Thank you, Mr Chairman. The department is operating in an environment in which there is increasing financial pressure on it at a time of budgetary constraints. We may be out of the economic crisis in that we are beginning to see signs of growth, but shrinkage has taken place both in the economy and in the availability of budgetary finance, with an increasing number of people needing to become recipients of benefits.
Proportionally speaking, we are, in a certain sense, becoming one of the largest welfare states in the world, with about five million taxpayers providing benefits for the rest of the population. This places before us enormous challenges in which a shift from the paradigm of assistance to the paradigm of development is very important.
I stand with the hon Botha when she stresses the need to empower families to become the first centre of assistance. In this way, the primary source of development can take place through educating parents to assume the responsibility of developing their children and, through the larger family, providing the social assistance that is necessary. This would not be done within the paradigm and straitjacket of morality, but in the paradigm of social responsibility, freedom and cultural growth.
So, in that sense, the Department of Social Development is also the bearer of a broader responsibility of bringing about a sort of mini cultural revolution in changing attitudes and perceptions, and in questioning traditional roles, to enhance the level of freedom, responsibility and human growth where it is needed most. In all of this, the great challenge is to be realistic - as in the old proverb of not giving fish to those who need it, but rather teaching them to fish.
We, as the IFP, are aware of the challenges facing the department, especially in terms of staffing. The department is really a department without walls but with many, many doors opening into all fields - into the justice and education fields, into the family field and into communities.
Some of the many positive, benign things that fall under the department are done by functionaries. Some are done by a much broader infrastructure of people, who need to be brought into the fold. How do we choose them? How do we motivate them? How do we pay them? We suggest that attention be given to the creation of programmes that will bring in people not only from among those who study the social sciences at university, but also from the much broader fold of people of goodwill.