Change Starts Now manifesto outlines wealth tax to fund R500bn reconstruction

Grants and social support policy

• End the segmentation of society into permanent “winners” and “losers”;


• Make significant increases in social and welfare grants, from the cradle to the grave;


• Urgently and publicly evaluate and consider proposals for a universal basic income;


• Apply the principle “the most vulnerable receive urgent care and can live with dignity and hope”; and


• Only 46% of South Africans have a running tap in their homes – deal with water as an emergency.

Climate change and the environment

• Promote renewable energy;


• Ensure SA becomes a global supplier of critical minerals; and


• Set up green industrial parks to become net exporters of electricity.

Crime and corruption

• Decentralise crime-fighting to improve safety; 


• Introduce more community-level policing;


• Get illegal guns out of the system through dedicated intelligence-driven, specialist firearm units; and


• Restore and strengthen trusted, targeted and specialised policing units.

Economy

• Set up a Reconstruction and Growth Fund capitalised and ring-fenced outside the fiscus to protect it. 
  
  
  
  • Funded by a once-off, three-year temporary reconstruction tax. This will raise R500-billion to fund immediate social protection interventions;
  
  
  • Funded through a wealth tax of 1.5% a year for three years; a corporate income tax increase of 4.2 percentage points for three years (from 28% to 32.2%); a tax increase for top earners (more than R1.8-million a year) from 45% to 49.5%; and a 1%-a-year charge on retirement funds for three years;
  
  
  
  


• Focus relentlessly on electricity, logistics and water infrastructure to increase GDP growth to above 2.5%;


• Foster competition in network industries to increase growth by a further 1%;


• Use the private sector for a massive infrastructure investment drive through public-private partnerships; and


• Accelerate investment to 22% of GDP over five years to create five million jobs and reduce unemployment by 37%.

Education

• Expand early childhood education – only 1.6 million of 11 million children aged 0-4 years are in education programmes. Fix this.

Food

• Emergency relief for an epidemic of hunger – one in five people doesn’t have enough food to eat


• Increase the child support grant;


• Target support for children younger than three facing stunting;


• Increase support for subsistence and smallholder farmers; and


• Make nutritious, basic foodstuffs cheaper.

Health

• Centralise strategic decision-making and decentralise operational decisions;


• Treat public hospitals as autonomous facilities;


• Develop a bridge between the public and private health systems;


• Give provincial hospitals greater autonomy to contract;


• Incentivise medical schemes to buy from either public or private health;


• Allow private practitioners to follow their patients into the public sector; and


• Develop a universal framework for emergency care.

National Health Insurance – NHI

• Adopt the recommendations of the Health Market Inquiry, which focused on excessive private-sector costs, and make significant proposals;


• Build bridges between private and public systems;


• Decentralise health services; and


• Jardine says the NHI Bill is a plan for a R600-billion state-owned enterprise, built on a failed model.

Housing

• End spatial inequality by promoting mixed-income, high-density housing development; and


• Reorient the housing budget to increase demand-side subsidies rather than direct-supply programmes.

Jobs

• Use infrastructure investment to drive massive employment – five million opportunities; and

Land

• Convene a National Land Council to review the different aspects of land reform.

Energy

• Focus relentlessly on electricity, logistics and water infrastructure;


• End blackouts in three to four years; and


• Focus on renewable energy.

Civil service

• Professionalise the civil service. This is a pivotal focus for Change Starts Now. It proposes the wholesale improvement of public service and administration; and


• Implement models for viable institutions of shared governance that harvest the best ideas, energy and collaborations.

Reality check

• It’s a beautiful and short manifesto that starts with an essay to envision a future state for South Africa. This resonates with the Freedom Charter, the Constitution and the National Development Plan, which all start this way.


• The tax increases for a Reconstruction Fund will require a lot of influence work, because South Africa’s small tax base is already highly taxed and poorly serviced, with high dependency levels on individuals.

Cool things

• The health, food security and early childhood education proposals are excellent. DM