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The Democratic Alliance (DA) broadly welcomes Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan's Medium Term Budget Policy statement. We agree with the minister that these are difficult times for the South African economy, but that by working tirelessly to improve the performance of the public sector, attract foreign investment, tackle corruption and advance prudent fiscal and monetary policy management, we can deliver the sort of growth that can create jobs and long-term economic prosperity.

The most important aspect of today's speech was the minister's utter eschewal of pressure from the ANC's alliance partners, and those fellow members of President Zuma's cabinet who are advocating an array of populist interventions.

Yesterday, Minister Patel promised that today's Medium Term Budget Policy would expand upon the macroeconomic implications of his "New Growth Path" strategy. Instead, barring one brief mention of yesterday's press conference, Minister Gordhan acted as if no such strategy had ever been announced.

This will no doubt be perceived as a slap in the face of the ANC's alliance partners, who have been consistently pressurising the Treasury over the last year. However, it is a critical and most encouraging stance that the Minister of Finance has adopted. He appears determined to continue to maintain the course he has charted in previous budgets.

There are a number of other important points that Minister Gordhan made in his speech today, that the DA welcomes. We applaud the renewed focus on addressing South Africa's unemployment crisis, and specifically the announcement of measures to support small businesses, and new measures to relax exchange control. We likewise welcome his steps to counter corruption in procurement processes.

The minister also spoke about much-needed incentives for youth employment. The DA continues to believe that wage subsidies are the best measure to address youth unemployment, but we are dismayed that, after the announcement of concrete proposals to subsidise the hiring of younger workers earlier this year, we are now, six months later, no closer to seeing that policy become a reality. If one of the focal points is to create opportunities for job creation, then we need to create incentives for small businesses to grow.

What is also concerning is that we have committed ourselves to R320 billion in financial support to parastatals over the next 10 years. The minister also emphasised that these would be major engines for growth and investment in the economy through state spending. It does not make sense for the state to prop up its own supposed vehicles of investment which are not sustainable without public money and to then rely on these to create growth: doing so generates no new money for the fiscus.

Likewise, the mooted National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme remains an amorphous proposal, first mooted by the Zuma administration last year, reiterated by the president in his state of the nation address earlier this year, reinforced by the ANC's NEC a short time ago, but still frustratingly light on detail from the Treasury. Since the re-announcement of the scheme as ANC policy by Dr. Zweli Mkhize in September, serious questions have been raised about how the plan is to be financed. We saw little today to reassure us that the Treasury can finance an NHI.

Minister Gordhan went out of his way to emphasise how important economic growth is to South Africa and its prospects, but it is important to have some perspective: the ANC government - through the implementation and sustained insistence upon a centralised government that limits choice and resists opportunity - has for 16 years sabotaged South Africa's prospects for real, sustained growth, comparable with other developing nations in the world. And that will only change when its attitude to ideas like the ‘developmental state' changes in turn. When it embraces competition, when it champions opportunity and fosters an environment in which small business can thrive; when it promotes choice, by reforming our labour market; and when it fully embraces the policies we need to grow and create jobs and breaks the restraints the unions have put on our potential. Thus, while Minister Gordhan is to commended for staying the course, for concentrating on job creation, for acknowledging the importance of addressing corruption and turning around our flagging public sector, there is still much to be done.