Madam Deputy Speaker, it is still Ambrosini. [Laughter.] During the budget debate the hon Minister challenged my statement that South Africa has one of the highest combined corporate, personal and indirect taxations, and it is listed as one of the difficulties that I have with the ANC in general. This is not correct.
He asked me to disclose the information and I would like to ask him publicly to give me space on his website to make that information available to him, to his department and to the whole of the country.
Secondly, we have information that a study has been conducted within the Treasury where the choice was placed between extracting more from the present tax base or trying to expand the tax base and incurring the costs of doing so. A strategic choice was made because it was in fact cheaper to extract more from the present tax base.
We have about 2,5 million taxpayers and about 16 million registered credit users. It is obvious that there is an amount of people receiving income and not paying taxes. There is an issue of fairness in respect of those who are paying taxes. We have enormous difficulties with the budget of a department which is not pursuing fairness in distributing the tax burden - trying to do the easy thing, rather than doing the hard but right thing to do, which is that of broadening the tax base.