March 24, 2025 • 11 mins
Earlier this month, the Coalition announced it wants public servants in the office five days a week if it wins the next election. Over the weekend, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came out strongly against the proposal, saying that working from home is important for flexibility, women in the workforce and the economy. In today’s podcast, we explain what the Coalition is proposing, and some of the criticisms the Government has levelled since.
Hosts: Zara Seidler and Sam Koslowski
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Already and this this is the Daily This is the
Daily OS.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh, now it makes sense. Good morning and welcome to
the Daily OS. It's Tuesday, the twenty fifth of March.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
I'm Zara, I'm Sam.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
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
(00:41):
going to take you through what the coalition is proposing
and some of the criticisms that the government has leveled since.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
And So by public service workers, you mean people who
work for government agencies, right.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
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
(01:47):
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.
(02:12):
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
(02:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
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
(03:27):
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.
(03:47):
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
(04:08):
would be willing to allow for that to happen.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
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?
Speaker 2 (04:21):
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,
(04:41):
in a press conference, Anthony Albernesi defended working from home.
Here's a bit of what he said.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
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
(05:08):
increased workforce participation.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Across the country.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Why don't we start then by talking about this impact
on women argument?
Speaker 2 (05:40):
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
(06:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Okay, so that's Labour's argument around the impact on women.
But then another issue there highlighting is the economic impact.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
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
(06:50):
average worker up to an extra four nine hundred and
seventy six dollars a year because of the cost of
transport and parking.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
They were forced to go to the office five days
a week.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
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
(07:24):
hours a year if they were required to be in
the office every day of the week.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Which would probably be good for podcasting.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Yeah, so listening to this podcast.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
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
(08:02):
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
(08:23):
why the New South Wales government wanted New South Wales
public servants back into the office.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
And we've previously pulled our audience on this topic. What
was the response like from TDA readers.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
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
(10:49):
out on this topic.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
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
(11:26):
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.
Already and this this is the Daily This is the
Daily OS.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh, now it makes sense. Good morning and welcome to
the Daily OS. It's Tuesday, the twenty fifth of March.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
I'm Zara, I'm Sam.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
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
(00:41):
going to take you through what the coalition is proposing
and some of the criticisms that the government has leveled since.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
And So by public service workers, you mean people who
work for government agencies, right.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
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
(01:47):
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.
(02:12):
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
(02:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
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
(03:27):
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.
(03:47):
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
(04:08):
would be willing to allow for that to happen.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
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?
Speaker 2 (04:21):
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,
(04:41):
in a press conference, Anthony Albernesi defended working from home.
Here's a bit of what he said.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
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
(05:08):
increased workforce participation.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Across the country.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Why don't we start then by talking about this impact
on women argument?
Speaker 2 (05:40):
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
(06:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Okay, so that's Labour's argument around the impact on women.
But then another issue there highlighting is the economic impact.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
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
(06:50):
average worker up to an extra four nine hundred and
seventy six dollars a year because of the cost of
transport and parking.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
They were forced to go to the office five days
a week.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
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
(07:24):
hours a year if they were required to be in
the office every day of the week.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Which would probably be good for podcasting.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Yeah, so listening to this podcast.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
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
(08:02):
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
(08:23):
why the New South Wales government wanted New South Wales
public servants back into the office.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
And we've previously pulled our audience on this topic. What
was the response like from TDA readers.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
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
(10:49):
out on this topic.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
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
(11:26):
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.
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