Already and this this is the Daily This is the Daily OS.
Oh, now it makes sense. Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Tuesday, the twenty fifth of March.
I'm Zara, I'm Sam.
Earlier this month, the Coalition announced it once public servants in the office five days a week. That's, of course, if it wins the next election. Then over the weekend, Prime Minister Anthony Aberzi came out swinging against the proposal, saying that working from home is important for flexibility, women in the workplace and the economy. In today's podcast, we're going to take you through what the coalition is proposing and some of the criticisms that the government has leveled since.
Zara. We first heard of working from home as an election campaign issue when the Coalition announced its plans to make public servants work from the office. Yeah, tell me about election commitment.
Yeah. So it was earlier this month and the coalition announced that if it wins the election, it expects all public servants to work from the office five days a week. At the time, Shadow Finance Minister Jane Hume described the current work from home arrangements for federal public service workers as unsustainable.
And So by public service workers, you mean people who work for government agencies, right.
Yeah, exactly, So people that are working for the federal Department of Health, Defense, Education, among other things. We're talking about three hundred and sixty five thousand people when we talk about the public servants in this story. So just to give you a sense of who would be impacted by this potential policy, the Coalition has spent quite a bit of time talking about the public service. This isn't a one off. They have made the public service a
kind of election issue for themselves. Last month they vowed to cut wasteful government spending and that included the number of people who work in the public service. Just quickly to connect those two things when they say wasteful government spending and then connect it to the public service, we're talking there about the fact that public servants are taxpayer funded.
So back to the work from home announcement. The most recent Australian Public Service survey showed that sixty one percent of public servants worked away from the office at least some of the time in twenty twenty four. So that's a majority have worked at some point away from the
office some of the time. In this context, the Coalition said as I led with that it once works in the office every day of the week now At the time, Opposition Leader Peter Dunnen said that Australian taxpayers expect government employees to be working as hard as they are. People refusing to go back to work in Canberra is not acceptable and.
We've seen similar moves from private companies across Australia who have said that they want to increase productivity and that's why they're asking people to come back into the physical Is the Coalition using the same argument in putting forward this idea.
I mean, essentially, yeah, it's exactly the same idea. The policy was first announced by Shadow Finance Minister Jane Hume in a speech to the Menzies Center, and I was reading through that speech and just pulled out a few key quotes there. She said that working from home has become a right that is creating inefficiency. She also cited a recent report from Stanford that claimed that after working from home arrangements were put in place, productivity fell by
about twenty percent. She didn't go into the kind of technicalities of that research, so we don't know particularly what workforce it's talking about. There. She also, as you said, highlighted the fact that other big Aussie companies, including NAB and CBA, have instructed their staff to return to the office. So she was saying there that the government wouldn't be an outlier if it were to have this proposal come
into fruition. And I do just want to clarify before we go any further that she did say that there could be exceptions for people coming into the office. She said that if the working from home arrangements work for the employee's department, the team, and the individual, that they would be willing to allow for that to happen.
So the coalition's position is really clear. What about the government, how have they responded, you said. Anthony Aberenezi responded to this policy over the weekend. What did he say?
Well, I think it's fair to say this is one of those times where we aren't seeing bipartisanship. I think a lot of the time we have an announcement by either the government or the coalition and then the other kind of matches it. That's sort of what happens during a campaign period. That's not what's happening here. This kind of light and day between the two parties positions. On Sunday, in a press conference, Anthony Albernesi defended working from home. Here's a bit of what he said.
This is an advantage in modern families that have enabled them to take advantage of it. It is also meant for working families where both parents are working, they're able to deal with those issues of working from home has enabled them to work full time and therefore it has increased workforce participation.
So clearly they're Labour coming down hard on the other side, advocating for work from home options continuing to be available for the public service and also for kind of Aussies.
Across the country.
Yeah. The government's criticism of the opposition's policy has broadly, i'd say, been from two main angles. The first is the impact on women and the second is the economic impact of cutting work from home options.
Why don't we start then by talking about this impact on women argument?
