Deputy Speaker, in February this year the DA said that we would not support the fiscal framework and revenue proposals as set out in the national Budget. We do not support the economic policies underlying the numbers, because they do not address the problems of unemployment and poverty that prevent our people from reaching their full potential to become everything that they are capable of being. Our position on fiscal policy is clear. Government must intervene when economic circumstances require its intervention and the intervention must focus on stimulating job-creating economic activity. Our alternative budget applied this principle of countercyclicality and relaxed the deficit to 5,99% of gross domestic product, GDP, that we consider to be nearing the outer limit at this point in our economic development. Our alternative set out increased government spending on the productive side of our economy.
We were hoping for bold action from the national government to demonstrate its political will to tackle the jobs haemorrhage. It could do this by implementing the promised wage subsidy; offering meaningful incentives to entrepreneurs and small and medium businesses, the net job creators in our economy; encouraging domestic savings through improved tax relief on interest and on savings; improving the efficiency of the state-owned enterprises to reduce their drain on the people's money; and crucially, ensuring that confidence in our economy remains intact and is strengthened.
We welcome the Minister's focus on job creation and his sincere determination to attend to the leakage from the public financial system that is nothing other than shameful theft from the most vulnerable members of our society who will never walk along a pathway out of poverty while national government remains disinterested in its construction. The Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement highlights our deteriorating macroeconomic circumstances. Revenue estimates are down on the back of declining corporate activity and the deficit has increased from 5,3% to 5,5% of GDP. The only significant upward trend is in the Public Sector Wage Bill that reflects government's position as the largest so-called job creator in our economy.
The DA sees absolutely no problem in offering appropriate compensation to members of the public service who add value to our people through their service delivery efforts at schools, hospitals, police stations and other delivery sites. However, we are vigorously opposed to the people's money being wasted on grossly overpaid deployed cadres in a bloated bureaucracy that adds no value to the upliftment of our people and only serves the self- interests of the national governing party. Million rand plus salaries for cadres of the National Youth Development Agency, NYDA, cadres is only one example.
Before the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement was tabled, the DA set out our expectations for government to cut unnecessary expenditure by disbanding pointless state entities, cutting indulgent expenditure on Ministers and officials and improving financial management. The Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement presented an opportunity for government to signal its budget priorities for 2012 on measures to stimulate job creation; future focused investments in education; health; infrastructure and growth enabling projects; support for entrepreneurs and small business; incentives for manufacturing; clarification of the implications of national health insurance; and bold action to eliminate wastage and leakage from the public financial system.
In the debate on Thursday last week, the Minister said that I am in the habit of getting things wrong. I speak on behalf of the DA and we never claimed that R30 billion is stolen from people each year through massive leakage in the public financial system - it was the Special Investigations Unit. We never claimed that fruitless and wasteful expenditure is increasing - it was the Auditor-General. We never claimed that South Africa's recovery from the great recession is markedly slower than in comparable countries - it was the International Monetary Fund, IMF. They presented to the Standing Committee on Finance last week; I was there. They concluded that South Africa's current predicament is partly on account of the severity of exogenous shocks, but that the inefficiency of product and labour markets has likely also exacerbated the impact of these shocks. Simply put, government's economic policy is impeding our growth. The IMF revised their estimate of our GDP growth downward to 3% for this year and 3% for 2012 - both lower than the macroeconomic projections of the National Treasury.
When Parliament enacted the Money Bills Amendment and Related Matters Act in 2009, it made provision for the establishment of a budget office as a resource to committees and Members of Parliament in their process to amend the national and adjustments Budget. No progress has been made on this and, in the meanwhile, our work must go on. The numbers on the fiscal framework reflect government's low growth policy regime, and a budget office would likely confirm this conclusion.
National government's failure to silence what it knows to be a reckless economy-crushing debate on nationalisation and expropriation without compensation; failure to contain the massive leakage from the public financial system; and failure to present a workable plan on how public financial expenditure patterns will be changed from excessive current consumption expenditure to enduring productive spending signals the incoherence and lack of political will in economic policy direction that drives potential investors into the arms of more attractive destinations; erodes the confidence of local participants; and ensures a low growth path that drains the hopes and dreams of our people.
We agree with the Minister that our relatively small open economy is one of the innocent bystanders in a global economic crisis that was not of our making. But we cannot crawl around on our knees to be kicked around by circumstances beyond our control. We must up our game and implement economic policies that work.
The DA is not opposing for the sake of opposition, we are opposing a low growth path to nowhere. Show us the policies, show us the jobs, show us the actual result on the fiscal framework, show us improvement in the lives of the unemployed and people currently trapped in poverty and we will be extremely happy to have been wrong. Thank you very much. [Applause.]