House Chair, hon members and the speakers who spoke here, I stand here to thank the committee for their sterling work and their recommendations and conclusions which will enrich the budget process. So, I thank you very much Chairperson of the committee and you members. [Applause.]
The different contributors to this debate made various valuable contributions, all of you. So I thank you for that, you have indeed enriched the process. So, House Chair, the challenges that we face, is of a slow down in economic growth [Laughter.]...it's an EFF gogo [something scary] [Laughter.] coupled with that, are the risks in the global economy.
Now, against the background of this risk in the global economy and the slow down in the South African economy by that very fact, one should expect revenue growth to slow down. This naturally puts a lot of pressure on the expenditure side of the budgets.
So, it is not very helpful for somebody to say; I can see that revenue is slowing down but I want higher expenditure. It doesn't gel. So, responsible fiscal management needs a basic understanding of what needs to be done. You can't say that you complain about the increasing debt mounting but continue to say expand your budget deficit before borrowing, it makes no technical economic sense [Laughter.] you can't say that we should spend more but then you say no, no don't increase, again the basic fundamentals of economics, don't work. [Applause.] So, therefore, our immediate challenge is to grow the economy; and to that extend, we have put in place measures which support the growth process. Secondly - you did not read the speech - [Laughter.] secondly, we need to contain wastage and remove corruption from the government system.
Thirdly, yes, with raining debt and the debt service cost, we have to have very stringent cost management measures, in order that our fiscals' stance must be supportive of the growth that we require in the economy.
I might have to define what fiscals is to somebody, but let me not doing it, let me not do it today - having said all of that, we have to manage certain tensions within our society very carefully. For example, the manner in which we talk about the Public Wage Bill, we must be very about how we talk about it. And nobody has said we are reducing the number of employees, so let people not go out there and tell lies, we never said that. We said that the challenge we have is the Wage Bill, the two things are not the same and I think it's important to understand that you can have larger Wage Bill with a smaller number of employees or actually you can have a larger number of employees with a reasonably managed Wage Bill. The challenge, if I could say to some people that side, the challenge is to understand the dialectics of the matter [Laughter.] about the relationship between these two.
Having said all of that, Chair of Chairs, I really honestly thank you all for your contributions, I don't want to stand between you and dinner. Thank you very much.
Debate concluded.