrimination as such? The hon. the Minister of Co-operation and Development said at the Hilton Riviera Hotel, Palm Springs, California, on 19 June 1979—

And then again, in Die Transvaler of 4 February 1975, the hon. the Minister of Tourism said—

He went on to say—

The hon. the Minister said—

Here we have three standpoint, therefore. The hon. the Prime Minister speaks about unnecessary and hurtful discrimination which has to disappear. The hon. the Minister of Public Works, of Statistics and of Tourism says that if one moves away from discrimination, separate development cannot succeed. The hon. the Minister of Co-operation and Development says in his turn that the Government will not rest until all discrimination has disappeared from the Statute Book and from everyday life. The question is whose and what kind of guidance is going to be provided in order to give effect to point six of the hon. the Prime Minister’s twelve-point plan. The heart of this issue indicates a line of division within the NP.

I now want to spell out this division. On the one hand there are those who sincerely believe that the White man’s right to self-determination is directly linked to not moving away from discrimination. In short, there are those on that side of the House who believe that discrimination in so-called “White South Africa” is a prerequisite for White survival. The hon. the Minister of Public Works, of Statistics and of Tourism is undoubtedly the most skilful, logical and consistent proponent of this standpoint. I mean this as a compliment, because the hon. the Minister puts his standpoint consistently and clearly. The hon. the Minister’s slogan in Credo, page 24, gives a concise summary of this—

So it does not matter whether we call it discrimination or differentiation; we must discriminate. Therefore apartheid, according to those in the NP—not according to the West or to our enemies—can only be kept alive through discrimination. To kill apartheid, according to this logic, is to move away from discrimination. On the other hand, there are those in the NP who are beginning to sense in several spheres that if the Whites are to survive in our fatherland, we have to move away from discrimination at any cost, that it is a prerequisite for the peaceful co-existence of groups in our country. I quote the words of the hon. the Minister of Foreign Affairs from The Argus—

I am not identifying these two groups because I wish to sow dissension. [Interjections.] These two groups already exist.

Rubbish.

These two groups identify themselves. [Interjections.] I am not the one who is identifying them. I have been silent for two whole weeks, until Die Burger began to ask why the Opposition was not talking about the division in the Government ranks, and now that I am talking about it, the Government members do not want to believe me when I say that I do not wish to sow dissension. The dissension is there, but what is more important is that these two groups within the NP are locked in mortal combat with each other for control of the NP. That is clear. The result of this struggle will determine whether and how we are going to move away from discrimination. If we do not move away, there will be violent conflict in our country. We know that.

There is a third group as well, but they keep quiet because they do not know which one of the two groups is going to win. They are waiting to see what happens. They do not want to open their mouths. When the newspapers approach them, they just say: “No comment.” [Interjections.] However, the two groups are clearly identifiable. It is of vital importance to us all in South Africa that this conflict within the NP should come to an end now so that there may be clarity.

†I say this because if we look at what the hon. the Prime Minister’s definition of what constitutes unnecessary and hurtful discrimination, he also says that it should not lead to bad feelings.

While the NP struggles amongst themselves over whether and how to move away from discrimination, I just want to remind them there are spectators who do not have the luxury to talk about what discrimination is, but experience it everyday in almost all aspects of their lives. Today is the 20th anniversary of Sharpeville. [Interjections.] If one goes back and reads the commission’s report, it tells one that discrimination lies at the heart of the matter. Discrimination comes out as a clear theme in every commission’s reports on disturbances, riots and uprisings since then.

Do you believe that?

The commission’s report said so. The hon. member accepted the report of the commission. Now the hon. member wants to know whether I believe it. Does he not believe the commissions appointed by the Government? The reports of the commissions say so. One does not have to ask a Black man whether the Separate Amenities Act is discriminatory. He experiences its discriminatory effects every day. The hon. the Prime Minister at least concedes that there are instances in which the application of this Act might be discriminatory. He will obviously agree that we must also have the courage to spell out what these circumstances are. To me it is a supreme irony that the vast majority of people whose lives are affected by discriminatory practices, cannot participate in this debate on whether discrimination should be removed or not, but have to await the outcome of the debate within the NP.

*It is my conviction that a Select Committee of Parliament which can make recommendations about how South Africa can be turned into a society which is free from discrimination could take this debate much further and give it a much wider scope than the infighting in the NP. Point six of the twelve-point plan offers us that opportunity. If the Government is serious about implementing point six of the twelve-point plan, it can seize upon this opportunity of moving away from discrimination in a systematic and concrete way. What is more important to South Africa: A government which is paralysed by internal debate in a country which is crying out for reform, or a Government which fearlessly initiates reform by indicating quite clearly to the people what sacrifices have to be made? The NP has to answer this question, and South Africa is waiting for it to do so with mounting impatience. [Interjections.] The hon. members may be as noisy as they like, but I want to read to them from a report which appeared in Die Burger quoting Mr. Rowan Cronjé. Mr. Cronjé is an Afrikaner who is not a member of my Party. I can recognize courage when I see it, because he is a man who stormed hell with a bucket of water and he emerged with something to say. The report was headed “Ongewilde stappe ’n moet om te oorleef” …

But not to capitulate.

That is the point I want to make. The report about Mr. Cronjé said the following, inter alia—

He went on to say—

He also said—

Mr. Cronjé did not say this to the PFP, but to an audience consisting of Potgietersrus businessmen. [Interjections.] Hon. members should listen to what he said—

I want to suggest that we avoid such a situation and that we should not talk afterwards about things we did not want to do, but that we should talk beforehand about things we have to do. That is why I moved tins motion. It is not a question of capitulation, as the hon. member for Rissik said. I have just quoted what was said by a man who had capitulated. He had no choice and no attempt was made in time …

Mr. Speaker, may I ask the hon. the Leader of the Opposition a question?

Unfortunately I do not have time. Mr. Cronjé said that if only they had made use of some of the opportunities they had at the time, they would not have found themselves in their present predicament. I am not asking them to accept Prog policy. [Interjections.] I am not asking the Government to accept Prog policy.

Order! There are too many interjections.

I am not asking the NP to accept PFP policy. What am I asking? I am asking for a Select Committee of the House to consider how we can move away from discrimination. My request arises from the twelve-point plan which the hon. the Prime Minister has drawn up and which he considers to be of urgent national importance. He says it enjoys the unanimous support of that side of the House. Does the hon. member for Wonderboom agree with it? Does he agree that point six is important? [Interjections.] He says: “Yes.”

Order!

If that hon. member agrees, he must tell us with whom he agrees.

With the twelve-point plan.

Everyone now agrees with the twelve-point plan. Sir, I agree with point six of the twelve-point plan.

Then you are one-twelfth Nat.

That point six of the twelve-point plan talks about moving away from discrimination. The hon. the Minister of Tourism says that if one moves away from discrimination, separate development will disappear. I can show that he has said so repeatedly. I have his works here. I want to recommend that hon. members read them to discover his point of view. He says—and I want to repeat it—that if we move away from discrimination, apartheid is going to crumble, and separate development will no longer be possible. How can that be reconciled with point six of the twelve-point plan? [Interjections.] I do not like apartheid. Why do hon. members think I am sitting on this side of the House? I say discrimination must disappear. I am telling them that there is a starting point in point six of the twelve-point plan. However, it is a point of division on that side of the House, and the hon. members opposite know it. They know that there is a struggle of this nature going on. That struggle is paralysing the Government and preventing it from introducing any reforms, and that paralysis must be seen against the background of the words of Mr. Rowan Cronjé.

†To sum up: The hon. the Prime Minister says we must have the courage to spell out what we mean. Well, Sir, we can do this in a Select Committee. The point is whether the Government has the courage to spell it out without breaking itself up. The question is: Can the Government clearly commit itself to removing racial discrimination without destroying itself? The Government has to answer that question. One thing is very important, and that is that this is not a debate that fundamentally concerns only the White people in this country. The Whites do not experience discrimination. The majority of Black people experience that discrimination every day, and therefore we must realize that when we have a debate about what is discriminatory and what is not and when we start thinking about measures that have to be removed, we are not really affecting our own lives so much as the lives of millions of other people. Also, against the background of the last 30 years, or let us make it the last 20 years, viz. since 21 March 1960, we have had enough illustrations of what kind of actions and what kind of discriminatory measures lead to bad feelings. I am even prepared to say for the purposes of debate that we should consider those actions and those measures which have nothing to do even with the community life of people, to see whether we can move away from discrimination.

Let us not delude ourselves. When one opens the post offices to all races, is one compelling people to integrate? It is a simple question. Is the post office part of community life? Is that compulsory integration?

Andries says so.

Yes. Obviously the hon. the Minister of Tourism says it is. Nevertheless it has been done. Yesterday the hon. member for Kuruman was complaining about “verdringing” in the post office at Kuruman. What is it, however? It is a moving away from discrimination clear and simple. When all people, irrespective of race, are treated equally in the Defence Force, is that compulsory integration? What is it? Is it a moving away from discrimination? Let us not delude ourselves about sport either. What is going on? Why are the British Lions coming to tour? Are they coming because we have not moved away from discrimination in sport, or have not attempted to do so? What kind of teams are going to play? Are they going to be multinational or are they going to be integrated?

One cannot go into this kind of semantic nonsense with one another any more, because the times confronting South Africa are too serious. We in this White Parliament who monopolize power have to enter into a debate amongst ourselves and say, in clear language, what we mean when we talk about moving away from discrimination, because otherwise, when every second hon. member of the Government, or more specifically when every second Cabinet Minister comes along with a declaration of intent, all that is created is confusion and no change takes place. One thing is sure, however, and that is that ad hoc changes, arbitrary changes and changes too late always fan the flames of revolution. It has been like that right throughout history, and the Government must realize that if it carries on this way, it will be a component part of whatever confrontation is going to come.

Mr. Speaker …

Andries’s man in Natal.

Order!

… we have just listened to a speech made by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition in which he told us for three quarters of the time what other people had said. Nor did he say anything new in the remaining quarter of the time.

Because you will not listen; that is why.

The speech made by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition certainly did surprise me, particularly in view of the fact that we gave attention in depth to this very subject in this House only a few weeks ago. I think that all the replies which the hon. the Leader of the Opposition wanted today were given on those occasions.

Consequently one wonders why the hon. the Leader of the Opposition raised this subject in this House again. I think there are two possible reasons. The first reason is to seek a pretext in the person of the hon. the Deputy Minister of Public Works, in other words to launch an attack on him and to try to make a little political capital out of events of the recent past In spite of the fact that the Press and certain individuals blew up the incident to which the hon. the Leader of the Opposition referred out of all proportion, surely there is no doubt about the official standpoint of the Government on sports matters. Surely we took that very step to de-politicise sports matters. Surely we cannot continue to make politics out of sport in South Africa, not when we are reproaching other countries of the world for dragging politics into sport.

Do you not want to de-politicize your post office?

I wish that hon. member’s spring would break. No one can deny the fact that there are many people in South Africa who are not in favour of sport integration. Surely this is a fact In fact the members of the Transvaal Congress of the NP adopted a resolution in this regard last year expressing their opposition to integration at school level. Of course everyone is entitled to differ in this regard.

And where do you stand?

It is indeed very petty to blow up out of all proportion a friendly family squabble in order to make political capital out of it. [Interjections.]

Family squabble!

I do not think the hon. the Leader of the Opposition should speak too readily of a split in this party, for since 1948, on no fewer than six occasions, while the newspapers and the Opposition were kicking up a terrific fuss about a so-called split on this side, the split took place on the other side. I think hon. members of the NRP know what I am referring to.

The motion before this House has a strange history, and it is probable that herein lies the second reason why the hon. the Leader of the Opposition introduced this motion. Originally we had a motion on the Order Paper in the name of the hon. member for Yeoville, a motion dealing with pension matters. Then this motion was suddenly withdrawn and introduced as an amendment to another motion, and shortly afterwards a new motion was introduced by the hon. member for Yeoville, dealing with the elimination of discrimination in the economic sphere. I think the hon. the Leader of the Opposition probably felt that chaos was on the point of breaking out in his ranks, particularly with a view to the fact that it is already clear that the theories of the hon. member for Yeoville in respect of economic integration had not been cleared by him with his own party. In any event his theories are rejected by financial experts in South Africa. To save this situation the motions were promptly switched and now the hon. the Leader of the Opposition is moving a motion on another subject He has indeed acted in time to clamp down firmly on the hon. member for Yeoville. However, this whole situation reminds me of the story of the American student who walked around with a large “K” on his chest. When he was asked what it stood for, he said it stood for “confusion”. However, when they pointed out to him that one spells “confusion” with a “c”, he said “Yes, but it just shows you how confused I am.” It is clear that the hon. the Leader of the Opposition has won the struggle in the midst of this “confusion”, otherwise there would have been chaos once the hon. member for Yeoville had again begun to discuss his “social democracy”.

The motion introduced today by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition consists of two parts. Firstly he requests that a Select Committee be appointed to formulate matters of policy, and secondly, he asks for a community which will ostensibly be free of any discrimination. As far as the first aspect of the motion is concerned, it surprises me that the hon. the Leader of the Opposition is asking for a Select Committee. Surely it is not the normal procedure for this Parliament to reach finality, inter alia, on the interpretation of terminology or to settle party political matters by means of its committee system. What will it lead to if the Parliamentary machine has to be used to eradicate the “confusion” in Opposition ranks? We know what we understand by “elimination of discrimination”; in fact we have spelled this out very clearly. We know what our standpoint on this matter, since it is a clearly qualified standpoint, and the hon. the Prime Minister explained it quite recently again in a brilliant way during the no-confidence debate.

†I fully understand that a prerequisite for meaningful debate, as was requested by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition, is that we should carefully examine modern-day political and sociological terminology. This is, however, not the task of politicians.

*The hon. the Leader of the Opposition is himself a social scientist. I think he will have to concede that one needs a really scientific approach to eliminate the obscurity of terminology in modern-day politics. Consequently this is not a matter that can be finalized on a political level in a Select Committee.

The motion before this House is vague, in spite of the explanation by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition, in contrast to the very clear standpoint, which, as I have already said, was stated by the hon. the Prime Minister. What is more, the hon. the Leader of the Opposition quoted that part of Hansard.

We also state clearly what type of discrimination will be eliminated. I shall deal further with this as well. However, this motion continues to hang in the air. The hon. the Leader of the Opposition does not say what he understands by the concept “free of discrimination”. Is this in fact possible, in a heterogeneous population, with a multiplicity of national communities? Where else in the world do circumstances exist that are totally free of discrimination? This is something which does exist anywhere in practice. Apart from the fact that, as in the case of the USA, compulsory integration gives rise to greater discrimination, surely there is still essential discrimination as well, which is aimed at the protection of minority groups. This also includes Black minority groups.

Nor does the hon. the Leader of the Opposition say whether he wants to extend the elimination of discrimination on the basis of race or colour to this Parliament. If he wants to be consistent, surely he should say this. Together with all the other things he said here today, he should tell us this too. However, I maintain that he dare not qualify it. He will never dare to say so. If he were to do so, he would be exposing the inconsistencies of his own party’s policy and would have to admit that his party is indeed a supporter of a system of one man, one vote in a unitary State without any protection for any minority groups. Furthermore he also knows that he can of course never sell this concept at the polls. That is why he remains utterly silent on this specific matter. He knows that he should rather remain silent on the consequences of an unqualified motion such as this.

Does the hon. the Leader of the Opposition admit that a need does in fact exist for statutory discrimination? How is influx control, with all its consequences, possible without it? Must we summarily scrap the development corporations and the credit corporations for the economic development and prosperity of the Black man? One could indeed advance by way of argument that this is in reality discrimination against Whites. However, must we do away with the commercial protection being enjoyed by the Black people in view of their backlog? Must we do away with the protection for them in their own areas? Must we do away with the tribal laws of the Black man, laws that are part and parcel of his own law and of his own ethnic identity? These are only a few of the questions which arise.

On the other hand I wonder whether the hon. the Leader of the Opposition is serious in his intentions, when, by means of his unqualified motion, he wants to deprive peoples of the right of protecting what is their own. Surely he cannot tell me this. Is he serious when he wants to disrupt the good order by insisting upon the removal of certain institutional discriminatory measures which are aimed at eliminating friction in a country such as South Africa? Are the implications of the motion made by the hon. the Leader not perhaps a repetition here in South Africa of the chaos which prevailed in American cities by the crowding out of people in good residential areas? In view of the way in which he has formulated his motion, the question arises whether this is not perhaps the case.

The PFP does not take nationalism into account. The PFP cannot explain nationalism away. Nor can they destroy it. Nationalism is, after all, as plain as a pikestaff, whether it is White nationalism or the nationalism of any nation in the world. Apparently the PFP is living in a world of phantasy, in which realities are not taken into account Have they ever considered what a tremendously disruptive effect this unqualified motion could have on the economic structures of South Africa? Have they ever considered what disruption this could cause? Surely one cannot place South Africa’s body of entrepreneurs, with their limited means, under such a tremendous pressure overnight that they are forced down overnight to the economic level of those one would like to help. Surely we are dealing here with a situation where the First World is being thrown together in one situation with the Third World. We should take this into account. They have been thrown together on one geographic subcontinent, and therefore a geographic systematization must of course exist in this process.

It could perhaps be said that some of the measures are discriminatory, but discriminatory measures are absolutely essential to preserve this system. The body of entrepreneurs are the people who have to create employment opportunities and have to take upon themselves the responsibility for economic growth. The Government’s standpoint has been explained very clearly. It is very clear to us what measures can be eliminated. These are measures that are not essential for the preservation of our own identity. Essential discrimination is in fact the recognition of group ties and is part of reality. If one ignores this, one is looking for trouble, because in that case the group ties will manifest themselves in confrontation which will be far worse than that held up to this House by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition.

I do not want to introduce any amendment to this motion, because on the basis of my own conviction and interpretation of this motion, I do not reject its general principle. Nevertheless I must reject it as a, whole, because I know what interpretation is attached to it by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition. Perhaps we could conduct a more meaningful debate on this important matter one day when we are sure that we are attaching the same importance to certain terminological concepts in our politics.

Mr. Speaker, it is not surprising that the hon. member for Newcastle, who is well-known for his attitude towards the opening of the post office at Newcastle, his constituency, had no difficulty at all today in providing a very long list of examples of what he considers to be acceptable discrimination. It is clear where he stands in the debate which is going on in the NP at the moment, a debate which he called “a friendly family squabble”. I shall leave it to him to resolve matters within his own party.

The hon. the Prime Minister and the hon. the Minister of Foreign Affairs made it very clear that it is the Government’s policy to move away from discrimination.

