As Parliament closed this week for its year-end recess, several key Bills — on child welfare and justice, communal land rights, sexual offences and others — remain pending. Several key Bills, including the Mineral and Petroleum Bill, are hanging in the air as Parliament goes into recess

Political parties are becoming increasingly worried by estimates that as many as 9,5-million South Africans are not registered for the 2004 election. ”There’s a massive amount of work to be done,” African National Congress communications coordinator Steyn Speed told the Mail & Guardian. ”I don’t think we can go to an election with this number of unregistered voters.”

In the opening salvo of the battle for the Western Cape coloured vote, DA leader Tony Leon urged Mitchells Plain residents to reject the ”racial discrimination” and ”twisted perversion of affirmative action” of the ANC and vote to return the province to the DA. The coloured vote is crucial to winning the Western Cape in the 2004 election.

Euros, pounds or dollars: ”no contribution would be too small” in the fight for South Africans abroad to have the vote in the 2004 election, according to the ”saxpatvote” website. If they are good enough to pay taxes to South Africa, they should be allowed to cast their ballots overseas, says London-based Die Interafrikaanse Trust.

Defence authorities have denied allegations that Western Cape-based personnel incinerated, without authorisation, classified documents said to contain information on apartheid spies. ”It was all waste paper,” said Western Cape SANDF spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Piet Paxton.

A number of senior Western Cape housing department officials are facing disciplinary action following the release of a forensic audit report that detailed irregular payments, gross mismanagement and corruption involving R17-million. The province is keeping mum on the names and amounts involved.

Armed robbery, not political and racial motives, principally lie behind farm attacks, says the long-awaited report of an independent committee of inquiry into the crime. The report also urges immediate government assistance for farmers

National crime statistics, except for murder, have limited value in tracking trends. Station-level statistics are better indicators, Ted Leggett, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), told the Mail & Guardian. But they are treated like ”the great national secret”.

President Thabo Mbeki has thrown his weight behind the African National Congress and New National Party cooperative government in the Western Cape, in the hope of boosting its popular support ahead of the 2004 elections, now only months away.

Although the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Bill (BBEE) was approved by the National Assembly this week, it is unlikely to be implemented before late October.