You are wasting my time. Sit down! Sit down!
Deputy Speaker, there are a number of issues to be addressed. We need a comprehensive audit of existing legislation to identify where the gaps are. Only then can we discuss the need for further legislation. We need to know why crucial pieces of legislation are not sufficiently implemented and what can be done to ensure that their objectives are realised.
We need to address the root causes of inequality and disempowerment. We need to recognise women's unpaid labour and the technology involved, and that women do the bulk of caring and housework within their communities.
We must ensure that our schooling system adequately prepares all young people for the demands of a modern economy; that learners do not drop out of school at the age of 12, 14 or 16; and that sufficient funds are available for postschool education and training.
We need to protect women, girls and sexual minorities from violence. Empowerment means nothing if people are scared to walk in the streets and, despite a law to combat this, live in fear of their domestic partners. We need to stop the scourge of teenage pregnancies. Teenage pregnancies trap many girls and their children in permanent dependency and degrading poverty, often accompanied by sexual violence.
We need to intervene in cases where fathers leave mothers to fend for kids all on their own. We need to stop the papgeld [alimony] dads who go on the run. We need to expand Operation Isondlo, launched in 2005, to help decrease the backlog of maintenance defaulters.
Today, Deputy Speaker, I call upon you in this regard. We need to start with the ancient provision of the Powers and Privileges of Parliament Act, Act 91 of 1963, that prohibits any Member of Parliament from being served with a summons or arrested on the precincts, especially where maintenance for women and children is at stake. [Applause.]
Only if interventions like these take place, will the lives of people like Vaseka Ntshinga change. She is a Du Noon mother of two, whose only income is the child support grant she receives. She is quoted as saying that it is not nice having to depend on the government to put food on your table. She said that she had tried to apply for jobs, but having only passed Grade 9 she could not even find a cleaning job. She added that the fathers of her children had told her that they were also unemployed and they could not help her and so the struggle goes on and on and on. [Applause.]
The department routinely complains of financial and capacity constraints. It is therefore hard to understand how the department will be able to work with and monitor individual designated bodies in addition to achieving its annual monitoring and evaluation targets. The annual report of 2012-13 reflected the extent to which this department is failing to achieve modest monitoring and evaluating outcomes, even before the implementation of the Bill. This department only achieved 10 out of 16 targets set for the monitoring and evaluation of subprogrammes. [Interjections.]
Should the reporting on gender empowerment that currently falls under the Employment Equity Act be moved to this department, the advances the Department of Labour has made in over a decade will be lost, not to mention the fact that it will bring back the problems faced in the early 2000s. It is thus doubtful that this understaffed and underskilled department, infested with skewed spending patterns, will be able to do a better job than the Department of Labour. The Department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities has let the women of South Africa down. This Bill is a lifeline to a department that has failed to identify the true barriers to empowerment and has failed to co-ordinate a government in the effort to address these barriers.