†I welcomed this motion when I saw it on the Order Paper, because I believed it would give us an opportunity to debate and perhaps even to get some clarity on what different people mean by different terms. One of the chronic political diseases South Africa suffers from is that people use phrases that mean something quite different to them than the meaning other people attach to those phrases. They use high-sounding words, words like “selfbeskikking”, a word which has come to mean all things to all men in the Government party. At the other extreme the word “discrimination” applies to any form of differentiation.

Unfortunately, however, in this debate speakers have again evaded getting down to specifics. Neither the hon. Leader of the Opposition nor the hon. member for Newcastle has specifically said what they mean when they say that we must or must not remove discrimination. They did not detail the consequences of what they are pleading for. I have put an amendment on the Order Paper, because I hope to pin down a few specific issues. With the NP it is difficult to pin down anything. It depends on who is talking. As against that, in the PFP at least a clear definition has finally been reached. I therefore move the amendment printed in my name on the Order Paper, as follows—

I am surprised that the hon. the Leader of the Opposition asked for a Select Committee, for a White Select Committee of a White Parliament, defining specifically in the terms of reference of his own motion that it should have no power to take evidence or to call for papers. It could only inquire into and report on steps to remove discrimination, and this at a time when there is a Select Committee of this very House sitting on a new constitutional structure for South Africa. Surely discrimination is not only a symptom, but in fact a consequence of one’s constitutional structure. Surely the key to a new society in South Africa will flow from whatever new constitutional structure emerges, and not from fiddling around with bits and pieces of dead apartheid, dead in the eyes of some and alive in the eyes of others. We in this party believe that the first step should be consultation and negotiation to identify what hurts people and harms race relationships.

Do you not know yet?

I believe it is arrogant for us and for that party …

You woke up very late in the day.

… it is arrogant to say to the Black and Coloured people of South Africa: “This is what you want, this is what hurts you.” I believe that we should talk to them and say: “What hurts you and how would you like to see it changed?”

Like we do in Natal.

Very late.

We have been doing it for years and years.

The hon. member says: “Very late.” We have achieved a major success in Natal by sitting around a table, identifying differences and reaching agreement.

You sound just like Graaff. Going from strength to strength.

From the very day this party was born, this has been our approach.

From the day you were born you have been dying.

Order!

That is why our amendment calls for machinery …

Order! What did the hon. member say? Will the hon. member repeat what he said?

Yes, with pleasure, Mr. Speaker. I said that the NRP started dying the day they were born.

So did you.

I treat remarks like that with the contempt they deserve. That is why our amendment seeks to identify the problems together. Having identified them, how do we eliminate White-created discrimination and not replace it with political domination of minorities by force of numbers without triggering off an equally explosive situation of reverse discrimination? This is at the root of the differences between the PFP and the NRP, the philosophic divide between us, a difference which has at last, last week, been clearly identified and stands on record, not as my partisan interpretation, but as an agreed statement of differences. I think it is necessary and relevant to this debate, in which we talk of discrimination, to put these differences on record. The hon. the Leader of the Opposition completely avoided saying one single word about what they saw as being discrimination and how they would like to see it changed. I now wish to quote from the terms of an agreed document submitted to the two caucuses—

And the common area is specified. Here is the fundamental difference. We reject “one man, one vote” leading to majority rule, but that is the official Opposition’s view of the removal of discrimination when it comes to the electoral system. It is clearly on record—a common voters’ roll with general franchise. That is the PFP’s interpretation of removing discrimination in regard to the franchise. It ignores group interests, while this party recognizes group interests.

In the second place—

and they are listed: Consensus government, minority veto, and Bill of Rights, etc.

In the third place—

So we see clearly what the differences are between our interpretation and the official Opposition’s interpretation of discrimination. In one sentence the fundamental question at issue is whether a self-identified community should have the right to an exclusive neighbourhood which it controls itself, provided that there is full opportunity in other open areas for those who, by choice wish to integrate, to do so. The NRP says: “Yes, they should have that option.” The PFP says: “No, there should be no option.” They reject the right of a community, self identified, to establish for itself an exclusive character in its own area. We regard this compulsory integration without choice as a form of reverse discrimination.

He supports you, Andries!

It is just as unacceptable as compulsory segregation with no choice. [Interjections.] That is why I disagree with the hon. the Minister of Tourism, because he stands for compulsory segregation with no option and no choice. The official Opposition stands for compulsory integration with no choice. Those are the two poles and that is why we disagree with them both. [Interjections.] The freedom of choice should offer both alternatives to the people of this country, not the forced acceptance of other communities with no right to retain their own community character, if they wish to do so.

The NRP believes—and I spell it out specifically—that local option should replace the Group Areas Act, that the Mixed Marriages and Immorality Acts should go, that business and industrial areas should be open to all, that all must share in political responsibility and in the political exercising of power. But where the intimacy of the family is concerned, and the right of the group to control its own intimate affairs, the destruction of that right becomes discrimination in reverse. [Interjections.] That is why we want all the communities to get together to identify the problems and work out the solutions, because we believe that the solution worked out around a table, as it was in Natal, would be a solution which would include the recognition of community identity …

Andries, he is more right-wing than you are!

… not as a symbol of rejection and inferiority, but as an instrument for co-operation and harmony. That is the fundamental difference, the reason why we do not and cannot join the NP. We cannot accept their concept of no-choice segregation.

That is also the reason why we cannot join the PFP …

We do not want you.

… because we reject their concept of forced integration in residential areas. I can assure the House that if it were not for the policy differences, the presence of the hon. member for Bryanston would be enough to put anybody off. [Interjections.] We in this party set out where we stand, unlike the governing party, which talks with two voices. That is reflected in its grass roots. We have just had the Craven week controversy—an intimate little “onderonsie”—and now we find that pure White sport has raised its head in Vryheid. The hon. member for Vryheid has been trying very hard …

Local option.

No, this is not local option. This is an imposition by the NP hierarchy which controls the school committees at their own will against the will of the ordinary parent. We believe that the choice should rest with the people and that there should be a local option to establish it together and that it should not be imposed on them. That is why I do not support the motion for the appointment of a White Select Committee where Whites will talk about what hurts other people, and that is why I have moved the amendment that is printed in my name on the Order Paper.

Mr. Speaker, it was an unusual phenomenon to see the motion of the hon. the Leader of the Opposition as printed on the Order Paper. I was surprised at his introducing such a motion, since he and his party have constantly adopted the standpoint that we as Whites should not make decisions for other people, but that we should decide in conjunction with them. In actual fact the hon. the Leader of the Opposition—the hon. member for Durban Point has already referred to this—came forward with a motion on behalf of his party in which he asked that a Select Committee of the White Parliament be appointed to consider which discriminatory measures could be eliminated. This is quite foreign to that party, because it has always been their standpoint that we should not decide for people but that we should decide in conjunction with them. This is a transparent effort by the official Opposition to try to drive a wedge into the NP, and it is impossible to do so. We realize that it was a bitter disappointment for the official Opposition and the other Opposition parties that the NP still exists as a powerful unity in South Africa.

Tell us about cricket in Barberton.

The hon. the Leader of the Opposition said in his speech that it was a pity that the people who were being affected by the so-called discrimination could not participate in this debate, and yet he nevertheless came forward with his motion. In this respect I think there is perhaps more sense in the amendment moved by the hon. member for Durban Point, in which he asks, unnecessarily, that the Government should create machinery to conduct negotiations among the various communities in order to eliminate discrimination. I want to emphasize that this argument is unnecessary because the Government has already created the necessary machinery and has already taken the necessary administrative steps in accordance with which thorough consultation on every facet of life affecting all of us is indeed taking place between the Government and all the other population groups in South Africa. The difference between the Opposition and ourselves is a simple one, and this is also clear from the motion by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition. What is the hon. the Leader of the Opposition asking us? His motion reads that steps should be taken—

In other words, the hon. the Leader of the Opposition, in accordance with their concept of a future South Africa, calls for the establishment of a single community in South Africa. The PFP’s concept of a single community in South Africa is a myth because in South Africa we are not dealing with one community, but with a variety of communities, a collection of communities, which one cannot escape by wishful thinking. We have communities that differ amongst themselves on the basis of race and colour. We have communities that differ with regard to their level of development. We have communities that differ in respect of the language they use. We have communities with religious differences. We have communities that are at a relatively low level of development and communities that are at a high level of development.

In this situation in South Africa, with its tremendous potential for conflict, it is not possible to envisage one community for the whole of South Africa, a community in which all the different communities have to be absorbed. What is more, if one takes each of these various communities in South Africa on its own, each one of them remains a minority group, measured against all the other communities combined. Thus it is essential that we in South Africa should find a modus vivendi by means of which all the minority groups—and all of us are minority groups—can continue to live alongside one another in South Africa. It is our belief that with the exceptional circumstances we have in South Africa, there is only one pattern for the establishment of peaceful co-existence, viz. the policy of separateness and separate development. That is why it is the Government’s task to develop each community and to assist every community to develop itself to its maximum potential. If we on this side of the House see the difference between various communities, we do so not in a spirit of superiority, but simply because we recognize the differences existing among the various communities with which we in South Africa are concerned.

It is a fact that whereas in practice the various communities in South Africa necessarily overlap into one another’s areas every day, it is necessary to see whether measures that have been adopted and that have created factual situations which some people could regard as hurtful to themselves, could be abolished without causing chaos in South Africa in the process. This is indeed being done by the Government from day to day. However, we gain the impression, as regards the official Opposition in particular, that they regard all measures bringing about separation between nation and nation and race and race, and all dividing lines between various communities, as discrimination in the negative sense of the word. Surely it is also a fact, which neither the Leader of the Opposition nor anyone else can evade by wishful thinking, that the White man in South Africa also demands a separate living space for himself—for himself alone. With all the goodwill on our side towards all the other communities in South Africa, if in the last instance we Whites are expected to sacrifice our White living space, I must simply say that we are not prepared to do so. Consequently I take pleasure in referring to the words of our hon. the Prime Minister. If we are expected to sacrifice our own residential areas, schools, etc., we have no hesitation in saying “No”. Then we frankly say that we are not prepared to accept the consequences of the elimination of the so-called discrimination in that sphere. This is our point of departure, because in the final instance the solution for South Africa lies in the development, on its own, of every community to its maximum potential.

The hon. the Leader of the Opposition said that he was not asking the Government this morning to accept Prog policy. It was unnecessary for him to say that, because the White voters of South Africa are not prepared to accept Prog policy.

You are going to do so at some time or other.

Nor shall we do so in future.

You will.

It remains a fact that it is the duty of this party, that is going to govern South Africa for the foreseeable future, also to find a solution in this sphere of the life of the people of South Africa. Whereas the necessary channels for consultation with the other communities of South Africa have already been established, this Government is making progress as regards eliminating any friction that may still exist.

I want to conclude by saying that I think that the motion of the hon. the Leader of the Opposition was not seriously intended, because it is in conflict with the premise of his own party in that they always maintain that we as Whites decide for other people. This was a thinly disguised effort to exploit possible differences that may exist in the ranks of the NP. There is something I should like to tell the hon. the Leader of the Opposition. They need not be concerned, because this NP will continue united, as has always been the case in the past.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Barberton, I think, clearly demonstrated the real tragedy of this debate, because here there was an opportunity to do away with public posturing, which appears to be necessary in some sections of the governing party, to go into a Select Committee and there to endeavour to find, for this Parliament, a method of dealing with the problem that quite clearly confronts us. That has, however, been rejected out of hand. The other tragedy is that if one reads the Hansard of the Rhodesian Parliament, one sees the kind of words used by the hon. member for Barberton and the hon. member for Newcastle.

That is not comparable.

Today those individuals, however, are changing their tune completely. The tragedy of this whole debate is that it is taking place in an unrealistic atmosphere as far as the NP is concerned. It is a pretence that a problem which clearly confronts the country does not exist. The hon. leader of the NRP, the hon. member for Durban Point, I found to be the greatest disappointment of all, because he decided that he would use this opportunity to play a little bit of “Swart gevaar” to try to preserve his crumbling situation. That party should be ashamed of itself for seeking to use this kind of opportunity here today. It is a tragedy that this should be necessary. [Interjections.]

Are you afraid of your own policy?

I am not afraid of my policy. What I am afraid of is people who seek to exploit colour feelings in South Africa for personal party political advantage. [Interjections.] The hon. member for Durban Point has been doing that year in and year out. That is all he can do.

Let us deal specifically with what has been the major challenge here, the question which the hon. member for Newcastle raised in response to the hon. the Leader of the Opposition, and that is what is actually meant by “discrimination”. I want to ask some specific questions across the floor of the House today and see whether we can get some answers about this. As I understand it, in order not to have discrimination, one should in fact treat individuals differently by virtue of their race. I should like to ask the hon. the Minister of Tourism whether he believes that people should be discriminated against, in the sense of the treatment the State metes out to them, by reason of their race. That is the first question.

If I want to speak, I shall make my own speech.

The hon. the Minister says he does not want to speak. The second question is whether it is right for rights of individuals to be different by virtue of their race. In other words, I am speaking about the treatment and the rights of individuals. Thirdly I want to ask whether there should be different obligations, on the part of individuals, by virtue of their race and, fourthly, whether there should be different opportunities for people by virtue of their race. I hope that in this debate somebody in the NP will tell us whether one can treat people differently and whether their rights, obligations and opportunities should be different. The hon. member for Barberton said that one must have self-determination. Certainly, but does self-determination not mean that one is entitled to develop fully in every way one wants to, and that some other group should not be able to restrict one and discriminate against one because of its interests as a group? That is the whole issue. When the hon. member talks about self-determination, he decides that he can make the laws and the rules, and that he can decide what should take place. Self-determination, however, means that the other man can do it as well, and that is the flaw in the whole of this argument as it has been presented. However, the one thing which is so clear is that no hon. member of the NP in this House can actually tell us what they are going to do about the removal of discrimination, and I want to challenge the next speaker, whom I believe will be the hon. member for Benoni, to tell us what the next thing is that his party is going to do to remove discrimination. What is the next law, the next practice or the next step that is going to be taken in South Africa to remove discrimination, because the truth is that there is no plan on the part of the NP? There is no direct movement which has some semblance of planning and direction. All that is happening is that where there is a little pressure they give a little bit there too, and that is the biggest tragedy of all, because when one gives in to pressure, when people are pushing one, that is when people learn that what one has to do in order to get change is to push. The tragedy is that there is no overall plan in relation to this. There is one very easy way in which the NP could tell us what their plan is. That is to paint for South Africa a scenario of how they see this country, e.g. in the year 2000. There is nobody there, not one hon. member of the NP, who dares get up and say how he sees South Africa in the year 2000. There is not one single one who will dare do it. [Interjections.] The issue is this. Let us take one simple example. Let us look at the year 2000. Do hon. members still see a Mixed Marriages Act in the year 2000? Do they still see it in the year 2000? Now there is a complete silence on that side. Not a word is said. Is there going to be equality of opportunity in the year 2000? [Interjections.]

I cannot see the PFP still existing in the year 2000.

The hon. the Minister of Social Welfare and Pensions, who is interjecting now, could he tell us whether, by the year 2000, there will be a system in terms of which pensions will depend on race or colour? Is there going to be this kind of system? I want to put it to him that that is the test The truth, the reality is that there is no plan on the part of the NP. There is no scenario that any hon. member opposite can paint. I shall tell them why. That is because each hon. member opposite will paint his own little picture, and each picture will be quite different from all the others. [Interjections.] The picture that the hon. the Minister of Tourism would paint would be utterly different from the picture that the hon. the Minister of Foreign Affairs would paint, because they are not in the same art game, if I could use that term. I can see the hon. the Minister of Tourism muttering under his breath. I am prepared to pause so that he can answer. I have a report here which appeared in Rapport. It deals with one of the hon. the Minister’s utterings of the past.

*This is what the hon. the Minister of Tourism has to say. I quote from Rapport—

I now ask the hon. the Minister of Tourism whether he is still of the same opinion.

Your leader has already read that same quotation here.

I am merely asking whether the hon. the Minister is still of the same opinion.

Read your leader’s book. Read page 12 of your leader’s own book. [Interjections.]

No, please reply to my question. [Interjections.] I am asking the hon. the Minister of Tourism to reply to my question. I want to know whether he is still of the same opinion.

Get on with your speech, man.

I want to know whether the hon. the Minister still stands by these words of his.

Yes or no?

We cannot get him to reply at all.

I am prepared to give the hon. the Minister the opportunity to reply to this. Does he still stand by this?

Yes, I do.

The hon. the Minister still stands by that. In other words, it is very clear that the hon. the Minister is saying exactly the same thing today as he said the other day. I quote again from the same newspaper report—

It isn’t there. You must quote correctly. [Interjections.]

The hon. the Minister says it isn’t there. It is. I have the newspaper report here in my hand.

Are you now quoting from a newspaper again?

It is a newspaper report. The hon. the Minister cannot allege that it isn’t here. It is. [Interjections.] However, I read further—

Is that incorrect as well? Is this just something that I have fabricated as well? [Interjections. ] Does the hon. the Minister still stand by this? [Inter jections.] I want to know whether the hon. the Minister still stands by this. [Interjections.]

Order!

Mr. Speaker, the truth is that each hon. member on the opposite side has his own idea concerning the future. Each has his own policy, and it is very clear that that is their big problem. That is why we want to give them a chance today. We want to give them the opportunity to sit with us on a Select Committee in an endeavour to solve these problems, so that a definition of discrimination may be formulated and so that a plan may be worked out of what should in fact happen in South Africa with regard to discrimination. [Interjections.]

†I want to put another point to hon. members. We have had all the talk about the Craven Week. I challenge any hon. member opposite to get up and to tell us what is now the official attitude in relation to this “onderonsie wat hulle gehad het”. [Interjections.] What is actually the official attitude? Perhaps the hon. member for Benoni, who is waiting to rise, will tell us what the attitude of his party is in relation to this. I shall tell hon. members what the problem is. I shall tell them what the real problem is.

The other day some of us had the privilege of going on to one of the vessels of the S.A. Navy. On board one of these ships—we can also see it on board others—one sees that the ratings are White, Coloured and Indian. They work together. They sleep together. They eat together. If necessary, they are going to fight together.

A truly South African situation.

We all saw that. There are hon. members opposite who also saw it. We are now asking the Coloured man who is on that ship, who is helping to defend our country, to go back home and to be told that his son cannot play in Craven Week against a White team; not even in a mixed team. Those were the words of the hon. the Minister of Tourism, words from which he cannot escape. That is the reality of the political situation in South Africa. I challenge him to take part in this debate. In exactly the same way, on the borders of South Africa, there are Black soldiers and White soldiers who live together, patrol together, eat together and, unfortunately in our society, may have to die together. He wants them to do that for South Africa, and then he comes with this kind of nonsensical, racist talk when these men are expected to go home. What kind of South Africa does he want to have?

Are you in favour of separation? [Interjections.]

