ON MATTERS PARLIAMENTARY (a preamble to one final whinge about 'the CAB' process)

In the absence of anything recently riveting on which to comment, we turn to a longstanding concern (of ours, and quite possibly of others) about parliamentary committee minutes. Because, as anyone familiar with day-to-day proceedings in Parliament's engine rooms will know, the minutes of a committee's previous meeting tend not to feature on the next meeting's agenda. In fact, accepted practice in that august institution's committee rooms is to consider bundles of minutes in one fell swoop weeks (sometimes months) after the meetings themselves took place.

We'll explore the worrying implications of this strange practice for the Copyright Amendment Bill's tortuous first and second passages through Parliament – closer to the Constitutional Court's hearings on that blighted piece of legislation. Just to refresh the memories of anyone still interested, of course ... Our position on the Bill's contents remains entirely neutral.

But for now, back to parliamentary committee minutes in general.

Take a look at the Parliamentary Monitoring Group's (PMG's) daily committee meeting schedules, randomly choose any date across as many years as take your fancy, tap 'minutes' into the search field and voilà. At least a few 'adoption of minutes', 'draft minutes', 'outstanding minutes' and so on will appear. And depending on the date's location in Parliament's calendar at the time, there may well be more than just a few. On 31 March 2025, there were twenty meetings scheduled at which batches of minutes were expected to be considered. Which may be because Parliament's first term for this year ended on 4 April 2025.

Fortunately, PMG provides a written report of each parliamentary committee meeting within a few days – and posts an audio/video recording on its website as soon as a meeting ends. Rumour even has it that parliamentary committee secretaries rely on PMG for their own minutes, but we digress.

With apologies for labouring the point, but elsewhere it's common practice for the minutes of a committee's previous meeting to be considered and adopted before proceeding with the business of the day. And the committee chair usually looks through them well beforehand to identify any errors needing attention before the draft minutes are circulated to other members. That way, everyone's up to speed with decisions made and issues requiring action. Which goes a long way towards ensuring that ensuing discussions are well informed and nobody drops their ball.

Not so in South Africa's parliamentary committees, it seems.

Apparently, the handful of Democratic Alliance (DA) chairs under a Government of National Unity's (GNU's) Parliament see no problem with this. We've looked at PMG reports on recent National Assembly Police Committee meetings chaired by the DA's Ian Cameron and minutes simply don't feature. Sticklers for procedural correctness in Parliament, DA MPs make a proper fuss whenever shortcuts are taken – so, why not this one? And even more strangely, it seems pre-GNU DA MPs never have been concerned about the when-s and wherefore-s of considering and adopting minutes. If they ever were, surely we would have heard about it in the media? Although to give them their due, maybe they did try years ago to nudge things back on track and failed?

Whatever the case, if anyone knows of the existence of a rule book on parliamentary committee proceedings that refers expressly to minutes, we'd appreciate a heads up. Before we lambast Parliament yet again for fouling up on 'the CAB' process.