Work from home is a fantastic notion and so very worthy of debate, though it does not seem to have been much of a debate tonight. The Liberals, the Nationals and the Greens are nowhere to be seen – missing in action again. It has been hours, I think, and none of them have stood up, which is really disappointing. So clearly protecting work from home does not feature highly on their priority list. Perhaps they do not see it as an important part of our modern way of life, or perhaps they do not see the pressures that households are under to balance their busy lives. Well, Victorians feel those pressures, and they sure as heck care about work from home.
The Northcote electorate has one of the highest proportions of people who do currently work from home in the state, and we are really proud of that. I see this when I knock on doors in our neighbourhoods. Time and again people will open the door and chat to me about how they are working from home that day. They are spending their time working from home, and they will tell me about how much easier it is to be able to do this, how much more productive they have been, how much money and time they have saved on travel and on child care. Fundamentally, they convey to me the importance of having choice in their lives. The Liberal Party wants to take away that choice. They are laying in wait, planning to end remote work and force thousands upon thousands of people back to the office. They have said it really explicitly, and why they do not have the guts to come out here and try and defend that position now is curious indeed.
This debate goes to the heart of what kind of workforce, what kind of economy and what kind of society we want to build in Victoria. Do we want a modern economy that recognises the realities of contemporary working life? Do we want to support working families and carers and people with disability to participate fully in the workforce? Do we want to give Victorians more flexibility, more choice and a better quality of life? Or do we want to drag workers backwards into a one-size-fits-all model that belongs in another era? That is exactly what those opposite are proposing. The member for Brighton has repeatedly demonstrated that he is completely out of touch with the realities facing modern workers and modern families. Last year he demanded that public servants be forced back into the office full time. He accused public servants of not delivering for Victorians, and he declared that every public servant should be turning up to work in the office. What an extraordinary thing to say, as though productivity is measured by where somebody sits rather than the work that they do.
The reality is that Victorian businesses and workers have embraced hybrid work arrangements. More than a third of Victorians already work from home regularly, and the data tells us that it improves workforce participation. It is not a perk. It is an essential part of adapting and evolving our modern economy into one that also enables livability, because we are not just economic units, we are people. We are people with lives and families, hobbies and passions, aspirations and hopes, commitments and burdens and complexities. What it means for people to have that time back cannot even be quantified. Think about what it means to give thousands upon thousands of Victorians the chance to see their kids in the morning rather than sneaking out the door before they wake up to take the train. What does it mean for the health and wellbeing of those families? I know how it has impacted my family when I have had to leave before being able to see the kids in the morning. It is hard. We cannot quite measure it. We do not yet have a measure for what that is, but I think that every single one of us feels that intuitively, and we know that it means a hell of a lot.
Our world-leading Labor reforms will protect the right to work from home. Under our plan Victorians whose jobs can reasonably be performed remotely will have a legal right to work from home two days a week. I know that people have questioned why this needs legislating. Why not just leave it to the market, leave it to the employers to offer? We see a problem with that, and Victorians do too. Our government undertook a really extensive survey on the future of flexible work. More than 36,000 Victorians participated, and the message could not have been clearer: 74 per cent of respondents said that the right to work from home was extremely important to them. More than 3200 people told us they did not feel comfortable asking their employer for that option, not because the arrangement was unreasonable, not because the work could not be done but because they feared the request would be rejected or held against them. Think about what that means. Thousands of workers feel unable to ask for flexibility that would improve their lives and their families’ lives, because they fear negative consequences. That is precisely why legal protections matter.
The consultation also revealed the practical benefits of work from home: how it supports people to be in the workforce, particularly those with caring responsibilities, disability, neurodiversity or chronic illness. But the most commonly cited benefit was time. More than 13,000 respondents reported commuting more than an hour each way. For those workers, even two days working from home each week means hours of their lives returned to them, hours that can be spent with children, hours that can be spent caring for ageing parents, hours participating in community life or simply hours that can be spent resting and maintaining their wellbeing. Then there are cost savings. The modelling says that the average Australian family can save about $5000 a year when you take into account commuting and parking and childcare expenses going back into people’s household budgets. The other benefit was productivity. More than 28,000 respondents reported being more productive when they did work from home – not less productive, more. They told us they were able to focus better, avoid distractions and get more work done. Interestingly, we also heard that the most popular arrangement was not full-time remote work. It was not five days a week at home, it was two days a week – a balanced model, an arrangement that allows workers to enjoy flexibility while maintaining strong workplace connections, supporting businesses, supporting the CBD economy, spreading that to local economies like those in Northcote and recognising the realities of modern life.
We understand that not all workers can work from home. Our teachers, our nurses, our firefighters, police, ambos and the many hospitality workers in my community in Northcote – these people work incredibly hard, and we are deeply grateful to them. Although work from home may not be the arrangement that they personally have, work from home still benefits them. It may be their partner who can put the washing on at home to save everyone time in the evening. It may be their adult child who can drop in more often. It might be their neighbour who can mow their nature strip because they have got time on their hands. Or it might be none of those, and it is simply the fact that their climate has less emissions because less people need to travel to and from the CBD each day and there is less pressure on their transport network.
Work from home is overwhelmingly good – good for families, good for communities, good for wellbeing, good for our economy. It is honestly hard to fathom how the Liberal Party can oppose work from home or why they want to drag Victorians backwards. Labor wants to move Victoria forwards. We understand the realities and the pressures and the challenges facing modern families and modern working life arrangements. Only Labor stands up for working families. Only Labor is prepared to enshrine work from home in law. We will not force workers back into the office as though we are in the 1950s. That is another era. We are in this era now, and we support work from home. I commend this motion to the house. It is an important motion, and I encourage those opposite to get up and talk to it too.
