Parliamentary Monitoring Group

What is the PMG?

The Parliamentary Monitoring Group, an information service, was established in 1995 as a partnership between Black Sash, Human Rights Committee and Idasa with the aim of providing a type of Hansard for the proceedings of the more than forty South African Parliamentary Committees for these three advocacy organisations. This was because there is no official record publicly available of the committee proceedings - the engine room of Parliament - and this type of information is needed by civil society to lobby the Parliament of South Africa on pieces of legislation, matters of democratic processes and parliamentary oversight of the executive.

This website was set up at the beginning of 1998 to make the information generated available to a wider audience. Presently this is the only source for this type of information. We hope that the PMG committee reports and other documents will provide the public with an insight into the Parliament of South Africa and its daily activity. Importantly it provides a window into the performance of each government department and public entity over which each parliamentary committee has oversight.

PMG became a fully fledged independent NGO in July 2009.

What We Do

PMG aims to provide accurate, objective, and current information on all parliamentary committee proceedings in the form of detailed, unofficial minutes and documents and since 2007, sound recordings of the meeting.

PMG’s key activity is the attending of all Parliamentary Committee meetings, where a monitor will tape and minute the proceedings and obtain all documents tabled in the committees. Immediately after the meeting, the audio recording is published on the PMG website Once a detailed written report has been compiled, it passes through an editorial and quality control process. It is then published on the PMG website within three working days of the committee proceedings along with all the relevant committee documents such as such as public submissions, working drafts of bills and briefings on policy & legislation.

Beyond the reporting of Committee proceedings, PMG provides

• Early notification of requests for submissions

• Details of public hearings

• Committee and parliamentary programmes

• Legislative programmes for each department

• A weekly progress report of the status of each bill in the legislative process