Yeah, So this criticism was really led by Labour's Minister for Women, Katie Gallagher, who said when the Coalition's policy was first announced that they again referring to the Coalition, don't have women's interests at heart. They don't see it as a central economic driver of growth. She went on to say that clearly the Opposition have no idea about how modern families operate, and that women have a right
to feel at risk. In response, we heard almost immediately from Opposition leader Peter Dudden, who said that this policy doesn't discriminate against people on the basis of gender, and he suggested that there were plenty of job sharing arrangements available for women who couldn't be in the office five days a week.
Okay, so that's Labour's argument around the impact on women. But then another issue there highlighting is the economic impact.
I found this one really interesting. So basically over the weekend Labor released new modeling that's just numbers that they said shows that Ozzie's would be worse off financially if they couldn't work from home. So let me walk you through it. According to this analysis, again by Labor, that needs to be said, the Coalition's plan would cost the average worker up to an extra four nine hundred and seventy six dollars a year because of the cost of transport and parking.
They were forced to go to the office five days a week.
Correct, So they're saying that if you work from home then you're not paying for the commute, inn you're not paying for a parking spot if that's how you get into work, and that if you have to do those things, you as the employee, will be worse off than if you were able to work from home. Labor also claimed that commuters would have to spend an extra two hours additionally in the car each week, or around ninety seven hours a year if they were required to be in the office every day of the week.
Which would probably be good for podcasting.
Yeah, so listening to this podcast.
Well, it is an interesting angle given the economic argument that we normally engage with on this topic is on the other side of things, right.
Yeah, I was really surprised to read this because, as you said, usually the economic argument is used to justify bringing people back to work, not keeping them at home. I remember last year Billy and I did a podcast about the New South Wales government wanting to implement something similar and at the time there was a lot of talk about how it could reinviger rate Sydney's CBD. That's because at the time some businesses were saying that they'd lost up to twenty five percent of profit on Fridays
compared to pre pandemic levels. It's because the after work bev Regino was not happening. When you're working from home, you're not going into the city and things like office spaces were becoming vacant at a rapid rate. And so that really dominated a lot of the announcement as to why the New South Wales government wanted New South Wales public servants back into the office.
And obviously that comes from you know, business groups and the businesses in the city who not just want the drinks after work, but the coffee in the morning and the cleaning of offices. I mean, so many businesses attached exactly.
But I guess for the federal government there's different jurisdiction, there's different kind of things that they have power over, and labor has as I said, kind of whittled it down to these two key areas of criticism.
And I think what's really interesting about having this debate as an election topic, it sounds like, is that there is for most people point to relate to it really closely. Yeah, I mean this is a discussion about setting the tone of how government sees flexible work. I mean, it just affects public servants at the moment, But.
I mean public servants a kind of the only workers who can be affected by a government ruling like this if you were for a private company and it's come down from your private company, not from the government. But you're right, it's a really interesting tone and precedent.
And we've previously pulled our audience on this topic. What was the response like from TDA readers.
Yeah, so we asked them, I believe when the new South Wales government announcement was first tabled, and at the time, ninety percent of respondents to our pole said that office policies should be hybrid so that they allow for both work from home and in the office, which is as we know what happens in most workplaces now. Only six percent of respondents said office policies should be a mandate to work in the office full time. It's quite a
low percentage there. We then also went on to ask them if they would reconsider working for a company if they were required to always be in the office, and around sixty percent said that they would reconsider it, And so I think these are interesting numbers to keep in mind if the coalition, you know, there's a lot of ifs here but if the coalition does win the next election and then does follow through on this election commitment, I do think that trying to understand how the public
service both attracts and retains young staff will be really really interesting.
That's a very interesting way for a lot of people to have a touch point with this election. I mean, as you just said, this is just about the public service. But if sixty percent of people responding to a poll are going to reconsider their jobs, if they're told to work from the office every day, then a lot of private businesses will be looking at the tone that's set in this discussion as well and the views that come out on this topic.
Of course, and it must be said that young people have a different perspective on this. You know. We a lot of us entered the workforce for the first time around COVID and I don't really know anything else. So there's lots of layers to this, lots of nuance and definitely one to keep an eye on.
Thank you so much, Sarah. We are certainly getting into election territory now that we're starting to break down these kind of foreign against on some big issues. We'll be back again with some headlines in the afternoon. Until then, have a fantastic day if you're working from home or at work. My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a
proud Arunda Bunjelung Kalkutin woman from Gadighl country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.