The Coalition has made a major policy U-turn, dropping plans to force public servants back to the office if it wins the election and with Peter Dutton acknowledging the Coalition “made a mistake”.
The opposition leader told Nine’s Today Show on Monday he was “listening to what people have to say” and blamed Labor for implying that the policy would also apply to the private sector.
“We never had any intention for work from home changes that we were proposing in Canberra to apply across the private sector, but the prime minister was out there saying that, it was just a lie,” Dutton said.
“We’ve made a mistake in relation to the policy. We apologise for that. And we’ve dealt with it.”
The shadow finance minister, Jane Hume, went even further on Monday saying the Coalition would “enshrine” workplace flexibility.
Hume told Sky News Labor has pursued an “unfair scare campaign” over the policy and said the change was due feedback showing the public wanted flexible work.
“We’ve listened to feedback from right around the country, not just Canberra-based public servants … who are telling us that flexible work is something that they would like to see enshrined,” Hume said.
“Now, let’s face it, it always was going to be enshrined. Flexible work was always here to stay. But what our concern now is that part of that flexible work should also be an ability to work from home where it’s appropriate to do so, and that hasn’t changed.”
Hume says the “Labor scare campaign” implied the policy would also apply to the private sector but she promises that was never the case.
On Saturday, Peter Dutton had already tried to soften the policy, saying it would only apply to Canberra-based workers.
The original policy announced in early March, would have required all members of the Australian public service (APS) to work from the office five days a week.
So, how did the Coalition end up here and what led to the shift?
What has happened so far?
When the policy was first announced on 3 March, Hume said it applied to all public service workers.
“It will be an expectation of a Dutton Liberal government that all members of the Australian public service work from the office five days a week,” Hume told the Liberal-aligned Menzies Research Institute.
It coincided with the release of gender pay gap data by the public service minister, Katy Gallagher, that showed women earn on average $28,425 less than their male counterparts in the last year.
That only bolstered criticism from unions, who warned it could negatively impact workforce participation for those who rely on flexible working arrangements – particularly women, but also parents and carers, and people with disabilities and chronic health conditions.
A little over a week later, Dutton softened the Coalition’s position, saying the Coalition was only advocating for a return to pre-pandemic levels of remote work, when only 20% of the workforce worked from home.
Then, on Saturday, he said it would only apply to APS workers in Canberra. By Monday, the Coalition had dropped the policy altogether, acknowledging it was a mistake.
Why does Peter Dutton keep changing his tune?
Dutton’s comments on Saturday came after he was asked a question regarding new polling by the research group YouGov, which listed the Coalition’s work from home policy as one reason for a dip in his personal satisfaction ratings. (Another poll released on Saturday by Redbridge also blamed the policy for driving women back to Labor.)
Dutton accused the Labor campaign of spreading a “scare campaign” by suggesting the policy would impact women working in the private sector, but some within the Coalition have previously warned the policy was not “fully thought-through” and could hurt them in seats with high numbers of working professional women.
They told Guardian Australia the policy was messaged poorly and had been misinterpreted by the public as affecting all workplaces – not just the public service.
Women are a key voting demographic the Coalition needs to win back, after many in metropolitan areas abandoned the Morrison government and turned to independents at the 2022 election.
How many people would have been affected by the policy?
There were around 185,000 public service employees in 2024, according to the Australian Public Service Commission. But only 64,435 – or 36.9% - of the total workforce is based in Canberra.
The remaining are spread across Australia, including 32,002 (17.3%) in Victoria, 30,712 (16.6%) in New South Wales and 24,180 (13%) in Queensland. About 12.3% of the workforce is located in regional areas across the country and 1,520 workers (0.8%) are overseas.
If Dutton had stuck to the Canberra-only policy, it would mean only one-third of the total federal public service would be forced back into the office full time.
Would the Coalition’s policy have overruled flexible working arrangements?
Confusingly, Dutton on Saturday said that existing flexible work arrangements for Canberra-based public servants would remain unchanged, though it was unclear whether he was referring to formal or informal agreements.
“That flexibility continues, whether it is in Canberra or outside of Canberra,” Dutton said. “We are not proposing to change those and that’s the reality.”
Andrew Stewart, an employment expert and professor at the Queensland University of Technology, had previously warned that existing enterprise bargaining agreements would make it difficult for the Coalition to enforce a work from office policy.
“If there was a new blanket policy of saying no to these [flexible work] requests, it’s clearly foreseeable that you end up with cases in the Fair Work Commission and in the courts,” Stewart said.
What’s the latest reaction?
Unsurprisingly, Labor has come out swinging again.
Albanese told Nova Sydney on Monday that Dutton was “pretending” the policy never existed and said the Coalition had opposed Labor’s industrial relations reforms, including making work from home more accessible, introducing same job, same pay laws, the right to disconnect and defining casualisation.
“All of these changes have been opposed by Peter Dutton. He’s campaigned against them each and every day, and today he’s pretending. He’s pretending that the policies that he announced, including in the budget reply that was two weeks ago, including the cuts to 41,000 public servants just don’t exist, and everyone will just forget about all that. This is a new Peter Dutton who’s discovered work rights.”
On Sunday night, before the Coalition dumped its policy, Labor released an analysis of publicly available data which showed if women were forced into job-sharing arrangements, they would be as much as $740 a week worse off.
The analysis assumed that women who were unable to work from home would switch to a three-day work week, with two days off. For an average woman currently earning $1,850 a week, this would result in a $740 reduction in gross pay. Over the course of a year, this would amount to a loss of $38,000.
Gallagher said women had “embraced flexible full-time work” since the start of the pandemic, which had resulted in economic participation rising and the gender pay gap falling.
