Statement by Dr Mark Burke MP – DA Spokesperson on Finance:
The speech below was delivered by Dr Mark Burke MP this afternoon during the First Reading debate: Rates and Monetary Amounts Bill [B14 – 2025] (s77) (121)
Madam Speaker,
What makes a state?
It is not geography. Nor is it a grouping of people. It is not even a shared history of suffering and celebration.
These are but byproducts.
What makes a state is its tax and the recognition by others.
Tax is so fundamental to the state that many of the oldest stone tablets we have depict tax records.
It is the ability of an authority to tell people: you shall pay us money, and in return, we will provide you with safety. A state which breaks this promise too often ceases to exist.
Madam Speaker, I am grateful that we still live in a place where tax thresholds and brackets can be frozen by our budget earlier this year and the center holds. We do not deserve our people. And our people do not deserve this, Bill. But here we are stuck in the unfortunate paradox where the survivors – our taxpayers – carry the cost of restitution.
Because let’s be very clear Madam Speaker, the bracket creep announced earlier this year – and enshrined into law today – is needed in order to control our debt. Debt brought about by years of bad policy and terrible execution.
This bill is another chicken coming home to roost in the Nkandla coop.
Madam Speaker, we know that MK will whine about this bill. Yet let us be quite clear — this law is their making.
Our debt spiralled under the watch of their Zuma. The bailouts and destruction that torpedoed our finances occurred when their members were CEOs at Transnet, Eskom, Prasa and SARS.
MK is an arsonist, complaining about the fire they started.
Madam Speaker, the data tells us that our people live in one of the most-taxed developing countries in the world. But if we quantified global hopefulness – I believe we’d top the list. Part of the reason we tolerate higher taxes is this hope.
But as Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.”
As the DA, we are not afraid to swing the hatchet of hope in order to bury the mistakes of the past.
- Four quarters of economic growth.
- An escape from the greylist
- A climb up the ratings ladder
- Debt finally stabilised
It’s clear that we’ve not yet won because we still have to pass laws like this.
But we have stopped losing.
So we support this bill, Madam Speaker.