Trevor Manuel, the Minister in the Presidency in charge of planning, told MPs that the National Planning Commission need not be made up of outside experts as his Green Paper on the commission suggested.

Replying to the submissions made to the ad hoc committee considering the Green Paper, Manuel said on Tuesday that the proposal for outside experts to advise the government has been widely criticised, including by one critic who suggested it was outsourcing development planning.

After pointing out that the cabinet considered several models — including one in which the commission consisted only of cabinet ministers.

"Do we want to create a super-cabinet?" he asked.

But he also noted that in other countries there is a mixture of ministers and outside experts.

"It might be wise to take some kind of hybrid route," he said.

One suggestion the minister appeared firmly to turn down was that put forward by business representatives, who wanted to see both business and labour represented on the commission.

He said that it was not the idea to create another Nedlac. The danger is that it would be easier to get a national 'buy-in', but the risk is that the development of a long-term plan becomes a negotiation and the plan would lose its coherence.

"One of the worst things we can do to planning … is to convert the planning commission into a large bargaining council," he said.

"The risk about representatives is there are always trade-offs between the sectors represented, instead of trade-offs that are pertinent to intermediating between the long-term future and the short-term decisions we need to take."

The risk on the other hand, he said, is that if you have only experts on the commission, then it loses political legitimacy.

One of the submissions said that if you have experts then it's elitist.

"All of us whether we are in the political leadership or the leadership of labour unions or business or the civil organisations that are in Nedlac, we are all part of the elite. Get used to it."

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