What about the Brown soldiers?

I include the Brown soldiers as well. Unfortunately the hon. member for Simonstown likes to put his sixpence in.

Those are the people one has to take account of. That is what the situation in South Africa in the future is going to be about, because the truth is—and anybody who knows about the defence of South Africa can tell one this—that we are not going to be able to defend South Africa adequately unless we get all the people involved in it. One cannot get people involved in it if one is going to discriminate against one section of the population. That is what the hon. the Minister of Tourism has to reply to. He is not only going to have to answer to South Africa now. He and his followers in the NP will have to answer to the future generations of South Africans, because the choice that will determine our children’s future is being made now. These are the final hours in which these sort of decisions are going to have to be made. People like the hon. the Minister of Tourism will be judged by history to have let South Africa down at one of the most crucial moments in its existence.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask the hon. member whether he is still of the opinion that separation is the best policy for South Africa, as he has said before?

I have never said that.

You spoke of “partition”. I shall bring you the cutting. [Interjections.]

There is a very big difference between his concept of separation and the geographical concept of partition in respect of the political situation. In a partition situation there is no discrimination in the parts which are separated. The hon. the Minister knows that He knows very well that that is a completely different concept.

However, there is another matter that I think it is necessary to touch on, a very important one that we should not forget either. There are Black people, Black leaders in South Africa who would like to co-operate with Whites in South Africa. There are many Black leaders who still believe that peace is the best way of solving the problems and that negotiation is the best way of doing it.

What about the Brown leaders?

Those leaders must also have credibility in their community. The question that has to be asked is whether, in the negotiating process that is taking place, those Black leaders are going to be able to deliver the goods to their people.

You are forgetting the Brown leaders again.

That is the test. The question is whether those Black leaders are going to be able to deliver the goods to their people. [Interjections.] I want to tell the hon. the Minister of Co-operation and Development that he knows what is going to happen in South Africa if those moderate Black leaders who believe in peace and negotiation cannot deliver the goods in regard to the removal of discrimination. They are going to have no support. They are going to be wiped off the floor, after which the militants are going to take over with the support of the Black people in South Africa. The hon. the Minister of Co-operation and Development knows full well that if he cannot allow those Black leaders to deliver the goods, we are headed for a period of conflict in South Africa, because those Black leaders are the key to peaceful negotiation in South Africa. What are we offering them? What is there going to be that they are going to be able to deliver in the situation that lies ahead? Somebody must tell us. Somebody must not only tell us, but there has to be a plan, a plan to which we are committed. When one talks about plans, a further issue arises. One can go back to speeches, which the hon. the Minister of Foreign Affairs made in America and in which he said that discrimination was going to go, and that was ages ago. There was also the speech by the former Prime Minister when he said: “Give me six months.” The tragedy of what has happened is that we are accused of raising expectations, but the reality is that the expectations were raised by the governing party, but the goods were delivered in inadequate form.

I do not say that they have done nothing. I think that the hon. the Minister of Co-operation and Development has tried. I genuinely believe that he has tried. I believe that the Minister of Manpower Utilization has tried, because there is no one who can say that the changes as a result of the Wiehahn and Riekert reports are not meaningful changes. There is no one who can say that some of the things that are going to be done in Soweto, and on which a start has already been made, are not meaningful things. As we know, however, it is not enough because the reality of the situation is that change is an on-going process. The more one changes, the more one has to change and the faster one has to change. That is the reality of history. That is why there needs to be a plan on the part of the NP, there needs to be some scenario to indicate what South Africa is going to be like in the year 2000. There has to be a plan so that we know which way we are heading, so that the Black man who wants to negotiate, the Black man who is committed to peace, will also know what his future is and will know that as a result of peaceful negotiation he will get much further than he would as a result of violence.

Do you have something against the Brown people?

That is the message that has to be put across in South Africa.

Do you discriminate against them?

Peaceful negotiation is the answer. Negotiation and peaceful progress will produce better results. It lies in the hands of the Government to enable the Black leaders to convince their followers that that is the course they should follow. That is why today is an important day. Today is important because the decisions that are going to be made, decisions that are going to determine the future of South Africa, will be made in order to decide whether peaceful negotiation is an answer, whether moderate Black leadership can survive in South Africa. These are the decisions that have to be made. If the attitude is adopted that has been adopted in this debate so far, if there is public posturing, if all we are interested in is debating points, if we are only interested in scoring a few political debating points, if that is what is going to happen in South Africa, then I believe that our children and our grandchildren will never forgive us.

Mr. Speaker, if the Opposition, whose motion this after all is, had been slightly more generous in the time they made available to this side of the House, I would consider answering some of the questions of the hon. member for Yeoville in greater detail. The hon. member for Yeoville asks whether we have a plan for South Africa and what South Africa will look like in the year 2000. He knows, of course, that we do have an overall plan. It is the twelve-point plan, point 6 of which, according to the hon. the Leader of the Opposition, forms the basis for his motion. In detail, of course we do not. It is absurd for any politician to demand that kind of prediction, because any politician knows that he cannot rule from the grave. By the time the year 2000 arrives the hon. member for Yeoville and I, if we are still around, will be doddering old men in our dotage.

It will not take you that long.

The duty of politicians is to form a sound basis, a foundation on which the next generation can build. That is precisely the duty of all of us in the House. Our duty is not to score debating points, as the hon. member for Yeoville tried to do, the very thing he accuses us, on this side of the House, of doing.

I think this motion should not have appeared on the Order Paper at all, and I say this for a number of reasons. In the first place the hon. the Leader of the Opposition is a member of the Schlebusch Commission which is looking at the issue from a constitutional point of view. In the second place, I believe the House is an adequate forum to debate the very subject of this motion. In any event, it hardly does anything else.

There are also other reasons why I believe this motion is an absurdity.

Absurdity?

The hon. member for Yeoville says the NP has no plan. The hon. member says negotiation is preferable to confrontation or whatever. Of course it is. We all agree on that. It is only in the method of negotiation, and how it is to be carried out, that we differ. Certainly the NP’s twelve-point plan is a much better plan than the national convention, which is the only plan the PFP has.

Why is it better?

Such a convention would be an endless talking shop which, in the words of the hon. the Leader of the Opposition, can last for 100 years. How absurd it is can be seen if one looks at the composition suggested for the convention. Anyone who has a following may sit in that national convention and have a say in trying to reach consensus. Can anyone tell me how it is conceivably possible for people with as widely divergent views as Jaap Marais on the one hand, and Nelson Mandela on the other, ever to reach consensus?

Look at Lancaster House.

What about Andries and Piet?

I will get to that. That is another thing. The Opposition puts a motion on the Order Paper to ostensibly discuss the appointment of a Select Committee to find ways and means of creating a society in South Africa that is free of colour and race discrimination. What do they do? Instead of debating their own motion, they spend their time trying to highlight divisions that exist within the NP. [Interjections.]

So you admit it.

I can only say, as in Alice in Wonderland, that “the situation is getting curiouser and curiouser”.

It is getting worser and worser.

Big brother is watching you.

As the motion stands it is a semantic absurdity.

Who is the Mad Hatter?

I say that because before we define our terms of reference we cannot even begin to conduct a sensible debate in the House on the issues that confront South Africa today. If we do not do that we can only continue to conduct a dialogue of the deaf to the detriment of this country. Discrimination per se is neither a positive nor negative concept. It is a neutral concept. I want to tell the hon. Opposition that the sooner they stop propagating the negative, destructive concept of discrimination which they propagate in common …

Is there a positive aspect?

Order! Now the hon. member for Bryanston is abusing the privilege concerning interjections. The hon. member must please restrain himself. The hon. member for Benoni may proceed.

The PFP propagates a concept of discrimination in common with the sickly humanists of this world, the Marxists and Bolshevists who want to destroy every vestige of national pride, and with the one-world advocates of the Council for Foreign Relations, and the sooner those hon. members abandon doing that they will be doing themselves, South Africa and all its peoples a favour.

*I find it incredible that the hon. the Leader of the Opposition could begin to think that a society completely free from racial and colour discrimination could exist in a country such as South Africa. For as long as there are Afrikaners who want to be Afrikaners, and the hon. Leader would find very few who do not want to be, and as long as there are Zulus who want to be Zulus, and the hon. Leader would find very few who do not want to be, whether in the rural areas, in kwa-Zulu or in the urban areas, for so long discrimination will exist in South Africa, because the voluntary choice to belong to a group, is according to all definitions in dictionaries a discriminatory act in itself, but surely there is nothing wrong with that. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. There is nothing more beautiful on earth than to be proud of one’s own appearance, origin, language, tradition and culture. We on this side of the House think that these beautiful qualities of discrimination ought to be reflected in the institutions of society as well. For that reason we draw a certain distinction. There are things that are negotiable and there are things that are not negotiable. Apart from the definitions given by the hon. Prime Minister, and quoted by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition himself, those things that are not negotiable in this regard as far as we are concerned, relate to the fact that we do not share power here in Parliament Neither do we believe in mixed residential areas nor in mixed schools. In respect of all other things we believe that each community should preferably have its own facilities and institutions of equal value, but if that is not possible, then these may be shared to a greater or lesser extent We believe in good neighbourliness and we do not believe in apartheid in the absolute sense or in forced integration. As I have said, I find it rash of the hon. Leader of the Opposition to move a motion such as this while the Schlebusch Commission is still sitting, because he knows as well as I do that the removal of unnecessary, hurtful and offensive discrimination is the very objective of each political party in this House. These are matters that should be resolved on a constitutional level. There is hardly a political party in South Africa, inside or outside this House, Black, White or Brown—except for the far-right and far-left outsiders, who do not count in any case—that does not have as an objective the removal of hurtful discrimination, and that does not have as an objective the elimination and prevention of the domination of one people by another. In this respect, surely, the debate only deals with how rapidly and to what extent this can be done and whether it can be done by way of power sharing—as the party of the hon. the Leader of the Opposition proposes—or by way of a division of power—as our party proposes—or a mixture of both, as the NRP apparently proposes. This is the very reason for the appointment of the Schlebusch Commission, as the hon. member for Durban Point quite rightly said. Consequently I ask, since each party and body in South Africa has the right to submit its views on these matters to the Schlebusch Commission, why the hon. the Leader of the Opposition now wants a Select Committee that could only lead to this aspect of the activities of the Schlebusch Commission being duplicated.

†I believe there are other motives for the extraordinary behaviour on the part of the hon. the Leader of the Opposition, and that is that the Opposition wants to use, abuse or misuse the instruments of democracy in a manner for which they were never intended. To explain what I mean by this I have to touch briefly again on the basics of our system.

To begin with, the Opposition has to accept that it has the same electorate we have at the moment. If it comes to power, it may, of course, find itself a different electorate. In a general election this electorate gives a political party a mandate to govern the country in terms of its declared policies until it is defeated at a subsequent election. How to apply these policies in practice and in detail is a matter for the Cabinet and caucus of the governing party. In our case I want to tell the Opposition parties that we are quite capable of doing this ourselves without any assistance from them through their attempts to create spurious multi-party caucuses through superfluous Select Committees.

Is the Schlebusch Commission spurious?

No, I said it was not.

You just said it was.

I am not saying that that is true of every Select Committee. I am saying that the one the Opposition proposes now is spurious.

What is the difference between this one and that one?

They tried to make much of the alleged ideological differences within our party. They quoted from books that are 10 years old. Well, Sir, their party has gone through three different phases, three different policies and three different names in a much shorter period than that. We do not have any ideological differences in our party.

Who are you bluffing?

Naturally, the NP, like any democratic party, is not a monolithic institution like the Communist Party.

When did they become democratic?

Consequently, there are differences of emphasis, of nuance, of detail and even sometimes of opinion amongst us, but these, too, we are quite capable of sorting out amongst ourselves in our caucus without assistance.

For how long?

What cannot be denied, however, is that our party is far more cohesive than any other party in this House, simply because we do agree on basic principles. The NRP is disintegrating left, right and centre. The PFP has to accommodate partitionists like the hon. members for Yeoville and Bryanston as well as integrationists like the hon. members for Houghton and Sea Point Certainly, we do not have any sinister cliques of the kind the hon. member for Yeoville has referred to.

The attempts by the Opposition to score political points in the sensitive area of race relations and to divide us on the issue are forlorn and futile. They should rather seek to play their own proper role in our system—inside Parliament it is to guard against the Government exceeding its mandate or the bounds of reason and outside Parliament it is to persuade the electorate, if it can, to accept their policies—instead of trying to worm their way by stealth into the decision-making process that has been denied them at the polls. That is the reason why they have the habit of demanding a plethora of Select Committees on any subject under the sun. They are trying to introduce power-sharing by stealth.

*We are not that naïve. We do not fall for such a transparent move. We on this side of the House reject power sharing. We reject power sharing in homogeneous as well as heterogeneous societies. In a heterogeneous society such as ours it inevitably leads to conflict and human slaughter. One can find many examples of this in history. The power sharing federal dispensation presented by the official Opposition, is the very dispensation that led to the Biafra War in Nigeria and the slaughter of more than a million people and the indescribable misery of many more. This happens time and again because man is morally incapable of sharing power fairly. There is simply no point in wanting to govern man and the world in accordance with what man ought to be: One must do it in accordance with what man is. This is what we try to do and consequently we stand for a system of the division of power. We stand for one man, one vote, but within an ethnic context. We stand for equal opportunities and peaceful co-existence in every field, but within a constellation of sovereign, co-operating, interdependent States and peoples. We stand for the ideal that each people should rule itself as it chooses, wherever possible within its own territory. We stand for self-determination and the division of power for the very reason that we want to prevent bloodshed, that we place a high premium on human life, that we believe that the highest human right of all is the right to survival in a peaceful society. We on this side of the House have already decided about that. As far as I am concerned we do not need a Select Committee for that.

†Other than that we consider the Schlebusch Commission to be an adequate forum in which to discuss these matters constitutionally, we consider this House an adequate forum in which to debate them politically and the electorate an adequate arbiter of the policy options put before it. For these reasons, and because of the inadequate formulation of the motion, we consider it to be devoid of merit and undeserving of any support whatsoever.

Mr. Speaker, the NP has been particularly unfortunate in the selection of the speakers on that side of the House to put their case with regard to this particular motion. [Interjections.] I think it is unfortunate that the NP did not take this opportunity, which we have given them, to clear up some very specific areas of confusion relating to the attitude of that party, or more specifically the various factions in that party, to the removal of race discrimination in South Africa. This confusion has now been going on for a very long time and, in fact, is the very basis of public debate, sometimes sordid public debate, the basis of the mistrust within Nationalist ranks and the basis of the conflict that has been building up within the ranks of the NP. One would therefore have thought that the NP would have taken this opportunity to bring into the debate the leaders at the two poles of that particular ideological conflict. I for one expected—and I did so with a degree of pleasure—that I would be listening today to the hon. the Minister of Co-operation and Development putting forward the “verligte” interpretation of NP policy and attitudes and the hon. the Minister of Tourism putting forward the diametrically opposed interpretation of NP attitudes and policies concerning the removal of race discrimination.

*But they sat there without opening their mouths. Not a single word did they utter. [Interjections.]

Order!

In fact, the hon. the Minister of Co-operation and Development sat here for a while, but there was no change in his facial expression to indicate in which direction he was moving or what he was thinking. The hon. the Minister of Tourism just stared at the bench in front of him. He was determined not to give any indication of what he thought or along what lines he was thinking. [Interjections.]

†I think that what the hon. member for Benoni, the previous NP speaker, was trying to do was to confuse the issue even more than it is already confused in order to take the heat off the NP. One expected from him a more intelligible and intelligent interpretation of what the situation is. He gave the impression, however, by what he said, that there are two forms of discrimination. Let us look at the definition that the hon. the Prime Minister gave in point 6 of his twelve-point plan.

Read the Oxford Dictionary.

The Prime Minister says that we will remove hurtful, unnecessary discrimination. He himself then says that that implies that there is another form of discrimination, in other words, necessary discrimination which we cannot remove because it is fundamental to the maintenance of our particular point of view and our position in South Africa.

Our survival.

The hon. member for Benoni says we only spoke about negative discrimination. By saying that he implied that there is such a thing as positive discrimination. If only the NP would then have taken this opportunity—perhaps the hon. the Minister who is going to speak after me will do so—to define for us exactly what race discrimination is, specifying that certain specific forms of discrimination are unnecessary and hurtful and that they undertake to remove them as soon as possible, whilst other forms of discrimination are necessary and will never be removed.

*Then we should know where we stand.

But surely I did say that.

Then we should have a clear indication. But it is no use talking in general terms. It is no use mentioning vague, general concepts here and merely plodding on in general terms. There must be a specific explanation by the Government of exactly what they mean by discrimination, how these two categories are determined and which forms of discrimination fall under which of the two categories. That is what we want and what we must have before we can conduct a meaningful debate here, but the Government is not prepared to do this.

† Then the hon. member for Benoni—and I should like that hon. member to listen—tried to create the impression that the PFP totally denies, and wants nothing to do with, any concept of group affiliation. In other words, he said that we do not take into consideration the “beautiful qualities of discrimination”. Have hon. members ever heard of any description of “discrimination” which contains the concept of “beautiful qualities”. Surely that is not possible. We on this side of the House accept that there are different groups. In fact, in our constitution we speak about the absolute right of different groups in South Africa to their language, culture and group life, and that we in fact entrench in our constitution the right of people to practise their own culture and language, and we shall not allow anybody to interfere with any group which wishes to do so. [Interjections.] It cannot, however, be used as an excuse to allow other power groups to discriminate against certain other minority groups in South Africa. That is the difference. The NP says it also believes in those things, but it uses belief in those particular things as an excuse for the power group, which is the White group in South Africa, exercising and having political power, to discriminate, very harshly in many respects, against other groups in South Africa. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the right to cultural identity. It has, however, everything to do with the determination to maintain the power position and the position of privilege of the Whites at the expense of the fundamental human rights of the other groups in South Africa.

Not at the expense.

That is what it is all about It has nothing to do with the cultural rights of the various groups in South Africa It concerns the philosophy of the NP exclusively, that fundamental philosophy which is aimed at retaining the position of power and privilege for the White man in South Africa at the expense of every other group and person in this country. That is what it is all about.

†The most important thing, in a situation such as the one in which South Africa finds itself, with regard to any particular problem, but specifically with regard to the problem of race discrimination, is the admission that there is race discrimination in South Africa. We had the problem previously, till the advent of the present hon. Prime Minister, and in that respect the present hon. Prime Minister has brought about an improvement in South Africa. However, till the advent of the present hon. Prime Minister, the leaders of the NP absolutely denied that there was race discrimination in South Africa, and therefore one would not even start to deal with the problem.

What about Pik Botha’s speech?

