Mr NEVILLE —My question is addressed to the Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business. Minister, can you inform the House of the efforts the government is undertaking to create employment opportunities for Australia's unemployed? What are the obstacles preventing the government from implementing its jobs program?

Mr REITH (Workplace Relations and Small Business) —I thank the member for Hinkler for his question. He asked what we have been doing to help create jobs. I am pleased to inform the honourable member that immediately after the election we started to implement the policies which were endorsed by the Australian people at the last election and which were aimed at starting to resolve some of the problems created by our predecessors, whose policies cost this country a lot of jobs. One of the things we did was to introduce and use the regulation power. This is a power available to this government, as it was used five times by my predecessor, the member for Kingsford-Smith, in respect of unfair dismissals. Why did we introduce that? Because we said to the Australian people, `If you elect us, we will do all within our power to provide a fair go for small business. If you give small business a fair go then we believe there are 50,000 jobs to be created.'

It was very interesting last week that the Senate committee heard some people running small business give evidence about the impact of the unfair dismissal laws on their business and their intentions of creating jobs. A Mr Tonkin of Tonkin's Car Audio told the committee:

Yes, we would certainly put on more people. At the moment every person you put on now is a potential litigation waiting to happen.

A Mr Maloney said:

This year I was planning to hire two people full time. Those people will now not have jobs.

He went on to say:

This is real. It is hurting people. It is putting people out of business and breaking up families. It is costing Australia and it is costing the economy.

What do the Labor Party say when they are confronted by the reality of their own policies? They have the cheek to say, `This is a political stunt. The real people should come up and tell us what is really happening in our businesses.' The fact is that Labor created this problem. They are now the barriers, standing in the way of a sensible solution.

It is exactly the same with youth employment. We have a problem with youth employment and, as a government, we are working to fix that. We are again fixing up the problems created by Labor. They of course think that a lot of these young people's jobs are jobs not worth having. I at least pay tribute to the member for Melbourne, who said in his book:

The ridiculous notion that some jobs are not real jobs but merely theme park jobs or McJobs must be abandoned. Many of the jobs in the old economy are no more fulfilling or better paid than such new jobs, and they are often dirtier and more dangerous.

We reckon a job at McDonald's is a job worth having. We are prepared to support those employers prepared to give young people a job. I say to the Leader of the Opposition: you have a few dissentient voices on your own backbench and frontbench. It is about time we saw some real leadership to actually create jobs in this country.