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It is hard to keep up with Australia. If it isn’t passing some of the toughest anti-vaping laws on the planet, it’s bringing in a world-first ban on social media for kids under the age of 16. Or becoming the first country to prohibit the artificial stone used for kitchen worktops that is linked with lung disease.
Now, Australia’s second most populous state of Victoria is planning another groundbreaking move: a law giving workers in both the private and public sectors the right to work from home for at least two days a week.
In the process, it is shaking the politics of remote working in a way that governments elsewhere may find hard to ignore.
And that is a daunting prospect for the 83 per cent of global chief executives who last year said they expected to see workers back in the office full-time within three years.
A similar number of Australian bosses said the same thing, so you can imagine what happened in August, when the Victorian Labor party government announced its plans for the right to work from home.
“This policy will absolutely cost Victorian jobs,” warnedBen Pfisterer, head of Melbourne’s Zeller digital payments group.
He previously launched Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Square financial services group in Australia and says if he were starting either company today, “it is unlikely that I would base them in Victoria”.
The bosses of big retailers also lined up to slam a plan the Business Council of Australia said should be scrapped because it was unnecessary, economically damaging and possibly unconstitutional.
All of which makes it striking to hear the far more guarded response from the opposition Victorian Liberal party, which is traditionally the voice of business.
“We will be constructive when the government presents its legislation,” opposition leader, Brad Battin, told me this week. It was up to the government to make sure its plans do not drive jobs and investment interstate, he added, and the government should be listening to business. But he isn’t calling for the plan to be ditched.
Why not? For one thing, polls in August showed as many as 64 per cent of voters backed the move, which some commentators think has contributed to a 10-point risein support for the Victorian government since the start of the year. Not bad for a party that has been in power for 11 years.
And it is only five months since the Liberals lost a federal election in which their Trump-like policy to force civil servants back to the office five days a week caused such a backlash it was wound back mid-campaign.
Many factors contributed to that loss, of course, and the same goes for the poll results in Victoria.
But Australia’s political tests of workplace patterns are still worth watching, not least because its work from home rates match the average for college-educated workers in 40 countries.
There, as elsewhere, the popularity of remote working is no mystery.
Commute times for Australians working from home since the pandemic have dropped by about three hours a week. For average earners, economists say, that amounts to annual savings of A$5,300, or around £2,600.
No wonder 76 per cent of Australians recently said they would want more pay to return to the workplace full-time.
It is also no surprise so many employers offer hybrid working when Australian researchers say people who do half their work at home put in just over 9 per cent more hours a week than those in the office full-time. That figure rises to nearly 20 per cent for people who work full-time at home.
I suspect that numbers like these explain why corporate real estate executives overseeing 650mn square feet of global workspace recently told the Knight Frank property group they expect the main type of working pattern in three years’ time to be hybrid.
Victoria is not due to introduce its new law until next year and few companies will be watching developments as closely as ardent corporate fans of a full return to the office, such as Amazon.
The US group told me this week that it could not speculate on how laws that have yet to come into effect might affect its Australian operations. But it was “excited” by the innovation and collaboration it had seen since its staff returned to the office five days a week. Let’s see how staff feel if they get the legal right to head back home.