We are not talking about Pik Botha. He was ahead of his time and is still ahead of his time. That is why he is so quiet.

You are talking absolute nonsense.

Mr. Vorster said that himself. You know he said it.

Let me continue, however. Fortunately, under the leadership of the present hon. Prime Minister … [Interjections.]

He said what petty apartheid was.

I am being nice to the hon. the Prime Minister. That is not something that happens every day. He should enjoy it while it is happening. I think that the present hon. Prime Minister has brought this reality to this scene in South Africa, because not only has he said “Yes, there is discrimination”, but he also said that we must get rid of it, and he has actually started to do something about it, far too little and far too slow.

Why not help him then?

We are trying. Our whole motion is aimed at saying to the hon. the Prime Minister: “Let us create the machinery in this Parliament to deal with this problem. Let us examine it fully and decide on the steps that have to be taken to deal with race discrimination.” I just want to make the point—and it was also made by someone on the NRP side—that that is not what we, as a PFP Government, would have done if we were in power in South Africa. We would not have needed a Select Committee of this Parliament to deal with the problem, because everybody already knows what race discrimination is, and I think everybody already knows more or less what one has to do in order to do away with race discrimination. We would not have needed a Select Committee. We could have done it on our own. Let us just go back to what I think is the most definitive document yet of the attitude of the verligtes in the NP, and that was the speech which the hon. the Minister of Co-operation and Development made in Palm Springs in America. It has been quoted on many previous occasions, and I should like hon. members to bear with me, because it is still going to be quoted many times in the future because this is definitive. I am sorry that the hon. the Prime Minister is leaving, because I was going to ask him whether he specifically supports this document. [Interjections.] The very moment I mention the Palm Springs speech, the hon. the Prime Minister gets up and ran away. [Interjections.] That is not fair. Do hon. members know what is going to happen next? Just now the hon. the Minister of Tourism is going to run away too. What am I to do with my speech in that case? Is this or is this not the philosophy of the NP? We want to know precisely whether this is the philosophy of the NP or not. [Interjections.] First of all he said—

That is what I wanted. It is an unjust society. In other words, I want to put it to the hon. member for Benoni that there is no such thing as positive discrimination. Discrimination is unjust.

*It is an injustice. It is an injustice against the human being, against the citizen of South Africa, regardless of his race or colour. [Interjections.]

Mr. Speaker … [Interjections.]

Does the hon. member for Benoni want to state a point of order or put a question?

Mr. Speaker, I want to put a question to the hon. member.

I am not prepared to answer questions now. However, if the hon. Whips allow me more time, I shall reply to all the questions the hon. member for Benoni could possibly ask. [Interjections.]

†He went on to say—

I now want to put a straight question. Could the hon. the Minister of Tourism and his hon. colleague who is going to reply to this debate, tell us whether we can accept that this is the policy of the NP, because if that is so we will be very pleased indeed?

*Can we take it that this is the policy of the NP? Does the policy of the NP lie in those words?

Answer, Andries.

The hon. the Minister of Tourism can surely read that little pamphlet of his later. But now I want a reply from him. He must just say “yes” or “no”. He must please just say “yes” or “no”. Oh, really, he cannot even do that. [Interjections.]

Carry on with your speech. You have just complained that you did not even have time to reply to a question. [Interjections.]

This is the principle which the hon. the Minister of Co-operation and Development expounds here—

Power sharing societies, the sharing of power, and nothing else. Is that the policy of the NP or not? [Interjections.] Is there not a single hon. member opposite who is prepared to reply to this?

No, it is not.

Louis says it is not.

Power sharing is not the policy of the NP.

The hon. the Minister of Police says no. Is there another hon. member opposite who is prepared to say yes? They need only raise their hands so that we can see them. [Interjections.]

The poor things! [Interjections.]

I quote the following principle—

I now want to come to “full citizenship”.

You should rather join Pagel’s circus.

I am referring to “equality before the law and full citizenship”. What does this mean? Full citizenship means “voile burgerskap”, equal citizenship and full and equal civil rights. [Interjections.] Is that the policy of the NP or not? Is there nobody who is prepared to reply to this. [Interjections.] The hon. member for Rissik looks so nervous to me. Perhaps he can reply to this? No, he does not want to answer my question either. [Interjections.]

I should like to determine—and it is important for South Africa that this be determined—exactly what the policy and the philosophy of the NP is. What exactly is their approach to racial discrimination? What can we expect of the NP? There are many people in South Africa …

You will not understand it in any case.

Of course not. It is totally confused.

There are many people in South Africa who are entertaining hopes that the NP is going to remove all racial discrimination. Some people have even said as much. Some hon. members opposite have said so, too. Tremendous expectations have been created among the Blacks, the Coloureds, and the Indians. However, once those expectations were raised, and after there had been a positive reaction as a result of those expectations, they have been frustrated once again. When this is done, the future of South Africa is jeopardized. Frustrated expectations are dangerous. Among those without franchise, among those who have suffered racial discrimination, among those who have not shared in any of the privileges of South African citizenship, the frustration of expectations creates the impression that peaceful methods stand no chance of leading to improvement, but that they will have no choice but to resort to violent methods in order to fulfil their aspirations.

You are telling them what to do.

No, I am not telling them what to do. Why can the hon. member for Port Elizabeth Central not be taken up into the NP? That is perhaps the only way in which he will get rid of his particular frustrations. [Interjections.] Let us take a look at what the NP has done. We asked that a Select Committee be appointed. This is perhaps not the ideal approach, but possibly the only way to deal with this problem which the NP can accept. A Select Committee should be appointed and should thoroughly investigate the whole spectrum of discriminatory measures in South Africa and work out methods of removing discrimination in South Africa. We should like the NP to see this not as a political trick, but as a sincere effort, which it is, to persuade the Government and to help them to deal with this problem. It is a starting point. If the Government appoints such a committee, it will soon afterwards encounter a totally different approach in the ranks of the NP. I want to refer to the Schlebusch Commission. Everyone in the NP was quite satisfied and quite happy that there were no problems as far as the constitutional future of South Africa was concerned and that they could merely carry on as usual with old-fashioned apartheid. But then the NP appointed the Schlebusch Commission, and what was the result? It resulted in many people in the NP realizing for the first time the tremendous scope of the problem and the dimensions it has already assumed. They realize that there is an enormous problem and that something drastic will have to be done to solve that problem. At the same time I want to say that if the Government accepts our recommendation and appoints a Select Committee, the NP as a whole will realize within a few months that there is a tremendous problem, will realize the features of that problem and will realize that they will have to apply themselves to removing discrimination in order to solve that problem. We make a sincere appeal to the Government to do so. I call upon the hon. the Minister not to reject this offhand even before he has even spoken. I wonder whether a trick has not been played on the poor hon. Minister who is to reply to this motion. That poor hon. Minister has to reply on behalf of the NP. I hope that before he rejects this motion, because of the verkrampte sounds coming from behind him, he will give it some thought as an opportunity to throw light on this problem and to find a solution for it. I readily concede that there are three aspects involved in the removal of discrimination.

Are there not four?

Firstly, the Government will have to deal with opposition in its own ranks. The hon. member for Rissik put up his hand and conceded immediately that he would form part of that opposition. Whatever it does, the Government must not heed the opposition emanating from its own ranks. The Government is dealing with two problems in the removal of discrimination, viz. the practical problems relating, for example, to the provision of schools and finding teachers for those schools, and the financial problem. We on this side of the House are sympathetic as regards the practical problem provided an honest attempt is made to deal with the problem and to overcome it, but as far as the financial problem is concerned, I want to say that South Africa cannot afford to offer financial problems as an excuse when it comes to the removal of discrimination. South Africa can afford to make the necessary funds available so that as soon as possible …

Where from?

Where is one to find the funds to do this work?

From where is the money to be taken away to pay for this?

Surely it is clear. All I want to say, is that South Africa cannot afford to advance that excuse when it is a matter of the removal of discrimination.

Business suspended at 12h45 and resumed at 14h15.

Afternoon Sitting

Mr. Speaker, in the first place I want to convey my thanks to all the speakers who took part in the debate this morning. I also want to thank the hon. the Leader of the Opposition in a certain sense for having again introduced this discussion in a responsible way today. But the quality was somewhat lower than that of his last speech during a previous debate. Perhaps this is so because we are dealing here with a discussion which, in my opinion, is not really very necessary for the South African constitutional system at this stage. I feel that right from the outset he made a joke which did not pass unnoticed by this side of the House. He did so in what was really a very nice, innocent way. He said that he should not like to sow division among us. As far as that is concerned, he must accept that I mean well when I say that I take that with a pinch of salt, and what is more, a big pinch of salt, even at the risk of developing high blood pressure.

Another remark I want to make is that he asked one question and I do not want to detract from the content of his speech. In my opinion he did his duty well. The question he asked was: Who is going to give the lead in regard to point 6 of the hon. the Prime Minister’s twelve-point plan?

In terms of what?

In terms of what we are now discussing. I want to say unhesitatingly that the hon. the Prime Minister will take the lead, because that is party-policy and has been accepted as it stands here by the whole party and also by the Cabinet.

†The hon. member for Durban Point—I have great admiration for him—always reverts back to the old United Party way of trying to sit on two stools. I saw his backside crack a few days ago in a cartoon depicting him looking through a crack to see whether the NP was going to split. I am warning that hon. member that it is no use sitting on two stools, because he is going to fall between them.

Why then are you taking over our policy?

I do not have much time; so I shall not react at this stage to interjections. The only real sense that the hon. member spoke today was when he said that discrimination was a consequence of our constitutional structure. He said that it was something which had to be worked out afterwards, after the constitutional structure had come into being.

*One cannot put the cart before the horse. He was right about that.

In the process.

The hon. member for Yeoville referred to a plan we had to have. Naturally I too should like to see a plan which spells out things from first to last But has he ever had a total plan? No one has a total plan for people and human relations. It develops over the course of many years. The hon. member for Yeoville was well answered by the hon. member for Benoni. The plan of the NP is in its deeds, and I shall come back to that. He also talked about discrimination. There, too, the hon. member for Benoni answered him. I may come back to that briefly. If the NP does not have a plan, why, then do the voters repeatedly return it with bigger majorities?

After all, that is what happened to the Rhodesian Front.

Or are the voters of South Africa so stupid that they do not know what they are voting for? That hon. member talks about Rhodesia The hon. member for Yeoville again raised the matter of Rhodesia as one of the problems we should consider. I say it is not a problem. In a certain sense, what happened in Rhodesia was a tragedy. Nevertheless, things may go well there eventually. The PFP’s policy applied in Rhodesia, not the NP’s policy. [Interjections.] We have already become a nation. We are a significant, recognized minority, just like the Zulu people and other peoples. That the Opposition must bear in mind. The Opposition must see whether they can find anywhere in the world history a case of a nation of 5 million people that has been destroyed.

Are you suggesting there was no race discrimination in Rhodesia?

I am not suggesting it, and I am not going to answer any more silly questions. [Interjections.]

You can only give silly answers.

The hon. member for Bryanston says that the NP has a problem with its philosophy. I think that the hon. member has a similar problem to some extent I have the problem that I am unable to understand how the hon. member can say how big our problem is. As far as the hon. member’s statement that he pities me is concerned, I just want to say to the hon. member that I pity him.

I want to convey my thanks to all those who have spoken, in particular the hon. members for Newcastle, Barberton and Benoni who made sound contributions on this side. I also thank speakers opposite who also made contributions to the debate.

It is very clear to me that this motion was selected at this stage to see whether political capital could not be derived from the events of the past 14 days, events which caused headlines in the newspapers and periodicals. The NRP came along and also tried to make a little political capital out of it. However, I shall leave it at that.

I think that a debate such as this should be conducted at a responsible level, and some hon. members did in fact do so. However we must come down to earth when conducting a debate such as this concerning the removal of discrimination. It has been recognized for a long time that the Government has committed itself to eliminating unnecessary discrimination. It is common cause that more than five years ago in 1974 we mentioned what was to be done not only in respect of ad hoc elimination but also in respect of statutory elimination. This has been done, particularly the kind of discrimination which has nothing to do with the preservation of those values and that power which a nation regards as of importance, or which one group does not regard as of importance in respect of another group. The hon. member for Newcastle outlined the overall principle very clearly. Therefore we do not differ with one another as regards the overall principle. However, there are differences of approach between us and there will be differences of approach, even major differences of approach. I do not wish to gloss over them. I believe for example that the over-hasty rejection or elimination and summary rejection of all differentiation or of discriminatory measures, even some which are still irritating, would lead to chaos. There are too many radicals and others who work underground and, with the machinery at their disposal, will exploit our adaptations for revolutionary purposes without giving the consequences thereof any weight in a positive sense.

Who are they.

They seek revolution, they want revolution and they believe in revolution. [Interjections.] That is why changes are taking place in a planned fashion, without telling enemies or friends what one is going to do tomorrow or the next day.

There is no plan.

The point is that we are progressing and not retrogressing.

The motion is to the effect that we must take steps to eliminate unnecessary discrimination. There will always be discrimination and differentiation in any society. That is as old as the hills, and in order to eliminate it in our South African situation, the Government has already taken a decision and a great deal has already been done in this connection. It is pointless arguing in abstractions. We must come down to earth and see what has been done. The Government is not indifferent to what the hon. the Leader of the Opposition broached today.

As far as this matter is concerned, we hear voices from the past. Even in his time, Dr. Malan put forward a comprehensive concept of a South African nationhood. Dr. Verwoerd spoke about passing phases of discrimination, and in the life of a people, a period of 20 years is as yesterday. Our present hon. Prime Minister talks about an atmosphere which we must create in which nations, groups and people can find one another. Therefore I do not wish to differ with the aim of the hon. member’s motion. I want to provide certain proof—because I said we should come down to earth—even though, in the opinion of the hon. the Leader of the Opposition, it is not entirely planned. Concerning the recommendations in the White Paper on the Riekert Commission, the Government has been as good as its word. The objectives underlying the findings of the Riekert Commission, among which is mentioned the elimination of unjustifiable discrimination among the population groups, was whole-heartedly supported by the Government. Point 6 of the twelve-point plan which the hon. the Leader of the Opposition mentioned, very appropriately, in his speech, viz. the removal of hurtful and unnecessary measures that could create ill-feeling, must be added to this. This was stated simply, clearly and very directly by the hon. the Prime Minister. There can therefore be no doubt about the Government’s intentions. Nor must there be any doubt about the fact that we have here a fundamental difference, in the sense that we on this side of the House believe that there must be opportunities for every group to have rights in their own churches, their own schools and their own residential areas, even though hon. members call them prejudices. If grey areas have developed over the years—we do not have control over what the Almighty has made our destiny—then that must happen, although I think it happens in the poorer areas and not in the areas where people are uplifted. I want to leave it at that. There may also be some of them that are exemplary. We on this side of the House believe that it must at all times be the right of every nation to demand for themselves their own churches, their own schools, their own residential areas and certain other values.

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

I have very little time at my disposal and unfortunately I am unable to answer a question at this point. However we can talk again later.

The community must be protected.

Yes, of course they must be protected.

Then they must have the right to decide.

Then we have the stated views of the Theron Commission and we have also seen the report of the Cillié Commission, which speaks eloquently to all of us and from which we can learn. However, the Government has not confined itself to pious intentions as regards the matter of differentiation. It has removed unjustifiable discrimination in the social and economic spheres in a planned way. We can talk about differentiation and discrimination. A climate must first be created and subsequently a long process follows. However, I want to tell hon. members about a nation that has been fighting about differentiation and discrimination for 180 years now. In Alfred de Grazia’s book The American Way of Life he states on p. 20—–

For all human beings there is a gap between fundamental doctrines and actual behaviour. Thus American Negroes are sometimes not treated as equals even by persons who believe in equality for everyone else.

That is still so today, 117 years after Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address on 19 November 1863. This is still true in America and there is more struggle there than here, despite the fact that it is more than a quarter of a century since it was provided by statute that all Americans are equal in all respects by implication. We in this country have a plural community with far more profound differences, and for a few years now we have been making progress step by step. However, this is not enough for the radicals. They belittle this and call it weakness. The Government will have to continue with this in an orderly fashion. That is its lot, its part. Its demise, if that were ever to happen—and that is not how I see it—will be its lot. However, it will not be its fault.

In the sector of public life, major opportunities have been created for all population groups over the years. The hon. members know this. This has been done since 1974 in particular, I am tempted to say that this has been the case since I appointed a Coloured rector for the University of the Western Cape in 1973. Such progress has been made with the policy of equal pay for equal work that it has become one of die recognized reasons for our present inflation. Therefore we have been so willing to help that we have not always considered the detrimental consequences for the economy.

Economically speaking that is nonsense.

It has been recognized. The hon. member can go into it in greater depth if he wishes. Progress has been made at more than one level in this respect. Of course one cannot provide equal facilities everywhere. Nor will it be possible for this to be done. It is also true that not everyone is pleased when changes take place all of a sudden. There have been changes which the fathers of some of the hon. members opposite would not have accepted it all. Let me say this here and now. There have also been changes in regard to which there will always be people in any society who apply the brakes. That is a fact.

As far as industrial training is concerned, we have made tremendous progress with our new approach towards the creation of opportunities for our Black workers. As regards university degrees for Blacks, I want to point out that in 1970, 1 411 were awarded, whereas 6 517 were awarded in 1978. In the economy we have made dynamic progress with that which is tangible, that which is material. Legislation has been adapted. Statutory changes have also been made. Therefore they have not been ad hoc or a case of “windowdressing”, as hon. members all maintain. We blow that the Riekert and Wiehahn reports accelerated this process, and we are very pleased that certain guidelines have been laid down for us in this regard. The Government is willing to follow those guidelines. There are only two determinations left under the legislation relating to job reservation. I refer to the Industrial Conciliation Act. As far as I can remember, they are to be found in section 77 of that Act. However, no new ones can be introduced.

Sir, the Government takes risks with everything it does, but it believes in what it is doing. It takes risks with the ultra right people, the radical movements. Nevertheless, we are continuing with what we are doing. However, the Opposition has a responsibility in this regard. They must not simply say about every sound step taken: “It is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough.” There are many people who are constantly testing the idea of revolution and seeking to play it off against the changes being made. In our opinion these changes are essential, but they have an intense effect on the welfare of the people affected thereby. The Opposition must please remember that. The decision to allow the entrepreneur class to trade freely in the Black areas has already been given effect to. With the rationalization of the development corporations, hon. members will see within a few months how we are bringing the Black entrepreneur, too, into a better dispensation in the staffing of our economy and of our industries across the length and breadth of our country. Apart from the distribution of income, there is even the idea of the distribution of wealth. That, and the narrowing of the wage gap, as well as the consolidation proposals, are aspects which one cannot simply pass over lightly.

