Chairperson, hon Deputy Minister De Lange, hon chairperson of the select committee and hon members, I am here this afternoon to represent the Western Cape.
The hon Deputy Minister and other members have essentially said what needed to be said about this Bill. But may I take you back a bit, because sometimes you need to know where you are coming from in order to know where you are going.
South Africa has travelled a long road since January 2001 when the DA's Tony Leon and Douglas Gibson began agitating for floor-crossing legislation to enable their party to formalise a marriage of convenience with the New NP. We all know that the DP was in control of the DA at that time, and they still are. But even while the national ANC government was contemplating the request from Leon and Gibson, it quickly became apparent that there were irreconcilable differences within the ranks of the newlyweds, with some Nats wanting to walk out.
Nevertheless, when the ANC government introduced constitutional amendments allowing floor-crossing in 2002 and 2003, the DA was among the parties which said "aye" with a surprising level of enthusiasm.
Irrespective of what has happened since, I think we need to take some time to remind ourselves of the purpose of the floor-crossing legislation. The hon Deputy Minister and other members have already referred to this. The amendments to the law were promulgated to enable members of the National Assembly, provincial legislatures and municipal councils to become members of another political party without having to resign their seats first. Here is the part that the DA liked - the new legislation also provided an existing political party with the opportunity to merge with another party; to subdivide into more than one political party; or to subdivide and to further allow anyone of its subdivisions to merge with another political party.
But there is an old South African saying which, I think, goes something like this: Never wear dark glasses when reading the small print of a political merger. [Laughter.] It is easy to be wise after the fact. But it turned out that the marriage between the DP and the New NP wasn't made in heaven after all. When the DP and the DA realised their mistake, they changed from being among the staunchest supporters of floor-crossing to ones that began shouting "scrap the law!" [Interjections.]
In calling for the abolition of the law, an understandably embarrassed DA constitutional guru, Ryan Coetzee, was not too keen to admit that his party was once one of the keenest advocates of floor-crossing. In some ways, I don't blame him for having been so embarrassed. When he said, during an interview, that the job at hand was not to argue over the genesis of floor- crossing, I could almost see the sheepish look on his face.
He added:
Our responsibility as legislators now is to look critically at the legislation, to assess the manner in which it is being used, to determine its impact on our democratic processes and, above all, to listen to what the voters are saying about it. Having done that, we must respond in the appropriate way.
It was classic mumbo jumbo from a party guru - and I use the word "guru" with a certain amount of caution - who had been tactically outmanoeuvred by his political opponents.
As a representative of one of Coetzee's political opponents, I want to say to the NCOP today that the ANC government of the Western Cape supports the scrapping of the floor-crossing legislation as envisaged in the Constitution Fourteenth Amendment Bill. Allow me to explain why this is the case.
The Western Cape government wants to see floor-crossing legislation scrapped, not because we have been unable to use it to our political advantage, because we have; not because it sends us into a blind panic at election time - on the contrary, we have always been confident at election time for very good reasons; not because we have been desperately looking for ways to occupy the moral high ground with regard to the law as it has stood for the past few years - we always acted with the utmost integrity in our dealings with those who wanted to join us from other parties; but because we believe that the political landscape that necessitated the promulgation of the law in the first place has now changed, as the Deputy Minister also mentioned.
We know that there is growing opposition to floor-crossing among politicians and the general population. But believe me, I know that those who fought so endlessly to make floor-crossing possible, when they realised that they were the net losers, referred to those who took the plunge - and sometimes courageously so - as prostitutes, sell-outs, flip-floppers and, crazily, even cross-dressers!
We, in the ANC, understand and know why people are opposed to political representatives simply upping, quitting and joining another party without first resigning from Parliament, the legislature ... [Interjections.]