Chairperson, Madam Speaker, Ministers and Deputy Ministers, all House Chairpersons, I explicitly also want to recognize the Chief Whips and in addition to talk about the people who oil our relationship, ourselves in Parliament, the
Executive and provincial liason officers, they constitute part of a critical machinery of what constitute Parliament, I want to suggest that the challenge we face is that at end of our five years we must look at this opportunity with pride that we took advantage that it presented us, to work together to craft ways of working and thinking together to address challenges that the people who recently elected us pointed out to us in no uncertain terms.
Madam Speaker, I am hoping the work to position Parliament that you and the previous Speaker were involved in will continue under your leadership and that of hon Chairperson of the NCOP. That work is important because this positioning of Parliament appropriately is in line with the Constitution and that it requires to be adequately resourced. We, therefore, call that this collaborative dialogue that is in the legacy report must be pursued with the greatest of passions between the two of you as exco as well as the head of the state and of government and of the executive and the judiciary so that the ongoing relationship between these three arms of the state and supported by institutions that support democracy evolve properly and carrying
out the job to defeat poverty and inequality as well as the unacceptable levels of unemployment.
We have agreed for example, that constitutional deadlines that we are given where the Constitutional Court intervenes but recognizes that this space is Parliament space does not enter there but defers to us to carry out our job, that we must meet those deadlines consistently every time and that subject must be a cause for discussion in the collaborative dialogue I am talking about.
Similarly, we as Parliament in various portfolio committees are responsible for the appointment of Commissioners so that these structures are able to carry out their functions properly and do it in a manner that is consistent with the constitutional requirement. In other words, we must deal with those areas for which we may be found wanting but act proactively to close those gaps. This is absolutely crucial for Parliament to play its role in the next five years or so.
Democracy is clearly not a cheap exercise. But this recognition also implies that the resources that are generated by our people in public which the state uses must be used appropriately. Similarly, those citizens of other countries that contributes taxes that come to us via support in many ways must also be used appropriately so that when they receive feedback from their governments that we gave South Africa this money for this purpose the report we get is a satisfactorily one that it was used appropriately. So this is a crucial part of our internationalism.
We succeeded to defeat apartheid and part of its colonial legacies because of the support of others in other parts of the world. Therefore, the necessity to treat with respect the resources that they give us and support us with must be the same that we treat the respect of the money that comes from our own people and their resources. This is a crucial part of what we are learning from the past. The commissions of inquiry that are going on are seeking to address this matter transparently, that we must not wait in certain instances to close the legislative
institutional or oversight task that we should undertake. This is an important part of what we are learning from the past.
Our conduct in the House, there is not question, must demonstrate that we will handle public affairs properly with dignity although with a necessary robustness. We all undertook to obey the Constitution and all other laws when we took up office. Let's do so in the House. It cannot be correct that we do that. We stand here and we undertake to obey the Constitution and the law and we go ahead and break it. So the impression... [Interjections.]