The great Australian taxpayer ripoff continues....
From the AFR
‘Ghost’ offices in the public service should rile taxpayers
John Kehoe
On a recent Friday in Canberra, a deflated public servant friend revealed that there were only three people at work on a floor space that can seat 30 to 40.
He usually enjoys working at the office – interacting with colleagues, mentoring younger staff, and gaining experience from executives.
But what’s the point in coming in if almost nobody else is?
If hard-working taxpayers knew the extent of the entitlement culture now pervading Canberra, they may feel riled enough to march with pickets on the streets. Simon Letch
The snowball effect can be real. If not many staff members come into the office, other workers feel less inclined to attend the ghost office. It feeds on itself.
The Albanese government has, inexplicably,
embedded unlimited, five-day-a-week, work-from-home-rights in the public service enterprise bargaining agreement, under a deal struck by Katy Gallagher, the Minister for Finance and the Public Service.
Gallagher is a senator for Canberra on a thin electoral margin. Many of her constituents are content with their new entitlement, which was granted without any serious evidence or productivity offset.
Officials from at least one major government department are telling stakeholders not to schedule meetings in Canberra on Mondays and Fridays because public servants may not be there.
To be fair, Fridays and Mondays are high-water marks for work from home, with many more people in the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
If hard-working taxpayers knew the extent of the entitlement culture now pervading Canberra, they may feel riled enough to march with pickets on the streets.
Moderately paid police, nurses, teachers, aged care workers and retail employees, battling to pay for mortgages, rent and groceries, could be disgruntled at the two-tier system that the government has created.
It’s not like workers in Canberra have to put up with traffic jams and long commutes like people in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
What are all these public servants doing at home? Working as hard and productively as if they were in the office?
Undoubtedly, some of those “working” from home are looking after children, doing housework, working side hustles, going for a long lunch,
heading to the golf driving range or nicking off for a long weekend.
Candid conversations are required
There are many dedicated public servants who work hard and unpaid extra hours to serve the community. Often, these are likely to be the same senior and/or higher-performing officials that ministers and department heads are most exposed to.
Busy ministers and senior public servants are probably not fully aware of what is going on below the surface in huge departments. To get a better appreciation, candid conversations are required with mid-ranking and junior staff.
It can be particularly useful to get insights from officials who have worked in the private sector and have a comparative benchmark.
One senior bureaucrat, who has worked in private enterprise, shakes their head and says the public service is “living on a different planet”.
Some officials and contractors “working’” from home have devised schemes to keep their computer active to make it look like they are online. One strategy is to open up an old Teams or Google Meet chat from an expired date to stop the screen saver turning on.
It would be funny (and I’ve heard people laughing about it), if it wasn’t true.
Before the new uncapped work-from-home entitlement was locked in, 57 per cent of federal public servants worked from out of the office in 2023, up from 46 per cent in 2021, according to
surveys by the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC). It didn’t say for how many days a week which, anecdotally, varies markedly between employees.
The Commonwealth is paying rent for empty offices and desks.
Defenders of the public service EBA argue that the uncapped work from home right isn’t five days a week in practice. The number of WFH days should be negotiated between a public servant and their manager, based on the needs of the worker, their team and the wider agency.
“Overall, an APS agency is required to consider each individual employee request for flexibility on its merits, balancing the personal needs of the employee and the business requirements of the agency,” the APSC says.
Why embed uncapped work from home in the EBA as the lowest common denominator? Why create a perception and encourage a culture of unlimited work from home? Why make it harder for managers to convince staff to come to the office?
“Flexibility strengthens the APS’ ability to deliver strong outcomes for the community by allowing employees to better balance their work and personal priorities,” the APSC says.
“Flexibility also helps to position the APS as an employer of choice.”
Nobody is arguing against flexibility, which can be a good thing for employers and employees, including to attract and retain staff.
Taking flex time and lieu days in return for extra hours and weekend work is part of a modern and flexible labour market.
I, like other parents, enjoy the flexibility of being out of the office to occasionally attend my children’s school assembly, sporting events, pick-ups from school and to meet a tradie at home or look after a sick child. But the government has gone much further.
Empirical research on work from home is still in its infancy since the pandemic, and it’s too soon to know the long-term effects. Advocates and critics can find studies to promote their biases.
Google, a company that profits massively from work-from-home tools, has ordered staff back to the office.
Work from home may be great for
computer coders at Atlassian. Retrofitting studies from tech companies or private enterprise is flawed for public servants developing policy and services affecting millions of Australians.
Benefits of ‘face-to-face’ work
Productivity Commission chairwoman Danielle Wood diplomatically raised some issues about uncapped work from home, at The Australian Financial Review Workforce Summit in February.
Wood is certainly an advocate of “flexible” hybrid work, with staff spending a few days a week in the office, with the option to work some days at home.
“I genuinely believe there are benefits to face-to-face contact in the types of jobs that we do,” she says.
“When you work in policy, you are working in teams, and there are all sorts of benefits around spillovers and corridor chats and creativity.
“That all applies equally in the public service, so I would be concerned if those benefits were lost. On the other hand, flexibility is a great thing. It’s trying to get that balance right.
“I certainly would tend towards wanting to see people in the office at least some of the time.
“I’ve got a whole batch of new graduates starting, and I want them to have the benefit of working with people and seeing how things work in the office because I think that’s a really important part of their development.”
Some big banks require staff to work at least three days a week in the office, including either a Monday or a Friday.
The government would have been better to conduct serious research and trials on work from home before permanently entrenching this new workplace entitlement.
Once an entitlement is embedded, it is almost impossible to remove, even if new evidence emerges. The out-of-control National Disability Insurance Scheme is a case in point.
Perhaps Gallagher should have asked her Treasury colleague and Canberra economist Andrew Leigh to run one of his randomised controlled trials.
Such a multi-year trial may have compared the long-term effects of working from home between one group that does it regularly and another group that does it sparingly.
Evidence-based policy would consider the impacts on worker productivity, team work and collaboration, mentoring, staff development, knowledge sharing, innovation, socialisation, isolation and mental health, new starters and graduates trying to settle into a new job.
The more generous work-from-home entitlement was not used as a trade-off in pay negotiations. The
Albanese government has offered public servant pay increases of 4 per cent in 2024, 3.8 per cent in 2025, and 3.4 per cent in 2026, plus offering 180,000 public servants a bonus ranging from $500 to $1400.
The rash decision is a small insight into why the country has a productivity problem.
Labor itself has admitted that to revive the economy’s lacklustre productivity, boosting performance in the swelling and notoriously low-productivity government sectors will be crucial.
The uncapped work from home entitlement heads in the wrong direction.