If one takes into account the fact that all these things have been done—nor is this all; it is being proceeded with by way of committees, and further reports are to be published—I simply cannot see what Select Committee will be able to prescribe to us what still has to be done. We have had a number of good commissions that have made the diagnosis and spelt out for us the various aspects to which attention has to be given. The Opposition is now asking that another Select Committee be appointed. This is now to be appointed alongside a constitutional commission on which the Opposition is represented.

Let me come back to the statement by the hon. member for Durban Point to the effect that the constitutional framework must first be established. Once it has been established, then after further negotiations we can eliminate some of the aspects which, in our opinion, do not at this stage endanger the position of people who are now seriously worried.

It must be borne in mind that when one wants to bring about changes, one must consider the group of people who will be affected by that change. One must bear in mind that by giving one person a privilege which he did not have previously, one is depriving another person of a privilege. The co-operation of that person who is being deprived of a privilege must be obtained. It is the place of the Government to look after the interests of all its people. It is not only their privileges that must be considered but their prejudices too. We are working with people. Accordingly I ask the Opposition—they, too, have a duty in this regard—to co-operate.

Whereas I have been speaking about the economic side of things, I say that in the social sphere, too, South Africa looks very different to what it did previously. However, this does not mean that mixing can be permitted at any level of society. This can give rise to things which could become totally uncontrollable. At the level where people understand one another, this need not necessarily be the case.

We must take into account the fact that the constitutional sphere is important and that there is a commission which is going into this and which will also be going into these other matters in depth. The commission will hear evidence from all these people. The commission has at its disposal the findings of certain other commissions and it will be able to issue findings concerning them, too. That is why I feel that the appointment of a Select Committee would be superfluous at this stage. It is not essential, because all these aspects have been taken into account.

A climate for orderly change has already been created. The fact that those who are affected have already obtained many benefits is not being recognized. I should like the leaders in general, particular Black and Brown leaders, to take this into account. We must now enter the era of recognition, the era of recognition of one another’s rights and privileges, but also the era of recognition of and understanding for what any group rightly wants to retain for itself. I believe that once we have reached that stage, however we do it, we shall achieve a harmonious society which will be able to throw its full weight into the struggle against the Marxist onslaught on us.

Business interrupted in accordance with Standing Order No. 34 and motion and amendment lapsed.

Mr. Speaker, I move—

To begin with, I should like to say that it is an exceptional privilege for me to submit this motion to this House for discussion. Although the motion will necessarily give rise to speeches of a political nature I want to express the confidence that in debating this motion we shall refrain from resorting to petty politics. The motion was not intended to create an opportunity to score petty political debating points, but rather to conduct a constructive debate about a matter which, I am convinced, is of vital importance for South Africa. In view of this I trust that we on this side of the House will be able to rely on the whole-hearted support and co-operation of the opposition parties. Today, at this very moment, an onslaught is being made on South Africa and its people in every imaginable sphere. Nevertheless it often seems as if warnings to our people in this regard have become a mere cliche. We talk about this, but to many of our people it is something which is not directed at us, but happens to people who are far from us. When one considers the behaviour of many of our people, one inevitably gains the impression that they do not believe that determined and purposeful efforts are being made to destroy the existing order in South Africa Let us say to one another that disillusionment awaits such people, and the sooner they realize that, the better. What are the true facts? What is really being planned for South Africa? At the beginning of this year, Dr. Igor Glagolev, adviser on foreign affairs to the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party, said, inter alia, the following—

Only last week Gen. Piotr Grigorenko, a senior Russian Officer in Paris, France, said that South Africa was one of three key countries which the Kremlin wanted to destroy in order to gain full control of the sea routes of the world. Apart from that, it is true that for many decades it has been a Marxist doctrine to say, and I quote: “If the national pride and patriotism of only one generation can be destroyed, then we shall conquer that country. Tear the Westerner away from his religious and moral values, sow confusion by undermining their leaders, and overturn their political and social order by way of a constant stream of propaganda aimed at the undermining of the loyalty of civilians in general and the youth in particular.”

A rising out of this, we see every day how the pressure on South Africa is growing. We encounter it in the military and security spheres, where armed action against South Africa and its inhabitants is the order of the day. We see it in the psychological and social spheres, where we are being ousted from international sport and other social organizations and where race relations in South Africa are deliberately being disturbed in an underhand way. We see it in the economic sphere, in that we are subject to boycotts and the withholding of vital development capital. We see it, too, in the political sphere, in that we are denied international forums.

It is crystal clear to everyone who wants to see it that Russia has a blueprint for the destruction for our country. It has been worked out to the finest detail, and they are working purposefully to bring this about. Can anyone have any doubt whatsoever that we are today in the focal point of the most serious threat in our country’s history?

The excuse put forward for this onslaught is the false mask of so-called White domination in South Africa. However, the real onslaught is being conducted by an evil Marxist enemy and its fellow travellers against all Christian norms of civilization existing in South Africa today. Any Government, it does not matter which, which seeks to uphold these norms in South Africa, i.e. which is anti-Marxist, will be a target for this onslaught.

The above is merely a broad framework for the onslaught on South Africa and indicates the fundamental spheres in which this onslaught is being conducted today against our country and all its people. Hon. colleagues of mine who will take part in the debate later will go into the various spheres in more detail and identify them. However, according to all available evidence, this onslaught on South Africa is being conducted fiercely and purposefully. If it is not averted in one way or another, it will totally eliminate the present dispensation of Christian civilization, as it has developed in Southern Africa over more than three centuries and as we know it today. We can be very sure of that.

When I say this I merely want to emphasize that the issue here concerns everything that is dear to us—we who sit here and our people outside this House. The issue here concerns our fatherland, and we have only one fatherland. It is the place where most of us were bom. It is the land of our forefathers. It is the heritage bequeathed to us. We have worked, sweated and made sacrifices for it. I want to state clearly that we are not prepared under any circumstances simply to accept its destruction. We are and must be prepared to stand up and be counted for the preservation of our fatherland. I believe the time has come for us to say these things. It is time for each of us in South Africa to state these things clearly and unanimously so that our enemies may know what they will be faced with.

However, because it is a total onslaught, the only counter-strategy with any hope of success is also a total strategy. Therefore, total resistance must be offered. Fragmentary and ad hoc efforts in any sphere are futile and pointless. The onslaught must be resisted on a national basis in all spheres, by all national groups and inhabitants of the South African subcontinent One or two nations cannot undertake it on their own and carry it through successfully.

In view of these facts and after intensive research, days of consultations and the consideration of relevant information, our Government, under the leadership of the hon. the Prime Minister, has designed a deliberate, detailed counter-strategy, a total strategy which may be defined as follows. A strategy which embraces all plans of action aimed at utilizing all the means at the disposal of the State and the community to the optimum and in a co-ordinated way in order to achieve its aims, and by so doing to avert the multidimensional onslaught This is a strategy which meets the following requirements: It has the approval of the highest authority. It is based on a fundamental analysis of the enemy’s strategy. It is clear and unambiguous about its aims. It takes into account all possible facets of the country’s total resources which could make a contribution. It contains clearly defined steps enabling appropriate action to be taken, and the implementation thereof is co-ordinated at all times at the highest level.

Arising out of this we have the interesting and historical twelve-point plan of the hon. the Prime Minister. It is a plan aimed at summarizing the total national strategy and implementing it in practise, a plan described by, inter alia, the well-known Dr. Willie Breytenbach as: The first Government plan since 1910 which gives consideration simultaneously to domestic, regional and international questions. We are dealing here with a piece of history, something which will be regarded in the future of this country as a pinnacle. There can be no doubt on that score. I therefore intend to put before the House briefly, but comprehensively, the main features of this twelve-point plan. It reads as follows—

1. 1. Acknowledgement of the acceptance of the existence of multinationalism and of minorities in South Africa.
2. 2. The acceptance of vertical differentiation with the built-in principle of self-determination on as many levels as possible.
3. 3. The creation of constitutional structures for the Black nations to make possible the highest degree of self-government; within States that have been consolidated as far as is practicable.
4. 4. The division of power amongst White South Africa, the South African Coloureds and the South African Indians, with a system of consultation where matters of common interest are involved.
5. 5. Acceptance of the principle of own schools and communities where at all possible, as a fundamental requirement for contentment as regards social circumstances.
6. 6. Preparedness to co-operate as equals and consult one another about matters of common interest, with a healthy balance between the rights of the individual and those of the community, the removal of hurtful, unnecessary discriminatory measures.
7. 7. The recognition of economic interdependence and the properly planned utilization of our manpower.
8. 8. The pursuit of a peaceful constellation of Southern African States with mutual respect for one another’s cultural assets, traditions and ideals.
9. 9. South Africa’s unwavering will to defend itself against interference from outside in every practicable way.
10. 10. As far as possible, a policy of neutrality in the conflicts between large superpowers and preference for South African interests must be adopted.
11. 11. Maintenance of effective decision-making by the State which lies in a strong defence force and police force in order to guarantee both orderly Government and effective and clean administration.
12. 12. The maintenance of free enterprise as a basis for our economic policy.

This is a plan which has been expounded in clear and unambiguous terms, a plan which says precisely what it wants to and does not leave matters in the air. It is a plan which lays down guidelines in terms of which the South Africa of the future may develop and in terms of which people can co-exist in South Africa in peace and harmony. A closer investigation and analysis of this plan shows that the principles of self-determination and self-preservation of minorities, Christianity, civilized norms, security which is ensured by a strong defence force and a strong police force and the welfare of all, with the emphasize on capitalism, underlies the whole plan. Certain values are inherent in this, inter alia, multinationalism. The plan stresses the protection of minorities. It means vertical differentiation by means of which each group may uphold its own language, culture and tradition and rejects horizontal differentiation which means the domination of one nation by another. The plan draws all Christians across the colour lines into a united anti-Marxist alliance. As far as capitalism and private entrepreneurship are concerned, the Government stated its standpoint in this regard very clearly on the basis of the 1979-’80 budget, the reports of the Wiehahn, Riekert and De Kock Commissions and the Carlton conference. Then too, there is a fourth value, which is democracy, not a “one man, one vote” democracy, but a multinational, vertical differentiation in which minority interests are recognized and protected. This democracy also involves a division of power on the basis of agreements worked out in advance, a division of power in which there will be no losers, whereas in the case of the sharing of power there are always losers.

In addition, an effective State machine underlies, and is an indissoluble part of any national strategy, a State machine which is capable of utilizing the means at our disposal, the State and the private sector, in a co-ordinated, optimally efficient way. Moreover, under the guidance of the hon. the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, a great deal of progress has already been made in establishing a prepared and rationalized Public Service. We can say today that the rationalization of the Public Service is already almost complete. The Public Service will soon be able to undertake and carry out this key role in South Africa.

It is very clear from the foregoing that we are dealing here with a matter which deserves the unanimous support of the entire country and of all the peoples of this sub-continent. However, I think that that support should originate in this House of Assembly. The message of national resistance to our enemies and to the attempted destruction of our country and value systems built up in this country must be propagated from here. That message must be loud and clear. Fortunately I think I can say that the official Opposition largely supports us in that connection. The hon. member for Bezuidenhout, a senior front-bencher of his party—he has said on occasion that he is in a position to speak about this, and I agree with him—made the following remark (Hansard, 7 February 1980, col. 326)—

But he goes further—

On 6 March 1980 he referred to the Black national States. I quote (Hansard, 6 March 1980, col. 2184)—

The Standpoint of the hon. the Leader of the official Opposition in this regard is (Hansard, 8 February 1980, col. 439)—

I know that later the hon. the Leader of the Opposition added a qualification. However, when one considers the components of this twelve-point plan, I am convinced that in terms of their own statement of policy, the Opposition can find no fault whatsoever with the majority of these 12 points. That is why we say today to everyone in South Africa: Let us unite in the face of the enemy that seeks to destroy us all. Let us stand together. We can all coexist with the principles and values as contained in the total national strategy. The opportunity to do so is here now, and we may not let it pass. I am convinced that in spite of the dangers surrounding us, and if we do not give way before the intensive onslaught against us and if we carry out that well-considered total national strategy in a coordinated and purposeful way, if we regard that which lies before us as a challenge, and, like another celebrated statesman, say—

Then we shall surmount the grave situation in which we find ourselves and we shall have a future as a people and a nation on this continent. This will demand of all of us sacrifices, hard work, toughness and persistence. It was Pericles who said as long ago as 430 B.C.: “Remember freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it-

In the light of the foregoing you will agree, Mr. Speaker, that a word of thanks and tribute to the person who is the motivating force behind this total national strategy and the twelve-point plan, the hon. the Prime Minister, would not be inappropriate. He, better, surely, than anyone else today in South Africa, is aware of the dangers surrounding us. He knows what awaits us. And the hon. the Prime Minister is doing something about it. What is he doing? What has he done? Because the hon. the Prime Minister believes in the moving words of Churchill: “Let me, however, make this clear in case there should be any mistake …”

Has Helen received his letter?

Order! The hon. member has made enough interjections today, and I forbid him to make any further interjections in this debate.

I was saying that because the hon. the Prime Minister believes in the moving words of Winston Churchill: “Let me, however, make this clear in case there should be any mistake about it in any quarter, we mean to hold our own”, the hon. the Prime Minister is building up the strongest Defence Force in Africa today and is making the Republic militarily prepared. But because he loves this country and its people, because he has a vision of the future for all of us, he is at the same time doing his utmost to ensure a future for us here in other ways. He is going out of his way to seek peace and progress for all and he is prepared to face problems fearlessly and seek solutions. He is also prepared to give purposeful guidance in doing what must be done in a fearless and determined way. I think that the hon. the Prime Minister sets us all an example of cheerful, unselfish service to our country and to our people. The hon. the Prime Minister does not spare himself in any respect His guiding principle at all times is: “What can I do for my country?” This House, and South Africa, take pleasure in paying tribute to the hon. the Prime Minister for his statesmanship in establishing a total national strategy which will be the guiding principle on the path that lies ahead of us.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Verwoerdburg has put to good use the opportunity he had of moving a private motion by moving a motion of this nature. I am also satisfied that the hon. member illustrated his motion in a positive way. I should like to reply to the motion in the same spirit. We shall confine ourselves to a discussion of the motion. Two crucial points of the motion we need not debate at any length, because there is no room for disagreement about them. In the first place, Russian imperialism or expansionism is a factor in world politics of which every country that values its freedom must be thoroughly cognizant. World domination and a world-wide victory are essential features of the communist ideal, and no-one outside the Russian camp can deny that. We also know that where Russian imperialism cannot promote its cause through direct military aggression, as it recently did in Afganistan, it uses its minions to do its work for it. This is the kind of factor we mostly have to contend with at the moment in Southern Africa. In Angola, for example, there is a military force—I believe it numbers 25 000 and more—of Cubans assisted by mentors from East Germany and other countries on the communist panel. Even Yasser Arafat’s terrorist organization is meddling in the affairs of Southern Africa. They all have one thing in common, and that is that violent revolution is an important export product among them. There cannot be any doubt about the fact that we feature prominently on their list of targets, and it would be the height of folly on the part of South Africa if we did not face up to this and take effective counter-measures. As far as we on this side of the House are concerned, it is sufficient just to add, concerning this aspect of the motion, that we are opposed to all forms of imperialism and supremacy, whether they come from the right, as in the time of Hitler, or from the left, from Moscow, and whether they be White or Black.

In the second place, we are a declared enemy of any power which threatens the security, freedom and integrity of South Africa, no matter from whom and from what side it comes. Therefore, when it comes to the defence of South Africa against aggression, we on this side of the House do not ask which party is the elected government of the country. We retain the right in politics to oppose and to criticize the Government every day and to organize ourselves to eliminate it in an election. However, South Africa is always greater than the Government of the day, and therefore it is a matter of principle to us that our country should always have the biggest and most efficient Defence Force possible. When it comes to aggression against us, every possible resource available to us, especially our human resources, should be used to ward off the onslaught. Perhaps it is fitting at this point that I should address a few words to certain small groups of young people who proclaim that they have consiencious objections to “fighting for the policy of the Government”, as they put it. My party and I object just as strongly as anyone in the country to a policy which denies people certain fundamental freedoms and which discriminates against them on the basis of their colour. That is the main reason why we are sitting in the Opposition benches. However, when aggression is committed against one’s country, and when there is fighting to be done, one does not fight for the preservation of whatever happens to be the political policy of the Government of the day. One might just as well say in that case that one is fighting for the preservation of the right to change that policy and to vote the Government out of office. When fighting against aggression, one is actually fighting for the preservation of one’s country as a country, for if it is destroyed, one also loses the right to say and to determine how and by whom one’s country is to be governed. The time has come for this matter to be seen in the right perspective by everyone in the country. As I have already said, one’s country is always greater than the Government of the day, especially when it comes to an attack on one’s country.

†Mr. Speaker, that brings me to the central point in the motion of the hon. member for Verwoerdburg. He spoke of a “national strategy” for South Africa and, of course, we must have a national strategy. I also want to say that there is little in the Prime Minister’s “twelve-point plan” which cannot be supported in principle. However, a national strategy must relate to a national goal. To defend one’s country against aggression comes naturally, but mere survival cannot be an inspiring national goal.

Somebody once said that there were three kinds of people: firstly, those who have no idea of what is happening around them and merely live to survive; secondly, those who do no more than watch what is happening; and, thirdly, those who make things happen, in other words the inspired people who have an aim in life. The question before us is: Do we as a country, as South Africans, have a national goal? If we have a national goal, what is that goal on which to base a national strategy? An individual who has no aim in life is of little help to himself and his community, and I think the same applies to a people. In our country we certainly have all the material in the world for an exciting national goal. We live on a developing continent, in a new world of our own. We are endowed with enormous natural wealth. Population-wise, we have a commonwealth of peoples drawn from Europe, Africa and Asia. If we can pull together and complement each other in a political system, wherein all co-operate and none dominates, and we show a multinational face at the UN and on every international forum, this land could become a power beyond all imagination. Much has been written and is said these days about the “decline” and the “feebleness” of the West. I do not profess to be an analyser of history, but I am entitled to my own view of things. I have often wondered whether the present-day weakness of the Western countries does not lie in their modern lack of a great national goal. For centuries small countries, such as Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Portugal and Spain, felt great because they were building empires and populating, governing and developing the New World. For a long, long time, until the Second World War, this was regarded as being a respectable national goal. After the Second World War imperialism and colonialism, as this came to be seen, ceased to be respectable, and we entered, as far as it concerns the Western world, the age of the “Winds of freedom and independence,” leaving Western countries without the goals which had inspired them in the past. I am not trying to put in a good word for colonialism or imperialism. I could not ever be an imperialist. I hope I will not be misunderstood on this point. I am merely seeking a possible explanation for the present feebleness of the West in the fact that they are minus the kind of national goals which aroused them in the past. As South Africans, we should guard against landing in a similar position. This applies particularly to the majority of Afrikaans-speaking South Africans—a group to which I myself belong—who happen to be in political control in our country. Looking back, the Afrikaner people particularly were at their best when they were fighting for freedom, for the freedom of country and people, for the freedom and recognition of the Afrikaans language, for economic freedom and participation, and for the establishment of a Republic. In that they had the sympathy of the world. These, however, lie in the distance and all White South Africans, including the Afrikaner, have now come to a point in time where the policies of domination, discrimination and forced separation which have been ruling our scene for so long, together with the attitude of regarding non-Whites as lepers, are no longer acceptable or tenable. Not only have they become untenable, but they are also the very stuff which strengthen the hands of those who seek to destroy us.

