In the period between the popular fight-back by most of the political parties against swinging tax increases, when the first budget was presented, and the final vote last week, there were discreet negotiations going on. What we did not know at that point was what the DA was putting on the table. It was widely assumed, and occasionally reported, that the DA was demanding things way beyond the ambit of the actual budget, and definitely beyond what Treasury thought it could deliver.
There is an important side issue here. The ANC knows when it leaks snippets of information to its political reporter cadres – which, let’s be honest, is most of South Africa’s press – they will make assumptions beyond what was actually said. So what was leaked was this: the DA is making extreme demands way beyond the budget.
In a sense, this was true. What the DA put on the table was a raft of measures it thought would constitute a growth budget, including things like relooking at the Public Procurement Act, which, by the way, is the most appalling piece of legislation that nobody (yet) knows about, which is saying something. The act was deliberately designed to counteract a court case that found – shocker! – that bidding on state tenders has to be largely fair and sensible.
In the period between the popular fight-back by most of the political parties against swinging tax increases, when the first budget was presented, and the final vote last week, there were discreet negotiations going on. What we did not know at that point was what the DA was putting on the table. It was widely assumed, and occasionally reported, that the DA was demanding things way beyond the ambit of the actual budget, and definitely beyond what Treasury thought it could deliver.
There is an important side issue here. The ANC knows when it leaks snippets of information to its political reporter cadres – which, let’s be honest, is most of South Africa’s press – they will make assumptions beyond what was actually said. So what was leaked was this: the DA is making extreme demands way beyond the budget.
In a sense, this was true. What the DA put on the table was a raft of measures it thought would constitute a growth budget, including things like relooking at the Public Procurement Act, which, by the way, is the most appalling piece of legislation that nobody (yet) knows about, which is saying something. The act was deliberately designed to counteract a court case that found – shocker! – that bidding on state tenders has to be largely fair and sensible.
But what it did not do, which was sneakily reported in some places around the web, was seek a revision of the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act, or the Expropriation Act, or the National Health Insurance Act, or any of the whole raft of growth-destructive legislation the ANC has smashed through the GNU against the will of most of the other parties. Thus was born in the public mind, carefully nurtured by the ANC, that the DA was being “unreasonable” and “overplaying its hand”.
