Mr Chairman, the National Planning Commission was established two years ago to provide a national vision for the future of the country. Two years later we receive a proposal on how to conduct a diagnosis of our problems. I listened very carefully to the Minister and there is nothing in his "state of the nation address" that I can disagree with - the observations, the descriptions, the benign platitudes and the obvious identification of problems and challenges are common cause.
I promise that I will carefully read whatever is posted on the Internet to see whether there is a greater measure of substance. The crisp issue is this. Minister, I promise that we will take on your challenge, an invitation to make concrete proposals. We have made concrete proposals in all departments and hopefully they will receive a greater audience in your commission than they have in respect of other departments and policy centres. We would really like it if you could go to the extent of organising a meeting for us to make those submissions to the entire commission.
The difficulty that we see, though, is how your commission fits into this process. The vision is overdue. The implementing actions are long overdue. What is required is a change of attitude. The proposals exist and they will be put forward. They are painful. Who is to impose the pain? Pain today is gain tomorrow. It is the path of each and every society which has sought to develop a better future.
Through you, Mr Chairperson, to the hon Minister: Is your commission endowed with the political power to bring together and implement a vision? Are we not trying to lead from a centre supplementing the lack of leadership which exists elsewhere? Are we not trying to address a problem which is much bigger? We know what our problems are. We have no long-term vision for the industrial development of the country, beyond the current flood of subsidies and the extensions of the welfare state to our industry. I refer both to state subsidies and our private subsidies which consumers are forced to contribute because of cartels, corruption, high import tariffs, regulatory constraints, preferential procurement, etc. What happens when the subsidies stop? Or are they meant to go on forever and ever? I raise this issue because this is an issue that we have been discussing in the Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry, where the discussion gets stopped. We are subsidising what we have and we cannot move forward.
It is the same thing with education. Education is not a challenge; it is a disaster. It is a problem. Now, who is going to have the political guts to restructure the entire process, recognise the mistakes which were made in 1994, and scrap the outcomes-based education? Will your commission do that? There is no greater investment in national assets than in education, and if we lack that investment, everything else falls - that is the flaw. We have no longer ...