Bullying

The below speech was delivered by Dr Mark Burke MP during today’s State of the Nation Address Debate:

There has been a lot of talk Mister President about bullying. Now I too hate bullies, which is why it hurts me to say we are indeed being strong armed.

The bully is not across the sea though, it is a ghost of budgets past. The consequences of our terrible decision to constantly borrow for decades. Now we have a huge interest payment bill.

Mr President, I welcome much of your SONA speech. However, I do find it baffling that our national debt was not mentioned once.

This year for every hundred Rand in tax revenue we’re collecting, we’re spending more than 20 Rand on interest payments: a number which is hard to understand intuitively, especially at scale. But if we divide it up into days, hours, minutes and then seconds, our debt is costing us over thirteen thousand Rand every time that your heart beats Madame Speaker.

Time is money and it is being wasted. The minute that I’ve been speaking for is equivalent to roughly eight hundred thousand Rands in interest payments. Money that could have provided nearly a hundred and sixty thousand school feeding scheme meals.

Madam Speaker, our children aren’t eating enough because our debt is eating us. It’s consuming money from our stomachs. Our schools and hospitals. From our futures.

Madame Speaker, like with any other bully, the only way we’re going to escape this one is by growing bigger and stronger. Yes, we can save money by cutting out waste and inefficiency, by not funding ridiculous programs like the R3.5 billion we’ve pencilled in for “peacekeeping” in central Africa over the next two years.

We’ve already financed one deadly and embarrassing military disaster in the Central African Republic under former President Zuma, we can’t repeat this mistake.

But we cannot win this fight simply by cutting. Let’s put it this way: If you work overtime, but you find yourself thousands of Rands short after buying groceries, paying rent, school fees, taxes and interest on your massive credit card bill, then cancelling your Netflix is also not going to help much. Nor is pulling your child out of school. And there is no way we can ask any hard working South African to pay more taxes. What one needs is a better paying job.

To escape our debt trap we need more and better jobs. We need them now. This is exactly why the DA is in government. We are the business friendly party of economic growth.

While Tweet storms rage around us and the ANC continues to push policy that worsens racial divides, economic inequality and foreign relations, our ministers are not blown off course. We know that jobs remain our Southern Cross.

Madam Speaker, there is another interrelated reason we’re in this GNU. As the Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius said: “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

How much money would farmers feel comfortable spending on tractors last year if Hon Molefe was Minister of Agriculture? How do you think the Expropriation Act would be implemented if Hon Malema was Public Works Minister?

The DA puts in place competent people to run the government. Our DA minister turned Home Affairs around quicker than most people could get a passport under former Minister Malusi Gigaba. However, we will not solve our jobs or debt crisis alone, our partners need to do more.

We cannot speak with forked tongues Madam Speaker. Saying with one side of our tongue that we want to grow the economy, and employ more people, but also with the other part of our tongue that we are putting in place conditions on who can be employed. Dictating how much of our products must be manufactured locally and then imposing knee capping tariffs on exports.

Starting a business is an extremely risky and difficult process. Why is this government making it harder? We need jobs, we don’t need regulations. We also don’t need bailouts dressed up as infrastructure investment: We know what you’re up to.

As the saying goes: one becomes bankrupt, slowly at first and then all together at once. This country has been going bankrupt slowly with its ever-growing regulations and business-killing measures, as well as its ever-fattening debt burden. But if Transnet gets its R50 billion bailout that its chairperson is demanding; If Eskom continues to lose money and wants another bailout; we will become bankrupt very quickly at once.

We cannot be bullied into more bailouts, more debt or more taxes. We must stand firm.

We need to stop the debt. We need to start the jobs. We need our GNU partners to pull their weight. The DA cannot do this alone. The DA is not in the GNU to be an enabler to the drunk parts of the ANC. We need a ministry of Finance that won’t be bullied into more debt, more taxes or more bailouts.

Madam Speaker, I’ve been speaking for around five minutes while allocated six. I will be giving back one minute or the equivalent of just under R800 thousand in national interest payments to the house. Will our government and SOEs do the same? Will they give back jobs to the people of South Africa?