Thank you, hon Chairperson, and apologies from the Minister in the Western Cape for his absence from the House. We hope that the House will understand the situation. [Interjections.] In connection with the shacks along all the roads in all provinces, we must remember that that is a historical problem. All of us must try to address that problem. Don't blame each other. We cannot blame the ANC, and the ANC cannot blame the DA. We must try to solve the problem together. [Interjections.]
The Western Cape government's vision includes the development of integrated and sustainable human settlements. Fortuitously, our strategy for realising that vision is aligned with the national government's Outcome 8, namely Sustainable Human Settlements and Improved Quality of Household Life. In order to create integrated and sustainable human settlements we need to take a very careful look at the social, legislative and physical factors involved in creating such settlements and whether or not our current ways of thinking and doing things are supporting or inhibiting this objective.
Central to the issue of sustainability is job creation. Job creation may appear to be unrelated to housing, yet it actually underpins the success of housing in our country. When people have jobs, they have the power to pay for services, they have an inherent sense of dignity and they have the ability to pay something towards their homes. If too many people cannot pay for their services, municipalities will eventually go bankrupt and there will be no more services.
Human settlements need to be sustainable. This means that people need to be close to job opportunities, transport routes, schools, and hospitals. For transport routes to be economically viable, business centres to be vibrant and for schools to be near where people live, we need high population densities - which means the densification of human settlements.
If we look at the pictures of housing developments that are shown to us and the dreams sold to people, then they are all pictures of single-stand houses with a piece of ground around them. By doing this we keep them entrenched in poverty, as they have to use their minimal resources to travel to work or send their children far to school and they often spend hours every day travelling. No wonder parents have little time for their children or children are too tired to study. The pictures we use to promote housing must change from nice little neat houses to blocks of high-density apartments surrounded by transport routes, close to businesses and full of people sharing public spaces.
When we have high-density projects, it's much easier to produce high- density rental settlements. The national Minister and I - not me but the Minister in the Western Cape, with his comments in his recent budget speech - support the densification of settlements.
The national Minister has also stated that there will be a future cut-off in government-subsidised housing and this creates an urgency to find ways to get beneficiaries to pay towards their housing and, once again, they need jobs. I am delivering this speech on behalf of the Minister, and that is why I'm saying that. [Interjections.]