Hon Speaker, countries that have made huge advances in reducing unemployment and creating jobs will tell you that to succeed you must create an environment for businesses to flourish, make it simpler and cheaper to create jobs, and reduce red tape.
This principle is broadly supported in the National Development Plan when it calls for ways to improve the functioning of the labour market in order to promote large-scale job creation in our country. Several components of this Bill do not represent what is promoted in the NDP. Although this Bill have some positive elements that will contribute to streamlining the labour market, it also sounds the death knell for private companies whose core business is to reduce unemployment and poverty by facilitating job creation opportunities.
We recognise and support every attempt to eradicate the exploitation of vulnerable job seekers, but for government to compete with the private sector, instead of creating partnerships, and to introduce more red tape for businesses to operate is simply suicidal. Unless government incentivises businesses that create jobs instead of punishing those who do, our unemployment rate will continue to grow; poverty levels will soar and the gap between the rich and the poor will widen. Unless government creates a real partnership with the private sector, it will retain the burden of high levels of poverty and massive inequality.
This Bill, instead of promoting public-private partnerships, introduces the complete opposite. It promotes the establishment of institutions that will compete with the private sector whilst, at the same time, introducing more regulations to make it almost impossible for private enterprises to profit from job placement schemes.
It does not help South Africa's labour market to ask the Department of Labour to do a job that is currently being done for free by private enterprises. Fining businesses for up to R50 000 for not declaring information relating to vacancies in their companies is not just absurd, but hilarious.
When will the ANC government learn that overregulation is not how economies grow and is not how jobs are created? When will the ANC learn that if economies do not grow and jobs are not created, then government will not be able to resolve the unemployment crisis of this country? The ANC is too stubborn to listen to the masses. That is why people like Mrs Johanna Phala, a single mother of three from Seshego, told the ANC Deputy President that she has lost hope in the ANC because it failed to create the jobs that it promised. There are millions of desperate people like that out there in our country today who have lost all hope in the government creating jobs. Instead of focusing all the energy in growing our economy, which will create jobs, our government is playing around with ridiculous Bills that will simply make this situation worse. Thank you. [Applause.]