It is here that I have to point to a major inadequacy and omission in the motion of the hon. member for Verwoerdburg. The threat of Soviet expansionism in Africa is a very real one—and I have dealt with it—but this is by no means the only danger that faces us. In my opinion it is not even the biggest. The biggest danger facing us is frustrated nationalism. People who are nationalists themselves ought to be able to grasp this without effort. Nevertheless, I will explain myself in a moment. Even Gen. Van den Bergh, the man who was at the head of our security services, in a TV interview with P. G. du Plessis once said that “the greatest danger facing South Africa was not communism, but the State of relations between her people”.

What we are witnessing all around us today is the failure of Marxism as a system to set countries and peoples economically free and to stimulate even the barest development. All Marxist-based ideas such as African socialism and scientific socialism, the ideas Swapo has also adopted for itself in South West Africa, are coming to grief in those countries in Africa where they were imposed by leaders on their people. Angola lies in ruins. Machel is tearing his hair out in Mozambique. Mugabe has made what seems to be an about-turn, perhaps because of what he learnt in Mozambique. This is true not only of Africa. Mao in China accused Russia of having failed the socialist-communist revolution. Then he, Mao himself, had the greatest difficulty in applying pure communism in China, and his successors have already altered course in many respects.

The simple truth is that real communism cannot be said to be working anywhere in the world and the Utopia it promises has nowhere been even halfway achieved—and people know it and they see it. So I personally do not believe that Marxism as such has or will have any real pull in this sub-continent of Africa in the future. The tragedy is that most of the African leaders who turned Marxists were frustrated nationalists who turned to Russia and other communist countries for help and landed up with their politics as the price for getting their arms and the training to use those arms. As I see it, this is where the biggest problem lies for us, too, internally and externally.

Prof. Dick van der Ross, principal of the University of the Western Cape, wrote a very stimulating book Myths and Attitudes—An inside look at the Coloured people. He deals frankly in the book with the question of the Coloured people and communism, and says the following—

We know that. Communist propaganda is banned, and it is good that that is so. Then he makes the following point—

I think this is a sensible account of the position and I believe it applies also to the Blacks. Support for militant communist movements in South Africa will be forthcoming from Black and Brown only if and in so far as they can find in it a stick with which to beat White privilege and White monopoly of power as long as these exist.

*For this reason I am not afraid that we shall not be able to defeat Marxism. However, what we cannot hope to defeat is the desire for freedom and the force of nationalism that lie behind it. Freedom and nationalism—I use the word without a capital letter to indicate nationalism which does not dictate to others or turn into imperialism—are related to each other and are the two most powerful political motivations in the world. People want to be free from oppressive restrictions in their lives, especially when these are imposed on them by others. They want to be free from humiliation, free to realize themselves and their personalities to the full and to attain the highest positions that can be attained in their country without any artificial impediments.

I see our dilemma as White rulers in South Africa as follows: There must be an honest, urgent and national goal or national strategy to allow every South African a fundamental freedom irrespective of his descent or colour, not somewhere in the distant future, but now in his own time. This is how I see the choice before us, therefore: Do we have a better freedom to offer all the people of South Africa than the freedom with which Marxism lures people and which we know to be a spurious freedom? It is as simple as that. If we cannot reply affirmatively to this and say that the freedom we offer is better than the freedom with which Marxism tries to lure people, and if we do not then proceed to put our words into action honestly and promptly, I say that our future already lies behind us.

We are living in the era of the freedom fighter. I want to say at once that not all those who call themselves by that name are necessarily freedom fighters and that some of them use reprehensible methods. Generally speaking, however, this is the era of the freedom fighter. There are more independant nations in the world today and more liberation movements among peoples and nations than ever before in the history of the world. We were among the first freedom fighters in Africa and we succeeded. We shall have to become freedom fighters again in the sense that we shall have to help not only ourselves, but our political subordinates as well, to become as free as we are, for if the Coloured person, the Indian, the Chinese and the Black man who is a South African cannot become free with us and alongside us, he will turn to others who will offer him a spurious freedom for the real article.

Beyond any doubt, South Africa today—there I agree with the hon. member for Verwoerdburg—needs statesmanship as never before.

It has got it.

I am glad to see that the hon. member for Verwoerdburg believes that the hon. the Prime Minister is going to give that statesmanship to South Africa and that he has embodied that faith in his motion. I believe that the vast majority of people in the country are prepared to afford the hon. the Prime Minister the chance. The words of Gen. Magnus Malan contain the truth about the struggle in which we are engaged—

And holding the centre of the stage is the hon. the Prime Minister.

I must add that people will be inclined to use the rest of this Parliamentary Session as the norm to decide whether they should believe that “what is said will be done”.

Mr. Speaker, I want to start by associating myself wholeheartedly with the motion introduced by my colleague, the hon. member for Verwoerdburg. I should also like to convey my gratitude to the hon. member for Bezuidenhout who explained the standpoint in a responsible and self-controlled manner. The fact that no alternative strategy whatsoever was advocated by the hon. member for Bezuidenhout did not pass unnoticed. Nor did it pass unnoticed that he said that many of the points appearing in the twelve-point plan of the hon. the Prime Minister were acceptable to him. However, what we lack in this country is clarity with regard to exactly which points of the twelve-point plan have in fact been accepted and which not. We have to know this, so that we can start talking, because the time for dialogue may be running out. Today was the ideal opportunity for us to ascertain where we stand with regard to the Opposition. The opportunity was there, and I still do not know. The hon. the Leader of the Opposition said exactly the same, but vaguely and without detail.

I give my wholehearted support to this motion, since I also associate myself with what Churchill said long ago, viz.—

We are locked in a struggle and we shall have to continue with the struggle until we have achieved victory. I believe that the strategy, as set out for us in the twelve-point plan, shows the path we must follow. The NP is a party of realism, a party that realizes that changes are taking place in Africa and throughout the world and that we shall have to adjust to them. One of our former hon. Prime Ministers explained this very clearly—I am referring to Advocate Strijdom—when he said long ago that “Suid-Afrika rekening sal moet hou met veranderinge wat in Afrika gekom het, en dat ons in die rigting sal moet stuur waar ons en hulle op ’n vriendskaplike grondslag in Afrika sal kan bestaan, en dat daar tussen ons en veral lande suid van die Sahara aanknopingspunte sal moet kom”. Building on this idea of the NP, our hon. Prime Minister associated himself with this strategy which Advocate Strijdom had many years ago, if I may put it in that way, in eloquent language. Our hon. Prime Minister said—

Now is the time to start building on those aspects on which we have clarity. Perhaps we cannot see the end of the road, but we must build as far as we can see. Our enemies are practical; let us build practically. The time for philosophical speculation has passed. Let us know where we stand with one another.

I want to start by saying that we must identify the onslaught on us, because there are leaders, outside this House too, who have to become aware of the onslaught on us, because if they do not become aware of it they will not act to curb the onslaught, and that is essential. My hon. colleague quoted Dr. Glagolev. I, too, want to quote something said by Dr. Glagolev—

The following words are very important—

This is not the Marxist plan for us. This means, for the Black leaders outside this House too, the elimination of the whole system in this country, irrespective of the number of people that may die in the process. The following sentence is important—

This is how serious the onslaught on us is. The method of the onslaught is something I do not want to spend much time on. Hon. members who want to know more about this can study the hon. the Prime Minister’s speech in the no-confidence debate. In that speech of his he quoted Mrs. Thatcher. I, too, want to refer to the method used by the Russians to launch the attack on us. There are three aspects I want to sketch briefly. I shall also refer to the same quotation from the words of Mrs. Thatcher which was in fact used by the hon. the Prime Minister. She said—

The threat that exists when there is a potential of conflict with a powerful nation, is something we in South Africa have already become aware of. We sense it in the streets. It is true. I want to put that clearly to everyone, and to the people at large as well. It is true that the policy of the NP amounts to non-capitulation to Marxism. We stand for non-capitulation to the threat of great powers as well. That is why our hon. the Prime Minister designed the strategy which I shall dwell on again at a later stage.

In the second place Mrs. Thatcher says the following—

We in South Africa are being cut off, or they are trying to cut us off, from our sources of weaponry, oil, etc., and they are also trying to deprive us of landing rights. They are using the same tactics against us.

On the physical level, too, we are being encircled, for example by vessels of the Russian fleet in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Furthermore, a Red belt has already been established to the north of us, a Red belt that extends across the entire continent In other words, the warnings addressed to us by Glagolev are materializing, and this is happening before our very eyes.

However, I want to dwell in particular on the third method being used by the Russians, viz. the method of subversion. Because in Africa, might is strength, the only source of authority, the Russians, the Marxists, simply must break down those institutions that stand for order and peace in this country. They start with our Defence Force. We should bear this in mind, and take due account of this as well, because they have said the following. The European Anti-Militarist Congress said long ago—

On another occasion the Communist International said—

When the potential exists, when the onslaught on our young soldiers follows, we must know that they must withstand this onslaught. Consequently I want to appeal to employers to make it easy for a soldier who goes to fight, to retain his job when he returns from the battlefield. Let them realize that the onslaught also has the aim of making our young men dissatisfied. Let us welcome those who return from the battlefield and show gratitude to them for what they have done. They must know that apart from the physical war that is being waged, our young soldiers have to resist the psychological onslaught as well.

The onslaught on our Police is very subtle and very dangerous. I want to refer briefly to one such example. I should also like the Press to give attention to this matter, because they are a very important link to us in the continued existence of our society in South Africa. In the first place I should like to point out what happened at Silverton. In a report in the Post Bishop Tutu subsequently said the following—

However, it seems to me that Bishop Tutu was also condemning the force used by the Police. It seems to me that he was advocating that that force should not have been used either. He goes on to say—

These are now the methods being used by the terrorists—

According to him that onslaught is an onslaught by “people in desperation”. He does not say they were ordinary murderers, robbers and thieves, who broke into a private body—Volkskas Bank—which has nothing to do with politics. That he did not say. My question is why he did not say this. This is simply to create a climate in which we must feel guilty about whatever we do. For that reason it was illuminating to read in The Star the next day—

Here there are no “desperate people”, but reference is made to “military operations”—

This originates from Lusaka and Maputo and not from South Africa. I go on to quote—

Can you believe it! Our newspapers publish anything they lay their hands on without realizing that they are prejudicing law and order.

The hon. the Prime Minister said—and this is my point of discussion—that the Press is an indispensable element in the establishment of a national strategy. However, if the Press carries on in this way, they will become counterproductive to the establishment of a national strategy. We cannot afford this in South Africa. I want to ask the Press to consider what they are doing.

I now want to refer to action that can be taken. Dr. Rollo May uttered the following very illuminating words—

It is our duty to strive for this. We must find centres of strength within ourselves so that we may survive.

I should like to deal briefly with the twelve-point plan of the hon. the Prime Minister on the basis of five key words, viz. constellation, consolidation, discrimination, rationalization and consultation. In my opinion these five concepts summarize of the whole plan.

I want to begin by briefly discussing a constellation of States. This is a new idea which holds out hope for us for the future of Southern Africa. This is our only ray of hope. When we are co-ordinated and stand together, we can prevent the enemy from attacking us in full strength. It is also essential for people outside this House to realize that South Africa’s salvation lies in fact in a constellation of States in which we can take united action.

Secondly, I want to refer to the question of consolidation. The hon. member for Bezuidenhout said that we should free people, but the whole policy of consolidation in order to make States independent is based on that very idea. I cannot understand how people cannot understand this. The hon. member has been here for many years.

He no longer lives in South Africa.

He is a good hon. member. I am not angry with him. I merely think it is a pity that he does not understand this, because he could be very useful if he did. When all the nations realize the importance of the constellation idea, they will also realize that any demands they want to make, must be reasonable. If unreasonable demands are made and cannot be met, this can lead to one thing only, something which could only be to the advantage of our enemy, and that is the establishment of a tyranny. I want to quote what Winston Churchill said many years ago. It is time that peoples and leaders outside this House realize this too. I quote—

The NP propounds the policy that peoples must be independent. We cannot do more than this. We lay the table and the people have to seat themselves at it, if they want to join us on the path to better relations.

I want to refer to a third point which, in my opinion, is a cornerstone of the strategy for survival. I want to discuss discrimination. Who in South Africa, and which political party, knows more about discrimination than the Afrikaans-speaking person in the NP? We know about discrimination, but we have to eliminate unnecessary and hurtful discrimination. I cannot define this more exactly, unless I am given half an hour longer to speak. I realize that this Government will not allow this type of discrimination to stand in the way of ethnic relations in South Africa. We cannot allow discrimination of this nature, which is hurtful and unnecessary, to create an insurmountable problem in South Africa. However, I also believe that where there is sound differentiation in South Africa …

Who decides for whom?

I shall come to that. I do not have time now to reply to that question. When we come to sound differentiation, for the Whites as a nation too, other people should not see it as an insurmountable bridge. We Whites are also entitled to realize those cultural and religious norms characteristic of us that we do not begrudge others. That is why I say this, too, is a cornerstone.

The following point I want to mention is that of rationalization. The hon. the Prime Minister has brought about a great deal of rationalization in the short period he has been Prime Minister. I can mention only one, viz. the Wiehahn report and the Wiehahn legislation. I am convinced that history will show that this legislation has brought labour peace for South Africa and has also enabled South Africa to become a great nation on the continent of Southern Africa. We cannot give serious enough consideration to how important this legislation really is to us.

Then I come to the last of the five concepts I want to mention, viz. consultation. What Government has opened more channels for consultation than this Government? What Government has ever created more channels? I need only think of our hon. Prime Minister. He went to Soweto. We have the Schlebusch Commission. The hon. the Prime Minister met economic leaders. When we consult in this way there is a future for us in this country.

When it comes to the implementation of the strategy, we shall implement it in a Christian way—this will be our norm—and we shall implement it in such a way that we shall be in a position to retain our own identity as well as the identity of other peoples who want to retain it We can implement it in such a way that peoples will preserve their sovereignty.

Finally, I believe that this strategy will succeed. I believe, too, that we shall succeed with the twelve-point plan of the hon. the Prime Minister, because I think it is exactly what Abraham Lincoln said. It is something we are going to implement here. We can implement it because this is our attitude. Abraham Lincoln said—

This is the reply to the question the hon. member for Groote Schuur asked me.

Now I conclude with the lofty words of the hon. the Prime Minister: Let us start building on those things on which we have clarity.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Pretoria West covered a wide field, and it is of course impossible for me to deal with everything he dealt with. I hope to be able to come to some of his points in the course of my speech and to reply to them. Where he referred to an alternative strategy, we in this party have stated our strategy very clearly and I think we can pride ourselves on being the first in this House to put forward the idea of federal confederal States. In view of the fact that everyone is quoting Winston Churchill today, I also wish to quote Winston Churchill as stating—

†Before very long we are going to see in this Parliament that idea gathering momentum, force, power and consensus. Therefore I believe that we can say that we have achieved something in our time and we do have a strategy that we can put as an alternative.

*Where the hon. member dealt with Marxism, nobody could doubt that Marxism is among the worst types of oppression one could possibly encounter. It means the eradication of the human being in his totality. Marxism oppresses and eradicates the entire human thought process. It would be an unmitigated disaster for this country if the Black man in this country were to come under the sway of the Marxists. The Marxists are out to subvert the Black people so that they would not be able to continue with the process we are now engaged in. The hon. member spoke about the people who were involved in the Silverton incident. What is tragic in this story, is that these people were South Africans. They were our own people. That is the greatest tragedy of all. Something has gone wrong somewhere if our own people are coming from across our borders to attack us. That is the criterion whereby we should measure the policy and the strategy of the hon. the Prime Minister: How are we going to succeed in warding off such attacks as these?

†The hon. member for Bezuidenhout spoke about the weakness and purposelessness of the Western world. I believe—and I put my conviction here on record—that what has happened in the Western world is that they have fallen away from what was the fire and inspiration in their history over the past five centuries, namely the Christian religion and the belief in the free man and a free society. There is a drift to collectivism and socialism and a falling away from the idea of man created by God, man with a mission to perform. That is what is wrong in the Western world. Our task in this country is that we are to be the watchers on the ramparts of the Western mind. We have got to keep this flame burning here so that the rest of the Western world can, from the example we set and the determination we have, have that flame rekindled in the Western world, the flame to stand up and fight against that darkness of mind which is communism. I think this is probably the greatest contribution that this small group of White people here at the southern end of Africa can make, that we stand fast against the threat which obliterates the entire mind of free men.

*I think the hon. member for Verwoerdburg has moved a very interesting motion. I think it is also a very important one. Of course, it creates an opportunity for the hon. the Prime Minister of setting out his ideas here. We are expecting a message from the hon. the Prime Minister. I have placed an amendment on the Order Paper which should actually be an incentive to the hon. the Prime Minister to go ahead with what he is now engaged in. I shall come back to that amendment at a later stage.

†I want to ask that we examine the concept “total strategy” as it appears to us. What is the strategy with which we are busy? What we are doing is gathering into one focus all the different elements of our society in South Africa, gathering them within one focus and putting them into a position where they can together resist the dangers from outside. I want to deal with it from the point of view that there are different elements in our society, and it is simply not enough for us here in Parliament to say that we are doing this and that. Let us look also at what other people are thinking. Let me quote for example Gibson Thula, who was or still is the representative of Inkatha in Soweto. He spoke at a symposium the hon. member for Cape Town Gardens and I attended in Pietermaritzburg a couple of years ago. He said that in Soweto there was no talk about “terrorists”. Those people are “freedom fighters”. Let us understand what that means in terms of our situation. In terms of what people think in Soweto those people are “freedom fighters”.

Including The Cape Times!

How far have we gone wrong? The idea that those people are “freedom fighters” is a telling indictment of us in Parliament. We have created the conditions whereby that idea can spring up in the minds of the Black people, people who are members of our society, of our country and are together with us in a situation where every one of us is threatened. It is not only we who are threatened; they are too.

