As a democrat, I am compelled to answer a follow-up question. Yes, it is a Green Paper.
If I have your permission and that of the House, Deputy Chair, may I ask that the question by the hon Mokgoro remain and then I can deal with it later.
I think it's important that we allow the process to continue so that we can understand how the National Planning Commission will work. Amongst the outputs that we will have to deal with are those that the hon Shiceka covered earlier. There must be an alignment between the national plan, the provincial growth and development strategies and the integrated development plans, IDPs. This becomes a fundamentally important task because I have a sense that - and I'm sure that the hon Shiceka wouldn't necessarily agree with me - the IDPs are developed with the full participation of people. They then get taken away by ward committees, where the people who have participated don't actually know which of their ideas have been accepted, as there's very little communication. When budgets are drawn up, they tend not to look at the IDPs, and then the people think that the councillors have done something wrong.
The way in which we engender participation with these matters is something we must consider, because in the Constitution and certainly in the Local Government: Municipal Systems Act, Act 44 of 2003, where participatory democracy is defined, I think we have a lot of learning to do. But the bigger challenge is getting alignment between these three sets of outputs; that's important going forward. For now we have to allow the institutions to be developed as per the Green Paper and in terms of the recommendations that will come from the ad hoc committee.
The one issue of concern - and the hon Mokgoro asks about provincial planning commissions and so on - is that we will have a plethora of planning committees and commissions everywhere that won't talk to each other. The President was, in fact, quite forthright when he said:
We deliver the state of the nation address, and the premiers and the mayors come. Then they rush back to deliver the state of the province addresses and state of the village addresses, the speeches for which have already been drafted. So, it isn't their part of the state of the nation, it's just something that's done.
We've lived through this. We've lived through RDP, where everybody had RDP offices, and we have lived through other things where everybody had, for example, HIV/Aids offices, gender offices, BEE offices and Asgisa offices. I want to communicate through the hon Mokgoro that we should in fact try and limit the enthusiasm with which we establish these bodies because we don't want to construct the Tower of Babel. We need a single set of messages about a single plan. Our task is to align. The more offices there are, the greater the risk of misalignment. This I think is something we have to work on. It's something that we are communicating to the premiers as well, but I think we must all take the message forward because we all have some constituency responsibilities and people ask us about this. Thank you very much.
Assessment of challenges facing people with disabilities in accessing the job market and in the workplace, particularly the Public Service
48. Ms N D Ntwanambi (ANC) asked the Minister of Women, Children and People with Disabilities:
Whether her department or the government has undertaken any assessment in respect of challenges facing people with disabilities in (a) accessing the job market and (b) the workplace, particularly in the Public Service; if not, why not; if so, (i) what are the relevant details and (ii) how does her department plan to intervene?