Hon Speaker, last week the Minister told us that the news flow was what was damaging South Africa. I am afraid, hon Minister, it is government policies that are doing that. In 2011 your Treasury forecast that South Africa's growth would be 4,4%. Actually, this year it's 2%.
It is because this government has an inability to introduce a single plan for the economy. This means that our fastest growing budget item over the medium-term is interest payments, which will increase to 9,7% per year for the next three years. By 2016, the year before debt is meant to stabilise, we will be spending R140 billion a year servicing our R2 trillion debt. This is more than we will spend on health care in that year.
Now the problem, hon Speaker, is that achieving the stabilisation of debt in 2017 depends on the Minister's forecast of 3,5% becoming a reality for 2017. The question is: If the Minister was so wrong three years ago in his growth forecast, how can we believe that this forecast is right, especially considering that this budget did not introduce any new measures from the National Development Plan, NDP, for implementation?
This year the Minister had to spend the entire R4 billion contingency reserve and rely on R3,5 billion's worth of underspending by government departments without the capacity to spend the money that they were given. He also had to recalibrate the budget deficit, so now we can sell state- owned entities in order to make the budget balance.
The point is, if the Minister does not introduce real reforms to drive growth higher, he will run out of these tricks to reach his budget deficit targets, and our mounting government debt will become a serious problem. Thank you. [Applause.]