Let us talk about Russian imperialism. It is not a direct threat to us in the sense that there are armed Russians on our borders. Russian imperialism is not the direct threat to us. Cuban aggression is a more direct threat to us than that. The real threat we are going to face is internal subversion. I want to make an appeal to the hon. the Prime Minister even if he notes nothing else at all of what I say today. It is the people who control the countryside at night and who control the streets in the townships who are going to set the tone of what happens and the relationship between Black and White in South Africa. There is an organization which we in this country, and we in Parliament particularly, cannot ignore.

I am referring to the organization called Inkatha, because I believe this is an organization that has a very strong following and a very strong influence. I need hardly point out to anybody who is a student of history that between the World Wars the people who controlled the streets eventually won the political struggle. Inkatha is an organization which today is becoming more and more important. We have to take cognizance of this and will have to find means of reaching accommodation with that group of people led by Chief Gatsha Buthelezi. We cannot ignore them, and if we do, we do so at our peril. If terrorism is to succeed, bases are necessary in adjoining territories, and anybody who has done any reading on revolutions in our time will know that in Vietnam, Algeria and elsewhere bases in adjoining territories were the downfall of the colonial power. They could not get into those adjoining countries to destroy the terrorist bases. We must understand that hot pursuits are not the answer, because hot pursuits create the idea to the outside world that we are the attackers if we should go into Angola, Mozambique or Rhodesia. Opposition to South Africa would be built up by such activities.

There is one other matter I want to warn against. It has been reported in newspapers that President Machel has been forced to revert to some kind of a free enterprise system in his society because the Marxist system has totally destroyed his country’s economy. We have seen this happening before in the history of the Communist Party. In Russia after the revolution, when Lenin had just taken over, we saw that when they tried to Bolshevikize and communize the entire economy, the total collapse of that economy. We then saw there a new economic policy whereby private enterprise was reintroduced into the economy, the peasants were encouraged to produce and so on, but as soon as the country started to get ahead and away from the absolute bottom level of economic activity, Stalin liquidated the entire body of people concerned with a new economic policy. So I think we can draw no encouragement for ourselves from what has happened in Mozambique. What we are seeing is merely one phase in an ongoing process where people who are Marxists are determined to ensure that the policy which they follow if going to be carried out in those areas.

What is total strategy? Let us analyse the concept “total strategy”. What is it, and where does it start? I want to tell the hon. the Prime Minister that total strategy starts right here in this House. It starts with us, the members of the White Parliament, because we are the effective source of power and nobody can do anything in this country without us. It involves outsiders only incidentally. The totally strategy embraces what we want to do and what we are trying to do. The total strategy does not involve outsiders. Blacks are only the secondary object, and the White community is the prime target of the total strategy. When we talk about change, why is change essential? What is it that we have to change in our society and why is it essential that we do in fact change it? I think there is a deep-rooted rejection of the White community which I find absolutely frightening. The result of a survey which was recently conducted by Prof. Simpson of the University of Cape Town, revealed the most deep-seated cynicism on the part of the Black urban community towards the entire White population. It does not matter whether it is the members on that side of the House or on this side. They rejected the entire concept that the White man had anything advantageous or good in mind for the Black community.

Is it not the same in the USA?

The USA is one thing; what we have here is something totally different.

It is much worse in the USA.

That is no comfort to us here.

It is much worse in the USA because the Blacks there are being integrated in a society which is alien to them. What is happening in our country is that we are trying to draw Blacks into a society in which we can all share and in which we can work together meaningfully. The Blacks are in the majority here. We have to take cognizance of the fact that among educated literate Blacks in the townships all White political parties are rejected and that communism has a lure for them. They know nothing about it. They do not understand the inner workings of it, but for them it means that everybody shares equally.

You are definitely not well informed in that respect.

This is the latest survey.

If the hon. the Minister wants to get up and tell me what his findings are, let him.

They are blind.

They do not want to see.

I will be very pleased to hear his findings.

What we have to do is that we have to convince the Black community by our strength. Our strength is going to be the key to the whole situation in which we find ourselves.

What kind of strength are you talking about?

I mean the strength of our position here: our economic strength, our military strength, our political strength, the strength of the White community, and our moral strength also.

What we have to understand—and I make an appeal to the hon. members on the other side to understand it—is that sharing does not mean surrender. I think the hon. member for Verwoerdburg himself said it quite clearly. Sharing does not mean surrender. It does not mean that we have to hand over everything. It means we can retain our own power bases, our own power position and that we can achieve a structure of power which is going to be fruitful and productive for everybody. Who wants to inherit a wasteland? This is a point I think we have to put to the Black community. If the sort of struggle has to take place in this country, a struggle which Marxism makes unavoidable, a wasteland will result. There will be nothing left for anybody to inherit There will be no winners.

We must understand another thing, viz. that wealth is not in itself enough. We can create wealth for the Black community. We are in fact doing it. We have involved them in a process of change. But it is not enough. It is a palliative. It is not enough to win them to us without positive identification of themselves with ourselves in a political process which is going to open for them the doors to the future.

What is the basic condition of the total strategy? I want to repeat something I said on another occasion. In the history of the French people there are three very, very famous sayings which I think illustrate what is happening to us here today. Louis XIV, “le roi soleil”, said “l’état, c’est moi”—“I am the State.” I think that anybody who thinks about politics in this country knows that we here in this Parliament today to all intents and purposes are the State. Madame de Pompadour said “Après nous le déluge”—“after us, the flood”. Anybody who thinks about South Africa knows that, if we were to disappear from the scene, after us there would come the deluge; there would be nothing left. Marshall Pétain was at the height of his military glory defending Verdun. When someone asked him “How are you doing?” he replied “J’y suis et j’y reste”—“I am here and I am staying.” We too: we are here and we are staying. I think it is terribly important that we should understand these things, and not only that we should understand them. The entire population of South Africa, all the groups in South Africa, should also understand it too. At this moment we are the State. We are now taking steps to divest ourselves of certain powers to create a different situation, and if we fail, there is only the deluge that is left after we have gone.

The other point is that we are here and we are staying. If we have that in mind, what kind of deal are we going to offer the Black people? The hon. the Prime Minister has indicated certain things. There is a commission sitting and it has indicated certain directions. The sort of thing which is going to offer the Black people a deal that they will accept, must include them in the absolutely fundamental total negotiating situation, whatever happens and in whatever way the hon. the Prime Minister intends tackling it. The commission in which we are serving will make certain recommendations, but these recommendations have to be seen to be genuine, to come from the heart of the White man and not something we are just doing to buy time or to preserve our souls, places or anything else like that. We have to persuade those people that this means something to them.

What makes you think it is not genuine?

Sir, I say that we must make it so. I believe it is so. I pray and beg that it is so. That is what we have to carry across to the other people—that feeling, that belief, that understanding that what is coming from us is not because we are afraid of our own situation, not because we are strong, but because we have something to offer, something to give which is positive and real. We have more to offer than anyone else—more than communism, more than Marxism, more than African socialism.

That is what we are doing.

But you are not succeeding. [Interjections.]

The real dialogue which we have to get going, must, if it has to succeed, be a dialogue between people who are willing to talk. The people who sit there together with us must be willing to talk to us. They must be willing to commit their future to the negotiations. Let me point out to the hon. members on the other side that when one starts negotiating, one may quite easily end up with something different from what one imagined at the start. It happened in South West Africa. It can happen. We have to commit ourselves that we are going to work our way through those negotiations to gather consensus with the other groups of peoples.

I also want to point out that as consensus gathers—I say this perhaps to my own detriment—the position of the Opposition in this Parliament might well come into question, since the consensus will create a position in which the paramaters of dissension and political argument amongst Whites will get narrower and narrower. I think it is important that this Parliament should realize it. This is something which can quite easily happen and will leave all of us in a situation …

It will be an entirely new ball game.

That is correct. It will be an entirely new political game which we shall have to play in the future.

I now move the amendment printed in my name on the Order Paper, as follows—

This amendment provides the foundation. It requires that things should be seen to be done, should be seen to be happening.

For this very reason the events of the past couple of weeks in that party and here in the House are matters which are causes of concern for every single thinking South African. I want to say—I am going on record here—that I do not believe that the party on that side is a party which is going to split.

Hear, hear!

I do not believe it. I say to the hon. the Prime Minister that I do not believe it, because there are people on that side who are professional enough in their attitude not to give up the positions they occupy merely for the sake of a few Coloured boys playing rugby against White boys. So I do not believe they are going to do it on that or on any other basis. [Interjections.] There is a saying in the Book of Proverbs that the slothful man who does not wish to do anything, always says: “There is a lion in the path.”

*“There is a lion in the way.” In the history of our nation, there have been various people who have borne the name of Lion. There was the Lion of the Magaliesberg, the Lion of the North, and now we are hearing about the Lion of Waterberg. I wish to tell the hon. the Prime Minister that he should not worry about that lion, because actually he is not a lion at all, but merely a tame pussycat [Interjections.] After all, he is merely an old cat that has grown fat on the cushions. He is not going to achieve anything. He will not be able to achieve anything, and the members on that side of the House who are saying that they support him, will not be able to do so either. I wish to tell the hon. the Prime Minister that he may as well go ahead.

†I want to say one thing about the English Press. The English Press have always been wrong, because they have labelled the hon. the Minister as “Dr. No.” However, if I had to give a suitable name to that hon. Minister,

I would call him “Dr. Rainbow”, because I believe that he is the biggest White political chicken that history has seen in South Africa.

Order! The hon. member is now digressing from the motion.

With all respect, Sir,

I am trying to show that the matter upon which we are engaged can go ahead.

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order. May the hon. member say that another hon. member is “the greatest White political chicken”?

A Rainbow chicken!

Order! I should appreciate it if hon. members, when they refer to other hon. members, would use the same language they would prefer other people to use when referring to them. The motion deals with a total national strategy, and the hon. member must confine himself to that.

The point I wish to raise, and the reason why I have moved my amendment, is that I wish to tell the hon. the Prime Minister that I believe that we can now go ahead and that we must go ahead. The hon. the Prime Minister must go ahead as rapidly as possible to build on the foundation which he has laid. We have now been sitting here for two weeks and wondering what is going to happen to the party on the opposite side of the House, and until that has been decided, we simply have to sit and wait, because as things are, we cannot accomplish anything.

Then why do you not sit down?

As far as I am concerned, as soon as that matter is settled …

[Inaudible.]

That hon. Minister is getting up-tight about things. I am saying to him that the party of which he is a member, has a purpose to fulfil and a role to play which it cannot play if there are two divisions that keep on niggling and haggling away at each other and frustrating the motive power that the party has. [Interjections.] I am saying to the hon. the Prime Minister, with my amendment, to go on with the work upon which he is engaged, because that is what is going to be the solution and the salvation of all of us in South Africa. [Interjections.]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order: We have had a barrage of interjections from the hon. the Minister of Police. I ask you to draw it to his attention.

Order! I have allowed a great number of interjections, more than usual, because the hon. member for Mooi River was busy with a political debate and with scoring political points. In such circumstances more interjections are to be expected.

Mr. Speaker, I really do hope that when the hon. member for Mooi River referred to freedom fighters in the course of his speech, he was not referring to the onslaught in Silverton as being the work of freedom fighters.

The hon. member did not hear what I said.

I listened very carefully to what the hon. member said and I wanted to comment on his speech, but after the hon. member’s unsavoury political remarks during this debate, I have decided to ignore him completely. Nevertheless, I just want to tell the hon. member that when we on this side of the House enthusiastically support this motion of thanks to the hon. the Prime Minister for creating a national strategy, we want to put it very clearly that the objectives of this national strategy are not to save the National Party.

I did not say that either.

The objectives of this national strategy are to save South Africa for all its people, for the hon. members of the PFP and the NRP too. It is the aim of this national strategy to afford Southern Africa the opportunity of escaping from the clutches of Marxism, from the Marxist onslaught, and where appropriate, to free themselves from it. The NP does not need salvation. The power of the NP lies in the fact that the programme of principles and the declared policy of the NP enable the hon. the Prime Minister to put a national strategy of this kind into operation. We simply have to speak to all recognized strategists, and they will tell us at once that, after all, a strategy is not a general dogma or a strategic recipe, which has to be applied to every possible situation in a stereotyped way; on the contrary, every situation, including the situation in South Africa, requires a strategy of its own.

Of course, in order to obtain a specific basis for a specific national strategy, it is important in the process of evaluating the particular situation, to take into account the circumstances of the situation as a whole. This process of evaluation can only take place under the guidance of a statesman. It can only be developed into a national strategy successfully under the leadership of a statesman like the hon. the Prime Minister. The hon. the Prime Minister has developed such a national strategy within the framework of the NP’s policy. As a Nationalist, I am referring here to the hon. the Prime Minister’s twelve-point plan which I am proud to support, and which was explained very well here by the hon. member for Verwoerdburg.

After all, a strategy for national survival and co-operation cannot be carried through successfully by means of military action alone. All the potential resources the State has at its disposal must be utilized for this purpose. Consequently, to put any State in a position to develop resources to be utilized for the purposes of such a total strategy, one important prerequisite must be complied with. This important prerequisite is political stability. After all, South Africa can boast a proud record of political stability over the past decades; under the leadership of the NP of course. Surely the responsibility of maintaining political stability in South Africa is not the task of the Government alone. Surely the Opposition parties also have a great responsibility in this regard. I am afraid that they do not always fulfil this responsibility with the necessary sense of responsibility. In this regard I want to refer to a remark made by Chief Gatsha Buthelezi when he held discussions with the hon. the Leader of the Opposition in Ulundi. On that occasion he said that he was tired of parties speaking on behalf of the Black man in this Parliament. Then he added the following words, viz. that superficial political chatter over cocktails is no longer necessary in South Africa. I think that the official Opposition should take note of this approach.

However, political stability alone is not sufficient Law and order must be maintained and there must be rest and peace in the country. As the hon. the Prime Minister has often said, peace does not come of itself and we must work at maintaining and conserving peace. Everyone has to work hard. It is not the Government and certain sections of the community alone that have to work hard, but the Opposition parties in Parliament must also work hard at conserving peace in South Africa.

Mr. Speaker, I do not want to deviate from the motion and in doing so incur your anger, but if I were a member of one of the Opposition parties, I would hang my head in shame, particularly if I look at some of the actions of hon. members in this regard, actions that definitely do not promote peace in South Africa. We have a proud record to maintain with regard to the conservation of peace in South Africa In this regard I want to refer—and the hon. member for Pretoria West referred to it too—to the visit by the hon. the Prime Minister to the Black States in South Africa. Since political stability, peace and rest prevail in this country, the people in this country enjoy economic prosperity and have economic power at their disposal in order to develop the resources of this country so that they can be utilized as assets and as instruments in this national strategic plan.

Let us take a look at a few of these fine assets which have been established as a result of the economic power of this country. In this regard I can refer to the S.A. Railways and the Airways, the network of roads, the posts and telecommunications network, agricultural structures and services, health services, educational institutions, electricity supply networks, industrial potential and skills and mining potential and skills. One of the points in the twelve-point plan includes the establishment of a constellation of States in Southern Africa. We must thank the Government very much for being prepared to make these assets to which I have just referred, assets which the nation has at its disposal, available in an unselfish way, so that, together with the assets which the Southern African States have in excess, they can be utilized for the establishment of a Southern African constellation of States. Apart from the ideological differences, internal problems and different levels of development, these countries of Southern Africa have a number of assets, both jointly and separately, which can be equalled by few other communities in the world. These are assets which form the basis of economic co-operation and interdependence. Various things are possible in a constellation of States. I should like to refer to these things. When the assets which the Southern African States have at their disposal, are joined together in a constellation of States, this may result in and confirm certain things. This will not only be an asset to South Africa, but to Africa and the rest of the world too. Let us take a look at a few of these aspects. Such a constellation of States can do the following. The political autonomy and sovereignty of member nations can be guaranteed by such a constellation of States.

The second point that I want to make, is that the integrity and freedom of the relevant countries and their people can be insured in such a constellation of States.

The third point that I want to make, is that it will be impossible to interfere in the domestic affairs of the member countries, with a view to preventing Marxism from gaining a foothold.

The next point that I want to make, is that the economic, the material, the spiritual and the cultural prosperity of the member countries and their people can be insured by means of such a constellation of States, with the aid of these assets that I have mentioned.

The final point, which in my opinion is one of the most important, because it is an ideological one—and since it is an ideological point around which the stability and freedom of the political set-up of the State can revolve—is that such a constellation of States has the potential and possibility to exempt themselves from Marxist influences. In this regard the Government has a proud record, to be sure, a record of unselfish aid and co-operation in transport, in the provision of electricity, sharing of knowledge, health services, economic, commercial and technical agreements with the countries of Southern Africa, to mention only a few. In his article “Strategy for Development” in 1976, a certain Mr. John Barrett said the following on page 3—

That common effort is our hon. Prime Minister’s strategic plan, is our hon. Prime Minister’s constellation of States, which is contained in this plan.

I conclude by saying that we are a Christian country. We are a country that accepts Christian norms in our negotiations with the other peoples in South Africa. We are a country that accepts Christian norms in our negotiations with the peoples of Southern Africa and of Africa, and the hon. the Prime Minister has already confirmed and emphasized this on several occasions. Nations who put their full trust in God and his leadership, forge their own future when they do so.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Wonderboom referred with appreciation to the hon. the Prime Minister’s twelve-point plan. He elaborated fairly widely on certain components of the plan. I, too, wish to avail myself of this opportunity to tell the hon. the Prime Minister that such a plan would be beneficial to South Africa, even if it only creates a basis for an open debate and also so that clarity can be found on those components of the plan on which the parties in this House are able to agree or differ. For that reason I maintain that such a plan would promote orderly political debate in South Africa.

The hon. member for Wonderboom also made a remark in passing which did not go unnoticed. He referred to hon. members on the Opposition side who should bow their heads in shame because those hon. members are allegedly not promoting peace in South Africa I would have expected that if an hon. member makes an allegation like that he would take the trouble, or have the courage, to elaborate in a little more detail and to explain why he made a remark like that. Merely to make it and then to leave it hanging in the air means, I think, that the hon. member actually dragged it in for what it was worth, hoping that there would be reaction. There was no reaction and therefore I suppose we should leave it at that.

Surely you ought to know why he said that.

Reference is often made to the onslaught on South Africa, and then of course to South Africa’s strategy for warding off this onslaught. That is primarily what this debate today is about. There must be no doubt that Russia and her cohorts want to extend their sphere of influence in Southern Africa as well as in Afghanistan and other areas. There is no doubt about it. The fact that Cubans, supported by East Germans are active in Angola, is just further proof of this. This party realizes how essential it is to be able to ward off every attack from beyond our borders and for that reason we constantly show a lively interest in military affairs. That is why we avail ourselves of every opportunity to discuss military matters in this House, and to propose methods by which our Defence Force can be made even more formidable than it is at present. In the past, for example, we proposed that larger professional fighting units should be formed in order to raise the preparedness of the Defence Force to an even greater pitch than at present. Another example is a proposal that an inter-parliamentary committee be appointed to discuss military matters which are of such a confidential nature that they cannot be debated openly.

