Economic growth path: Cosatu should contest an election if they want to sit in on Cabinet meetings

Cosatu should win an election before they can complain about being left out of a Cabinet meeting.  The labour federation has a seriously over-inflated sense of their own importance if they think that the highest decision-making body of government should be including them in decisions on economic policy, as reported in this morning's press.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) notes the release of Cosatu's own so-called "growth path" document, but we are confident that South Africans have already wholeheartedly rejected their hodgepodge of discredited, interventionist ideas that have turned many countries around the world into basket cases.

Such plans include such gems as the ‘strategic' nationalisation of "land currently used for game-farming, golf-estates and land held for speculative purposes" and the integration of private schools into the public sector.

Cosatu's document takes the usual swipe at the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR) policies without acknowledging that, while the macro-economic stability measures in GEAR were successful in turning around the Apartheid decline, it was their own blocking of the critical micro-economic reforms in GEAR - like flexibility in collective bargaining, scaled up privatisation, increased use of tax incentives and an overhaul of training programmes - that resulted in continued high unemployment and slow growth.

Cosatu will be inviting civil society organizations to engage with them on their growth path strategy at their Civil Society Conference on 27-28 October. We trust that this engagement will bring home to them just how far off course they are.

Statement issued by Tim Harris MP, Democratic Alliance Shadow Minister of Trade and Industry, October 26 2010

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