The Commonwealth parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was established in 1913 and to the end of 1995 had produced 397 reports on government expenditure and administration, with almost all its recommendations implemented by government. However despite the Committee's prominence among the instruments parliament has used to oversight the executive, not only does it lack clear legislative authority for major areas of its activities but its specific purpose is not defined in its legislation. Among other things the latter omission renders proper evaluation of the PAC's effectiveness impossible, as objectives are a necessary prerequisite to assessment. This thesis establishes the de facto purpose of the Committee by tracing the development of standing public accounts committees generally, and by analysing the PAC's work as shown by its output of tabled reports. In that development, six evolutionary phases are identified: the PAC's roots in the move to a parliamentary control of the administration of government expenditure in Britain from the 1780s; its genesis in the 1850s with the concept of the standing public accounts committee, to be concerned with regularity and probity in government expenditure; its origins in the establishment of the British standing public accounts committee , in 1861, stressing high standards of government accounting, audit and reporting; its establishment in the Commonwealth, concentrating on information on departmental activities, efficient implementation of government programs and provision of policy advice; its re-establishment in 1951, stressing parliamentary control of government financial administration; and its operations from 1980, pressing for economic fundamentalist change in the public sector. Their output shows that in these phases the committees concerned displayed characteristic standing public accounts committee activism and independence in utilising the wording of their enabling documentation to adapt themselves to changes in their environment by pursuing a corresponding different mix of one or more of the following concurrent immediate aims: ensuring adequate systems of government accounting, audit and reporting; ensuring probity and regularity in departmental expenditure; obtaining and disseminating information on departmental activities; ensuring high standards of departmental administration and management; providing policy advice to executive government; and ensuring economic, efficient and effective government spending. Together these attributes and practices have made the PAC a parliamentary instrument of unequalled flexibility with a single continuing underlying aim - a purpose not concerning the public accounts per se, but directed at achieving high standards of management and administration in government by calling the Commonwealth's public service to account for its expenditure and activities.

Magister Legum - LLM

Student Number : 9908223M - PhD thesis - School of Social Sciences - Faculty of Humanities / This thesis examines the status and role of parliamentary committees in democratic theory with a view to critically assessing the performance of one such committee, the South African version of the PAC, SCOPA. It advances a pluralist theory of popular sovereignty according to which there is no single institutional complex or site, which exclusively expresses the will of the people. The latter is the case in monist theories, which reduce democracy to its practice in a single site. Rousseau and Weber are critically examined in this connection. In the pluralist notion advanced in this thesis the popular will is expressed and realized in a plurality of institutional sites and modalities of exercise. On this perspective parliamentary committees perform a function vital to the constitution of popular sovereignty itself. They are indispensable to the formation by the people of an accurate perception by it of what the Executive is doing in its name. Their investigative work is thus constitutive of the formation of a democratic subject and will. Parliamentary committees are thus central to the satisfaction of the conditions of the deliberative dimension of democracy. On this definition, parliamentary committees must in addition themselves conform to the principles of deliberation in their own practice. This specifically deliberative conception of democracy is then further delineated by distinguishing it from the aggregation – majoritarian perspective and defending it against a variety of criticisms, including that of Chantal Mouffe. With this conceptual and normative framework in place, the British and American committee systems are examined in order to establish some reference points in terms of the institutional practice of parliamentary committees. The focus then shifts to the parliamentary committees of the South African Parliament. The constitutional and legal foundation for parliamentary committees (in the South African system) is examined with particular reference to SCOPA itself and the first five years of the new parliamentary committee system identified as a period during which several South African parliamentary committees, including SCOPA, effectively exercised their “oversight” function. Once the Government’s SDP entered the scene all things changed. This thesis examines the formation of the JIT, paying particular attention to the exclusion of the HSIU and the interventions of the Speaker, Hon Frene Ginwala. It identifies in close detail all the flaws in the SDP procurement process as well as the contradictions and lacunae in the final JIT Report itself. These are of such a magnitude as to render unreasonable any claim to the contrary and in endorsing the Report SCOPA thus clearly failed in its essential function. The notion of a threshold concept of reasonable adequacy is introduced as limiting the conditions under which committee decisions can legitimately be taken via majority voting. The argument is advanced that these were clearly not met in the case of the SCOPA decision under discussion. The implications of this “collapse” of SCOPA for South African democracy more broadly are then identified and discussed in terms of deliberative democratic theory.