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A heated debate in the DA about a new values document meant to endear the party to more voters has become a proxy battle between those who want to retain the party’s more liberal values against those who want it to take a more populist road.
The document has also been sold as part of outgoing DA leader Helen Zille’s legacy in the party. She told the more than 1 300 delegates at the Boardwalk Casino yesterday: “In adopting the new values charter, the DA is saying to South Africa that the DA government you vote for will do everything in its power to put you firmly in charge of your own destiny.”
After an emotional farewell to Zille yesterday morning, DA deputy federal chairperson Anchen Dreyer told delegates at the elective congress in Port Elizabeth to support the document because it was drafted under Zille’s leadership.
However, DA federal chairperson Wilmot James has objected to the document, which sets out family structures as the basis of society and has been nicknamed the “family values charter” by those who oppose it.
James’ objection, which he voiced in a meeting of the federal council on Friday and which he was expected to voice at the congress, is that the party’s liberal values should value the individual over the group.
But DA national spokesperson Phumzile van Damme yesterday emphasised that the values charter had at its core the DA’s principle of an “open-opportunity society” for all.
“So the argument out there that the values charter is the DA getting rid of the open opportunity for all and us neglecting our liberal values is absolutely not true. It has at its core the open-opportunity society.
“A successful nation must have strong family structures, no matter how they are constituted, because no government can ever replace the role of the family,” said Van Damme.
Her colleague Marius Redelinghuys said the charter not only spoke to the white picket fence, 2.2-children suburban life, but also to his husband – who Redelinghuys married last year – and himself. They also wanted to raise children in this country.
Former DA leader Tony Leon, who is attending this weekend’s congress for the first time in eight years and is regarded as a classic liberal, said it was Zille who had brought family values to the DA in the first place.
When the party was formed in 2000, Zille negotiated with the National Party on what the founding values of the DA should be.
“We put family values into the charter then and I said: ‘I don’t think anything hangs on that.’ She didn’t have problems and I didn’t have problems. So it is actually the National Party’s contribution to the DA,” he said.
He said it was a “sociological matter of fact” that households run by two parents were generally more successful than those run by one parent.
“But if family values operate as exclusionary of people having other alternatives – gay, single people living outside the family structure – then it does create a challenge,” said Leon.
He said he did not get the idea that anyone in the party supported exclusionary family values, but admitted the debate about the charter could be “proxies for something else”.
There was controversy a few weeks ago when the charter was first drawn up, with some in the party complaining it could be construed as antigay, but those concerns were addressed at the time.
The charter was discussed at DA branch meetings in the run-up to this weekend’s congress and forms part of the party’s Vision 2029, a plan that will set out how the party envisions South Africa a decade after it plans to come to power.
A plan to have a grand launch of the document this weekend was abandoned when Zille announced her resignation last month and the emphasis of the congress moved to the election of new leaders.
