Coalition channels Trump with work-from-home ban
Public servants will be required to work from the office five days a week if the Coalition is successful at the upcoming federal election.
Coalition plans to ban public servants working from home are straight out of the playbook of Donald Trump, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says.
Public servants would be forced to work in the office five days a week should the Coalition win the next election.
The opposition’s finance spokeswoman Jane Hume, who outlined the Coalition’s proposal in a speech on Monday night, said work-from-home arrangements had made parts of the public sector ineffective.
“While work-from-home arrangements can work, in the case of the Australian public service, it has become a right that is creating inefficiency,” she said.
“Work-from-home arrangements for public servants should only be in place when the arrangements work for the employee’s department, their team, and the individual. This isn’t controversial.”
The latest employee census of federal public servants found 61 per cent work from home at least part of the week.
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The Coalition has also vowed to cut back the public service, planning to cut about 36,000 people.
Albanese hit out at the proposal, saying the Coalition’s approach to public servants was copying that of the Trump administration in the United States.
“We don’t have to adopt all of America’s policies. What we have here from Peter Dutton is he’s so policy lazy, him and his team,” Albanese said in Sydney on Tuesday.
Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher said the work-from-home ban would put women at a greater disadvantage due to the lack of flexible employment arrangements.
“I would see this announcement, if you can call it that from the opposition, as certainly a step in the wrong direction for working women,” she told ABC Radio.
“They clearly have no idea about how working families manage modern life. I mean, across the economy working-from-home arrangements are in place.”
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The Australian Council of Trade Unions president, Michele O’Neil, said ending work-from-home arrangements will hurt working women the most..
“Flexibility around where you work is helping 36 per cent of Australians balance busy lives and earn more money,” O’Neil said.
“If this enables a woman working in Services Australia in Goulburn, Townsville, Nowra or Perth to work full time and provide for her family, then the Coalition should support that instead of mindlessly following whatever Trump is doing.”
But Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said people not wanting to go back to the office in the public sector was unacceptable.
“I don’t think it’s unreasonable that people like in many other workplaces are asked to go back to work for face-to-face contact and that’s exactly what will happen if there is a change of government after the election,” he said in Brisbane.
“We need an efficient delivery of government services.”
He said there were “plenty of job sharing arrangements” for women who couldn’t be in the office full time.
“Our desire is to get public servants who are, at the moment, refusing to go back to work… and that is not acceptable,” Dutton said.
“There will be a commonsense approach as there always has been. But I am not going to tolerate a position where taxpayers are working harder than ever to pay their own bills and they’re seeing public servants in Canberra refuse to go to work.”
