Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, we're talking about the same government that spends almost half of its $1.2 billion annual budget on salaries and benefits to our employees; the same government that does not have a comprehensive human resource plan for the future. We don't have that, but yet we're embarking on developing a framework. To me it's like putting the cart before the horse here. We have to try to get a plan for the future and if we want to get a plan for the future, you start with your biggest expenditure, Mr. Chairman, and that biggest expenditure is the 500-and-some-odd million dollars that this government spends every year off the top. It's gone. Every year. I've talked about this before. How sustainable is that growth at 3 percent a year? It's compounded annually, every year. We pay more and more every year, guaranteed. How long can we afford to be paying the compounded effect of increasing employees? That's where we should start.
Mr. Chairman, I just have to take issue with this and I don't know how else to put it, but if there is a framework... Let's put it this way, Mr. Chairman, if there is a framework, and I'll give the Minister this -- and some of my colleagues that are intent on having a framework in place for us -- let's get the framework. But if we still don't have a deal on resource revenue sharing, what are these three employees going to be doing in a policy shop designed on macroeconomic policy if we've got no money to spend or we've got nothing to gauge anything on? It's all hypothetical. You can dream, and I talk to the adolescent kid. We can dream, we can hope and we can pray. That's all we can do. I mean, let's be realistic about things. Let's get a framework. My colleague from Thebacha talked about getting a framework. I agree. We probably need a framework and we needed it years ago, but we don't need three people sitting in a shop until we have some surety on what our revenues are and we don't, absolutely not. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.