Voorsitter, ek het probeer kyk of die agb Minister van Kommunikasie hier teenwoordig is, want ek wou graag aan haar oordra dat ek gedink het dit is nou die jaar waarin ons haar begroting sal steun. Dit is helaas egter nie die geval nie. (Translation of Afrikaans paragraph follows.)
[Ms M SMUTS: Chairperson, I tried to see if the hon Minister of Communications was present here, because I wanted to say to her that I thought this was the year in which we would support her budget. Unfortunately, however, that is not the case.]
This should, in fact, have been her moment, and the Electronic Communications Bill would have been seen as her monument, even though the truth is that it is the fruit of the work of both Parliament and government working together, much as the hon Minister of Finance earlier said - that the executive and Parliament can, very fruitfully, work together. The Electronic Communications Act is the product of such co-operation. So I fully expected to be supporting this budget. However, we will not do so, and the reason is this: The hon Minister has proved to be unable to abandon the idea of executive control of telecommunications. In fact, she has caused a waste of the time of Parliament and of the President over the Icasa Amendment Bill, which is the companion piece to the Electronic Communications Act.
Her intervention has in fact also delayed the implementation of liberalisation under the Electronic Communications Act. It is true that she was stung into action and that she announced policy directives to hurry things up here on 25 May. But the fact is that we have lost many months, which could have been used to assist Icasa out of its present troubles.
It must also be said that the Deputy Minister of Communications continued to question Icasa's status here, even as we debated the final Icasa Amendment Bill.
Let's just recap that Icasa, the regulator, has been given a sophisticated set of legal and economic tools to enable it to define markets and to judge where forbearance and an absence of regulation might in fact be prudent; to decide where there are essential facilities and bottlenecks; to declare operators with significant market power and then to impose conditions such as fair access to the local loop on them, and also to impose a price range ... [Time expired.]