That is all I want to say now as far as the military situation is concerned. Our standpoint, therefore, is the same as that of most members in this House.

Military preparedness alone, however, will never avert the impending danger, unless all South Africans—Black, White and Brown—unite in their determination to avert this danger.

†It is in this respect that the hon. the Prime Minister and his party have over the years failed to read the signs correctly. The onslaught from beyond our borders can never succeed if the entire community is united against such an aggressor. To put it differently, the onslaught can only succeed if a substantial section of the community welcomes such an onslaught. The political and socio-economic policies of the Government over the years has had the effect of making the free-enterprise system look ugly in the eyes of many Black people. When a system looks ugly alternatives start looking more attractive.

It is no secret that we find that more and more Blacks, particularly the younger amongst them, are starting to look to Marxism as an alternative to the free-enterprise system under which they feel that they have been hard done by. Therefore, if the hon. the Prime Minister wants the support of the young Black people in his total strategy, then clearly he must regain the confidence and co-operation of those young people. I am hoping that the hon. the Prime Minister will tell us today how he plans to get the co-operation of those people in his total strategy. He has the opportunity and I trust that he will make use of it, because it is vital to the total strategy which was referred to earlier. Unless the loyalty of those Black people can be ensured then, no matter how good the twelve-point plan or any other plan may be, it will be doomed to failure.

Nowhere in the twelve-point plan does the hon. the Prime Minister set out clearly how he plans to get people together in some kind of convention, or whatever name he may prefer to use, to express their support for the programme or otherwise to suggest alternatives.

In the political system, as applied by the NP, the result has been a continuing growing alienation between White and Black. One cannot, for two generations, or perhaps more, say to your fellow South Africans that they will have no political participation in the real law-making bodies and then overnight expect them to fall in with your plan, no matter how good those plans may be. It just cannot be done. So, we now have a situation in which words must be converted into deeds. I do not think that it would be fair at all for us to blame the hon. the Prime Minister for everything that was and is bad in NP policy, although since he has been a senior responsible member of that party for a long time, I am sure he had great influence. We cannot, however, hold everything that is bad about that party against the hon. the Prime Minister. When a new man takes over the driver’s seat one can expect directional changes and the hon. the Prime Minister has in recent months indicated that he would like, from time to time, to make directional changes.

Unfortunately, one or two of his back-seat drivers have made this change in direction rather difficult, but we trust that under the present circumstances, with peace having been restored, that he will stick strongly to his views and that he will bring about the changes which he has referred to, because words without deeds have no meaning. The hon. the Prime Minister has said much to indicate that South Africa was at last moving away from the old apartheid era into a much more accommodating one. He has raised expectations which, so far, he has not been able to fulfil but which we as the official Opposition to a large extent would like him to be able to fulfil.

In this regard I just want to say that there are some problem areas which seem to be conflict areas within the NP right now. I refer for instance to the fact that the Schlebusch Commission is still sitting and deliberating at this point in time while at the same time the CRC is abolished and another body is appointed in its stead. At the same time the Indian Council, which more or less has a similar function, has its life extended. This seems to indicate some kind of muddled thinking in the ranks of that party. There is another instance I should like to mention. One of the Cabinet Ministers has indicated that he has declared war on the pass laws system. Yet in the last two weeks we have found in the Western Cape an increased activity, an increased number of arrests of people under the influx laws and the pass laws system.

Were those people here legally or illegally?

This just does not add up. The hon. the Prime Minister appealed to all South Africans not to do …

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

I regret, I have only one minute left The hon. the Prime Minister appealed to all South Africans not to do anything at all which would lead to further race friction. These events indicate to me that the one hand is not always sure what is happening as regards the other hand. Perhaps the hon. the Prime Minister will make use of the opportunity he has today to explain this to us.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to convey my sincere thanks to the hon. member for Verwoerdburg, and to the hon. members for Pretoria West and Wonderboom who supported him, for the enlightening way in which they elucidated this motion and made their contributions this afternoon. They did so on a high level, and it redounds to their credit. I thank them for doing so.

I also wish to thank the hon. member for Bezuidenhout sincerely for his contribution. Naturally there are matters on which we differ with one another, but I think we should give him credit this afternoon for having made his contribution on an equally high level. In my opinion the hon. member made one mistake. He said that if we are to have a total national strategy, we must also have a national goal. I have no fault to find with that, because it is correct. But what the hon. member actually wanted to imply with that was that we do not have one. I want to tell him that he should simply read the preamble to the Republic of South Africa Constitution Act, for there he will find the national objective of South Africa spelt out in very heart-warming and wonderful words. I also want to refer him to the White Paper which I tabled here in 1977 as Minister of Defence and in which that national objective is spelt out very clearly in abbreviated form. I recommend it to him for consideration and suggest that he read it, for then he will see that there need be no doubt in our minds as South Africans over what our national objective is. Consequently we have an objective, and we are developing a strategy to pursue that objective, as it is stated in the preamble to our Constitution and also in the White Paper.

Unfortunately I cannot congratulate the hon. member for Mooi River on the last portion of his speech. He began on a high note, but then he suddenly began to falter—he was seized by a sudden impulse—and he lapsed into personal remarks which were entirely in conflict with the whole spirit of the debate. However, I feel myself compelled to react to them. Let me tell the hon. member and those who, in conjunction with him, are trying to cause trouble in our ranks, that there are no differences of principle between the hon. the Minister of Public Works and myself.

Hear, hear!

In the second place I wish to say that Ministers who are serving in the Cabinet under me as Prime Minister, enjoy my confidence. When we are stating standpoints in a candid way, the hon. member need not think that he can fish in troubled waters. Leave the hon. the Minister of Public Works alone. He is complete at home where he is. The hon. member would do well to carry on with his own work; he has enough to do in that little party. [Interjections.]

He was followed by the hon. member for Wynberg. That hon. member, who is not even a member of the hon. member for Mooi River’s party, also wanted to make a contribution. I really have nothing to say to him in reply, except to point out to him that Langenhoven once said: “If you have nothing to say, do not say it”

If one considers the world scene, one cannot help thinking of the statement of an expert such as Mr. Henry Kissinger when he was making a speech in September 1979 in Nato circles in Brussels, and said the following—

These are serious words, because for the first time since the Second World War the entire world has been confronted by the fact that a super power is able to translate its will into a decision reached by a trial of arms. For the first time the world is faced with the irrefutable fact that no other super power is at present capable of conversing on equal terms with the Russian super power. That is why these words of Mr. Kissinger have a very grave import.

If this truth applies to the major Western countries and countries of the Free World—it does apply to them; this is acknowledged today by all experts, also those from Nato circles—it is far more applicable as far as the Republic of South Africa is concerned, because we are not only a Western country in a certain sense; we are also an African country, and a conflagration has been lit in Africa through the interference of super powers. The following was written by Gen. Sir Walter Walker, and rightly so, in one of his latest contributions, Wake up or Perish—

That is what is at issue. Today we are witnessing an encircling strategy which is being deployed step by step across the globe, according to the rules of the domino game, where the one move after the other is calculated eventually to isolate the USA and to use Europe and Africa to bring about the destruction of the way of life to which we have been accustomed for more than 2 000 years. The position of the Republic of South Africa is placed in even greater jeopardy by a few other contributory factors, and I wish to mention these briefly.

Firstly, there is the hate campaign which is being waged against us to an increasing extent by a number of UN member countries, a campaign in which they have already succeeded with an arms embargo against us. Other methods are also being considered. We know this from experience and on the basis of knowledge we have at our disposal, and these are being applied, inter alia, by visible means, such as the incitement of terrorists, something to which Western countries are contributing in blissful ignorance or out of stupidity. Another method is subversive practices. Nothing we can do can satisfy that hate campaign. Nothing that any of the political parties represented in this House can do in this country can succeed in assuaging the hunger of that hate campaign. The hate campaign will continue, grow, and become more radical.

Secondly I wish to say that the inability of some Western leaders—I say “some” because I always wish to single out the few who can be singled out—to acknowledge the importance of the Republic of South Africa, although they have the facts at their disposal, is another factor. For the most part—and I have experienced this because I speak to them and their representatives—when one comers them with one’s argument, they say with a shrug of the shoulders: “Yes, but your colour policy, your domestic policy makes it difficult for us to allow strategic considerations to be the decisive factor.” But what do they do on the other hand? When the President of Yugoslavia became very seriously ill and there was talk of the Kremlin possibly interfering in that country, a warning was issued by the USA: “If you interfere in Yugoslavia it will be regarded as a hostile act.” In other words, even in the case of an enlightened communist dictatorship which had adopted a neutral stance towards Russia and which was faced with a possible threat, another super power saw the need to issue a warning that it would regard interference in that country as a hostile act. In the case of South Africa, however, a double standard is being applied. Here they hide behind the colour problems with a shrug of the shoulder, in order to deal with the colour problems in America. That is our second problem. There is an unwillingness among certain Western leaders, an unwillingness which I wish to describe as a kind of neutralism towards the decisive role which the Republic of South Africa is able to play in Southern Africa. This kind of leadership in certain Western Circles—and I want to say at once that I make certain exceptions in this respect, among others the British Prime Minister, who in regard to these cardinal problems confronting the Western World has struck a different note—is that of reaction to political pressure groups. There is no positive leadership with which the initiative is being manifested to withstand the Russian militaristic expansionism. Instead there is a neutralistic spirit of reaction to pressure groups. That is where the weakness of the West lies.

In the third place this unwillingness on the part of some Western leaders denies the truth of the Republic of South Africa’s strategic, military, industrial, food and mineral position. It denies these things. In this connection I should just like to quote—and I wish to do so very briefly—from a publication, The Washington Papers—Strategic Mineral Dependants: The Stockpile Dilemma, in which, inter alia, the following very important statement was made—

It goes on to state—

It is going to cause chaos, and yet, in spite of these obvious facts, in spite of the fact that South Africa has succeeded in being a granary, in spite of the fact that South Africa has become a power source in the industrial sphere, a power source through the generation of power, and is displaying leadership in the generation of energy and leadership in many other spheres, it is as though there is a paralysis in the mind of the West to acknowledge the importance of South Africa. Consequently the Republic of South Africa must realize that the one major error which we could make in this situation would be to seek a solution born of panic, because panic is the twin brother of fear. That is why South Africa must not seek a solution for itself born of panic, but out of acceptance of the fact that the West is not in a position to help it either, or is partially unprepared to help it as a result of a neutralism in which it lies entangled, an unwillingness which socialism has forced upon it, an unwillingness which the labour force has caused in it, an unwillingness which opportunistic international politics has forced upon a large part of the West.

That is why I have pleaded, as I am still doing today, for the creation of a total national strategy which, apart from the need to take security measures into account, as well as the fact that security measures cannot be applied in isolation, also entails action within a total context on the basis of economic, political, social and psychological security. We have seen our former allies in the Western world take action against other countries, for example in respect of Taiwan. They betrayed Taiwan overnight. We heard them announcing with great ado that they would stand firm in respect of Afghanistan. Did they? We saw how, with much clamour, they left Vietnam in the lurch. We saw theft-conduct in certain South American States. Today there is even talk of Russia establishing a new so-called “free Baluchistan” out of parts of Pakistan, Iran and Soviet Turkistan in order to gain control over the Persian Gulf. This, too, weakens the position of the West, and it forces reasonable people in the West to realize that South Africa is becoming all the more important. We have convinced ourselves of the lack of a total strategy on the part of Western nations.

We have heard more than one commander in Nato circles talking about this. The latest statement is that of General Haig, who expressed an opinion on the absolute lack of a total strategy on the part of the West Even in Nato circles it is being said that “Nato is a glorified debating society between West Germany and America”. In the meantime we know how a policy of appeasement in connection with the SALT and the SALT Agreement has caused a shortfall in Western preparedness, with the result that the West does not have the power to call a halt today, even if it wanted to.

I am not a prophet, but year after year since 1967 I have been sounding warnings as Minister of Defence in this Parliament during the discussion of my Vote—they are recorded in Hansard for everyone to read—and have pleaded for other attitudes to be adopted and for a strengthening of South Africa’s military capacity, so much so that at times, in this House as well, I was accused of “sabre rattling” and what is more of spending money unnecessarily. In this one sphere at least South Africa had to expand its capacity to hold its own, even though it was unpopular.

At the beginning of the ’eighties the Republic of South Africa finds itself the target of a three-pronged onslaught by the forces to which I have just referred. The struggle against the Republic of South Africa is not always clearly discernible, but is calculated to bring about the downfall of this State. It is not calculated to break the Government or to bring another party into power. The main object of the onslaught on the Republic of South Africa, under the guidance of the planners in the Kremlin, is to overthrow this State and to create chaos in its stead, so that the Kremlin can establish its hegemony here. The present strategy against us avoids a direct, conventional onslaught, because such an excursion is too expensive and because the threshold is too high to launch a direct conventional onslaught on us. That is why they avoid it, but at the same time an indirect strategy is being pursued with every possible means: Economically by encouraging boycott movements; psychologically by waging a concentrated propaganda campaign against us. Whether people are always, willingly or unwillingly, aware of this or participate in it, there is a concentrated propaganda campaign against everything which is stable in this country. The campaign is also of a political nature and demands are being made which, if we were to comply with them tomorrow, would cause chaos in this country. It is also being waged by proxy forces and in the whole of Southern Africa as well by the presence of the Cubans—who are a crowd of slaves of the rulers in Moscow—the East Germans, who are also helping to plan this onslaught, and Czechoslovakians. There is only one way of withstanding this onslaught and that is to establish a total national strategy, as far as is possible in a democratic State, by means of which we will make it impossible for Russia to receive an invitation to South Africa. One thing we must admit: Russia never operates, whether directly or by proxy, without being invited. It first creates the circumstances in which it can be invited, as in Afghanistan. Then it moves in. It creates the circumstances, as in Czechoslovakia, in which it is invited, and then it moves in. It has a master-plan for being invited, and apart from our military capacity we must utilize other means within a total national strategy in order to prevent Russia from being invited in. Apart from the economic need for co-operation in Southern Africa, there is among the leaders an express desire to co-operate, because the threat is not directed against the White man only. The threat is also directed against the Black man. The threat is also directed at the traditions, the way of life and the ideals of the Black man. If chaos develops, the dictatorship which is then established comes to destroy that which has been built up over the years in every sphere.

In my opinion there are five power bases from which the total national strategy must operate. The first is the military power base. The South African Defence Force and the South African Police must be made as strong as possible and be kept as strong as possible, and this is the task of each one of us. To be able to do this, to enable the Defence Force and Police to do their work, we must have a reliable security intelligence Service, a security intelligence service which is capable of providing properly evaluated intelligence in respect of each step taken by the enemy.

The second base is effective means of administration of the State through proper co-ordination and the arrangement of priorities as far as the State administration is concerned. And we are engaged in doing this. We are hard at work on this aspect, in co-operation with our Government Departments and our Government officials.

Thirdly: Co-operation between the private sector and the State to maintain a sparkling free-market economy. I think that if there is one thing with which the Government has succeeded during the past 18 months, it is the success we have had in creating a proper relationship between the private and the public sector, and the goodwill which prevails in this sphere today.

Fourthly: The promotion and maintenance of good neighbourly relationships between the population communities of the Republic. I have gone out of my way to try to establish such relations. But what I want to say is that we shall not be able to create these sound population relations in a unitary State. We shall only succeed in creating them through satisfaction in diversity, through the recognition and acceptance of our diversity and through a realistic utilization thereof as a foundation on which to build for the future.

Fifthly: The belief and the acknowledgement that the individual, the family and the State are not subservient to earthly things, but to God. If this State deviates from this, it must fall. The State must utilize all possible means to ensure a national will to attain prosperity and freedom. Communism as an ideology is failing throughout the world. Communism is failing in Russia and China. Communism is now engaged, with other motives and other objectives, in bringing about ever-expanding military domination. Instead of an ideology it is becoming a purely Russian militaristic expansionism. This we must simply acknowledge.

We in Southern Africa must learn to look after common interests as a high priority. There are very promising signs that there is a profound desire among the various leaders of various Southern African States to talk to one another, to confer with one another, to single out priorities and to try to find common ground on such priorities. Yesterday we had another example of this, when the severed relations with Transkei were restored. I welcome this, as I welcome every effort in Southern Africa to establish better relations on the basis of frank recognition of problem areas and the utilization of the best means available to get the best results for these countries.

I conclude. We must eliminate negativism in our ranks by means of an effective system of administration, by co-operation between the State and the private sector and also by co-operation in Parliament. There is too much negativism in Parliament. There is too much point-scoring. There are too many attempts to thwart every good deed for the sake of party-political gain. I am not accusing anyone now. I say it is our joint task to eradicate negativism if we wish to survive. Anyone can tolerate proper criticism, but negativism is the downfall of the country.

I also wish to make an appeal to our media today. I have already made a statement here on my standpoint on the media. I wish to make an appeal to them today and ask them whether they realize how essential a national strategy is. Do they realize how essential it is for them as well to play a role, the role that newspaper reports should not be presented for the sake of exaggeration, but in a responsible way so that we can maintain discipline in this country? Our goal must be a happy and developing constellation of States on the sub-continent of Southern Africa. We must find an answer to the deceit of the Kremlin. We do not believe that the idea of trying to find the answer in Southern Africa is dead. In fact, I think we are far closer to the realization of the idea.

Mr. Speaker, we have now reached the end of a debate on a very important matter. In the few minutes still remaining for the discussion of my motion I should like to thank all speakers who participated in the debate sincerely for their contributions. I wish to convey a special word of thanks to the hon. the Prime Minister, firstly for his willingness to participate in the debate and to react in the way in which he did in fact react and, secondly, for his contribution in which he once again showed us the way. Once again he set out clearly what he understands by, and what he envisages with, a total national strategy for Southern Africa. It is very clear that the hon. the Prime Minister has a vision for the future of South Africa. This vision is contained and fully set out in the twelve-point plan, which in my opinion takes full cognizance of, and makes provision for, the aspirations, necessities of life and expectations of the various people and nations living in our country. I wish to tell the hon. member for Bezuidenhout that this twelve-point plan, this national strategy, makes full provision for the nationalism which is to be found in South Africa, and the hon. the Prime Minister once again spelt it out clearly and fully here this afternoon. This plan makes provision for the protection of the rights of all minority groups in South Africa, and therefore we can with great confidence leave the implementation of this plan in the hands of the Government. We can go to meet the future with the hope and confidence that there will be peace and quiet in this country for all of us.

Business interrupted in accordance with Standing Order No. 34 and motion and amendment lapsed.