HIGHER EDUCATION, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION

• A review report has been gazetted for public comment. It includes analyses of:
  • ‘the capacity of existing institutions to support post-school education and training and to undertake strategic research to produce knowledge spanning the social and natural sciences and the humanities’
  • the potential for existing institutions to ‘establish programmatic focus, intensity of activity, concentration or dispersion of activity, and impact on the realisation of policy outcomes’, and
  • ‘strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats’.

ELECTORAL AMENDMENT BILL

• Parliament has confirmed that the Constitutional Court has granted it six more months to remedy defects in the Act requiring adult citizens to be members of a political party in order to be elected to the National Assembly and provincial legislatures. Once operationalised, the Bill will provide for the election of independent candidates.
• According to a recent media statement from the National Assembly’s Home Affairs Committee:
  • ‘further clarity’ will be sought from the Independent Electoral Commission and parliamentary legal services on ‘some aspects of the Bill … particularly the Bill’s technical aspects’ with the aim of:
    • avoiding ‘any legal challenge’, and
    • producing a Bill that is:
      • ‘qualitatively better’
      • ‘constitutionally compliant’, and
      • ‘fair to independent candidates’.

Prepared by Pam Saxby