Deputy Speaker, hon members and colleagues from the Cabinet, let me firstly thank all the parties for their reasonably enthusiastic and unanimous support for our first R1 trillion Budget. Thank you very much. [Applause.] It's fine, you can clap. We need to applaud everybody. [Applause.] Let me also extend our appreciation to the chair of the standing committee, Mr Mufamadi and his team, and also the NCOP committee and its chairperson, Mr De Beer, for the excellent recommendations they made as a result of their deliberations.
We want to reiterate our three key fiscal guidelines which underpin this fiscal framework. The first guideline is countercyclicality, which means that when the economy is not doing well, the state must play a supportive role, and when it is doing well, the state should withdraw its supportive role and build up its resources. The second guideline is intergenerational equity, which means to manage your finances today so that you don't impose too much of a burden on future generations. The third guideline is debt sustainability, which says manage your debt in such a way that we don't end up where the boomerang might go, Mr Koornhof. I think all of us would say that the Treasury team and the Ministers' Committee on the Budget have done extremely well in presenting this fiscal framework to South Africa. In addition, we have managed to carefully balance support for economic growth and job creation - however modest it might be - together with a medium-term fiscal consolidation approach, so that we don't make the mistakes that Europe, belatedly, is beginning to realise it had made. Today, a key European commissioner responsible for social security is having reservations about the extreme emphasis on austerity and the impact that it actually has on ordinary people.
Many speakers correctly pointed out our emphasis on changing the composition of expenditure. Let me caution that these sorts of changes in composition don't happen overnight. What we are going to require is a conscious, multiyear effort to ensure that consumption on the one hand, the wage bill on the other hand and the interest bill on the third hand all change in order to achieve and in favour of the investment part of our Budget being increased far more than we have increased it up to this point in time.
Linked to this - as many hon members have pointed out - is our commitment to present a draft, long-term fiscal framework later this year, so that this constant apprehension that is brought to the fore - will we cope with National Health Insurance, NHI; will we cope with social security changes; will we manage this infrastructure expenditure? - is answered within the context of a sustainable framework that will continue to reflect the kind of balances that we have committed to through the fiscal guidelines. As the chairperson of the committee has indicated, the moderation of consumption spending - on which a lot more needs to be done than the small haircuts that we are talking about at present - is the kind of direction we want to take and a commitment that we actually want to sustain.
Similarly, although we as a country are not doing extremely well on the jobs front, we can certainly record the fact that hundreds of thousands of jobs were created in the last year. As the chairperson pointed out, some 850 000 jobs could be created over the next three years, even at a modest level of growth. If we are able to ignite growth further within the South African context and get the enthusiasm - as Mr Swart was saying - of all South Africans to start employing more people and creating more enterprises, that number could increase quite formidably.
Several hon members have raised the question of infrastructure funding, which was more than adequately dealt with in both the Budget Review and the Budget Speech. Let me repeat that infrastructure funding is a combination of funding - from the fiscus, from debt, from state-owned enterprises, SOEs, from development finance institutions, DFIs, and from the private sector, where their contribution is appropriate and cost-effective at the end of the day. As we said in the Budget Speech, no good project will not be funded. The real challenge that all of us must acknowledge, and have acknowledged, is the challenge of putting together an implementation machinery, both within and outside of the state, that can effectively deliver on the infrastructure projects that we are putting together.
I am very confident that, under the guidance of the President, we will be marshalling all of our forces, which will include broader elements of our society, over the next few months so that we can put together this capacity that will enable us to get a far more effective machinery in place.
Several hon members made reference to administered prices and their impact. I am told a study was undertaken a few years ago by the National Treasury. We are going to take the dust covers off that study, take another look at administered prices in South Africa and the impact both on our economy and on individual citizens and promote, within government, a more co-ordinated approach on this question so that we don't impose an unmanageable burden on South African citizens. We will come back to Parliament on some of those questions.
I congratulate the hon Harris on his maiden speech as the spokesperson for finance for the Official Opposition and thank him for his support for the broad thrust of the Budget. However, let me assure him that building a capable state is part of our mission. However, hon Harris, building capable states doesn't happen overnight. States are built over thousands of years. The Greek state has been there for many thousands of years and you can see the condition that they find themselves in today.
So, what we have and what we need from all of us is the commitment to build the capability of a developmental state. We need to build the skill and capacity within this state that we are talking about and not be cynical - and I'm not saying that you are - about the mission to create a capable state. A capable state is what we require in order for it to play the developmental role that we actually require it to play.
The hon Harris knows that in the committee we talked about the word "cadre". I want to repeat to him that the word "cadre" comes from a long and proud tradition, meaning the best informed, the most committed, the most highly skilled, the most conscious, the most socially aware and the most socially committed. That is a cadre! [Applause.] What we have come to call "cadre deployment" is a mistaken notion. Where we would agree with every South African is that political office bearers and senior managers within the state must do better at appointing capable people in the right jobs, and the hon Tshabalala actually repeated that for us. [Interjections.]
I want to assure both the hon Koornhof and hon Harris that we are nowhere near Greece and we will never get there, whether we have a boomerang or not, hon Koornhof.
Hon Ambrosini, I must say that your resorting to concepts of nationality and ethnicity to defend your particular view of life is a rather regrettable and unfortunate way of managing a debate. [Interjections.] People like me have been nonracialists for many, many decades. Equally so, there are people on this side of the House who have a deep and profound commitment to nonracialism, who would never, never have used ethnicity as the basis for a political attack. You really need to change your speechwriter now. [Applause.]
The hon Ntapane, as well as several commentators both outside and inside the House, have made reference to these notions of the fuel levy, roads, who pays for the roads and so on. Let's look at some of the numbers. The fuel levy brings in R42,8 billion, excluding what goes to the Road Accident Fund. Of that approximately R43 billion, R9 billion goes to the metros as a way of financing them after the regional services councils' levies have been withdrawn. On the other hand, government expenditure on roads is R61,4 billion. Of this, R15 billion goes to the South African National Roads Agency Limited, Sanral; R12,6 billion goes to provincial roads; R13,8 billion goes to municipal roads and some R20 billion goes to rail and bus subsidies. Generally, a lot more is spent on roads and transport, more generally within the government system, than what we collect through the fuel levy.
Let me congratulate the hon Tshabalala on her maiden speech and her very neat balance between social security, on the one hand, and the necessity to create decent jobs in South Africa as the key way to work ourselves out of poverty, on the other.
To the other hon members, I don't have the time to address all of your issues, but thank you very much for your contributions and, once again, thanks to the committee for the excellent work it has done. [Applause.]