House Chairperson, this department's flagship document, the New Growth Path, suggests that its ideas can create 5 million new jobs by 2020. Lets see how that is going.
On the day that the Minister tabled the New Growth Path in November 2010, there were 6,5 million unemployed South Africans. Today there are almost 7 million. So, right now there are 500 000 more unemployed people than there were the day the New Growth Path was introduced.
The increase in unemployment during the lifetime of the New Growth Path is probably not a direct result of the muddled policies in the document, because almost all of them have not been implemented, thankfully. The whole country has been talking about the National Development Plan instead.
However, unemployment has almost certainly been worsened by the ideological stand-off between the ideas coming out of the Department of Economic Development on the one hand, and those coming from National Treasury and the National Planning Commission on the other. The best example of this is seen in the shameful Youth Employment Accord published last month under the stewardship of Minister Patel and the Department of Economic Development. I encourage all the members of this House to go and read this document. I'm sure they will agree with me that it is one of the weakest documents that this government has ever worked on.
Most of the ideas in the Youth Employment Accord will simply not work for creating new jobs. There is no way that youth brigades or youth co- operatives can even begin to create the millions of jobs we need for young South Africans. This idea of youth set-asides would have a significant distortionary effect on the labour market. Most importantly, the Youth Employment Accord reads like an embarrassing effort to oppose Treasury's youth employment tax incentive. Not only does it lack any reference to the incentive, but it also actively speaks out against it.
This means we are in an extraordinary situation, in which National Treasury has now tabled not one, but two tax incentives to subsidise the employment of young people. Whilst the so-called Youth Employment Accord is meant to represent the overall strategy to tackle youth unemployment in South Africa, it leaves out the tax incetives entirely. It is a tragedy for this government to have an ideological stand-off blocking progress in the exact parts of Cabinet that should be working to create jobs.
Thirty-eight percent of South Africa's workforce cannot find work, or has given up looking. In the past three months, the ranks of the unemployed nationally have increased by 73 000. This is despite the best efforts of the Western Cape, where we've brought the number of unemployed workers down by 16 000 in the same period.
Imagine how many more workers could have had the chance to join us in the gallery today if government worked hard at bringing down the cost of doing business, as they do in Minister Patel's vague record. Over the past five years, we have given this department R2,7 billion of taxpayers' money. With this money, the department has achieved three things.
Firstly, it has published six accords that together have not created a single job. Secondly, it has given Cosatu a voice in the economic cluster. Lastly, it has worked hard to provide ideological opposition to Treasury and the National Planning Commission, blocking new policies and reforms that would start to tackle the world's highest rate of unemployment. In anybody's book that is not good value for money. I thank you. [Applause.]