The work from home debate is ‘dangerous territory’ for politicians

The opportunity to work from home has been the pandemic’s silver lining for many people.

And while companies increasingly want workers back in the office, the future of remote work hasn’t been a hot button issue in the halls of parliament.

Until last week, when the Coalition vowed to force public servants back to the office if it won the election.

Suddenly, working from home was a partisan issue. A flashpoint in the culture wars.

But if working from home becomes an election issue, who benefits?

After Liberal Senator Jane Hume gave a speech calling remote work in the public service “a right that is creating inefficiency”, Finance Minister Katie Gallagher accused the Coalition of stealing the idea from Donald Trump.

“It seems that every other idea is being stolen from the United States, and they clearly have no idea about how working families manage modern life,” Gallagher said.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton denied the policy would disadvantage women — as Gallagher had asserted — and said it would improve productivity.

“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,” Dutton said.

The proposed crack down on working from home comes after Dutton said he would cut thousands of wasteful public service jobs if elected.

‘Dangerous territory’

The Liberal Party strategy to attack public servants is “playing the class divide game”, says Andrew Hughes, a political messaging expert and marketing lecturer at Australian National University.

Dutton’s comment plays to a stereotype that portrays public servants as rich fat cats who live in Canberra and are out of touch with reality, Dr Hughes argues. 

“What Dutton’s trying to do is build that messaging that he’s really in touch with people and he understands… that most people are doing it tough.”

But Dr Hughes believes this is “dangerous territory” for the Liberal Party.

While it may appeal to Dutton’s base, attacking public servants or characterising working from home as lazy or inefficient won’t help win marginal seats, especially those held by teals, Dr Hughes says.

Labor’s messaging is equally risky, he says.

“It’s making the assumption, on a very gendered ground, that only women work from home and only women are care providers.”

Dr Hughes also says Labor can’t assume Gallagher’s message will resonate with female voters simply because she’s speaking from a point of shared experience.

In 2024, around 36 per cent of employed Australians worked from home regularly, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which is down slightly from the 40 per cent peak during the pandemic.

Among workers aged under 40, a University of Sydney study found that in 2022 men were more likely to work from home than women with 44 per cent of men compared to 38 per cent of women working from home at least some of the time.

Analysis by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, released in 2024, found that in jobs where people could work from home workforce participation increased for women with young children and people with a disability. 

Not just women

David Bissell, a professor of human geography at The University of Melbourne, says men value working from home too.

“We heard from a lot of men who told us working from home had enabled them to be more present to their children,” he says.

Professor Bissell co-authored research for which more than 60 employers and workers were interviewed to examine how remote work is transforming households and workplaces.

In a cost-of-living crisis, he says economic reasons, such as the cost of commuting and after-hours childcare, also impacted people’s desire to work from home. 

“There’s still a real appetite for working from home across the board, it’s not something that’s fizzled out towards the end of the pandemic,” he says.

Recruitment agencies report that working from home is still one of the top searches when people are looking for jobs, he says.

The research also found employee age affects work location preferences and that young people were often more interested in travelling to an office.

The “buzz those spaces have”, Professor Bissell says, was appealing to younger workers but living arrangements also meant they sometimes didn’t have access to an appropriate space to work at home.

A desire for mentoring by senior staff was also a motivation to be present in an office, however it was senior staff who were often working from home, he Bissell says.

Productivity discourse simplistic

Writing in The Conversation, Julia Richardson, a human resource management professor at Curtin University has warned of the perils of following Trump’s lead in terminating remote work in the public service. 

“I think we have to be really careful when governments start trying to impose policies that may or may not have worked in one context on another context, and I think politicians need to be much more aware of the nuance of this remote work issue,” Prof Richardson told the ABC. 

“It’s way more complex than they’re giving light to, way more complex.” 

She says the political debate often misses that there are different kinds of remote work, and that remote or flexible work policies have varied levels of success depending on many factors. 

“It’s management responsibility to work with the employee to ensure that their productivity is as it should be,” she says.

“I think what’s missing in many of the conversations in Canberra is how are they actually going to manage the working from home policies.”

Central to the Coalition’s announcement demanding public servants return to the office was productivity.

But Prof Bissell says, “productivity and working from home has a really complicated relationship”.

“When people talk about productivity, we need to really think about what that means and try to separate it out,” he says.

“There are certain types of productivity that working from home is amazing for, but there are other types of productivity that it might not be so good for.”

For example, working from home might be great for work which requires focus and a lack of interruptions but working in an office may be better for creativity and collaboration, he says.

Prof Bissell says employers and HR managers are not only concerned about productivity. They’re worried about working from home “eroding workplace culture” and people feeling less attached to their organisation. But he says working from home or hybrid work don’t necessarily have this effect. 

Other experts have told the ABC when it comes to determining whether working from home or the office is more productive, the “evidence is mixed”.

And last week, the ABC reported that when arguing against working from home, Senator Hume in fact cited research that concluded hybrid work arrangements improved productivity.