MPs slate ‘snot-nosed’ commentators

The following article was published online by IOL News:

Members of Parliament processing the Protection of Information Bill rubbished criticism of their work by former intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils.

Kasrils, who introduced the first draft of the bill to Parliament in 2008, wrote in a Sunday newspaper that the latest version was looking more dangerous than ever.

He has been a constant critic of the bill and has called for its withdrawal.

The MPs, who clashed over several clauses of the bill on Monday, were united in criticising Kasrils’s article.

The DA’s Dene Smuts described it as “rubbish”, with the exception of one point.

She suggested that the committee respond to Kasrils by highlighting the work it had done to improve his version of the bill.

She said Kasrils had made one good suggestion when he wrote: “There is absolutely no mention of members of the intelligence services who concoct and manufacture false information.

“Given the scandalous abuse of state resources for political purposes in recent years, this is an astonishing omission.

“Members of the committee must be suffering from acute amnesia to ignore this.”

The ANC’s chief negotiator on the bill, Luwellyn Landers, also expressed his unhappiness over people who commented on the bill while they were not keeping up with its development.

“There are a lot of snot-nosed commentators who are not prepared to consider and who want to pretend that the progress made on the bill is minimal,” he said.

The ANC conceded on Monday that there was a need to define national security in the bill – something it said last week might be unnecessary – and presented a new, slightly narrower definition.

Opposition parties, however, continued to call for it to be narrowed down more, saying that references to state security matters and hostile acts needed to be clarified and or taken out.

Last week, suggesting it was not necessary to define national security, Landers said: “Virtually nowhere in any democratic jurisdiction such as ours have legislatures or governments bothered to define national security. We are informed very reliably that courts and judges already clearly understand what national security means and don’t need to be told what it means.”

Source: IOL News