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For the first time in a long time, it feels like grown-ups are back in charge of the Victorian government.
Premier Ben Carroll’s decision to delay his government’s working from home legislation sends two clear messages.
The first is he would rather be a Labor leader who listens to business owners than one who goes out of his way to pick a fight with them.
The second is that, in the potentially short time he has in the job, he wants to focus on genuine problems – and there are plenty of them in Victoria – rather than confected ones.
The decision also reflects how dramatically the political landscape has changed in the 12 months since Jacinta Allan announced her work-from-home policy, to rapturous applause, on the floor of the state Labor conference.
Back then, Labor was a government searching for a viable opposition to define the coming political contest. The entire point of legislating a right to work from home was to draw a feckless Liberal Party and the business lobby into a Duttonesque stoush.
This is why Allan promised not only to legislate working from home rights this parliamentary term, but to bring the laws into effect in plenty of time for someone to mount a High Court challenge before the November election. The louder the fight, the better for Labor.
It was political opportunism, laced with a socialist left caricature of industrial relations, in which every boss is an exploitative bastard intent on screwing over workers, and every worker is powerless to negotiate reasonable terms of employment for themselves.
The proposed construction – changing anti-discrimination law to make working from home a protected attribute alongside race, sexuality and gender – always seemed faintly absurd, and indeed insulting, to people who face genuine discrimination.
Labor has no lack of opposition now – not from a Coalition better organised under the leadership of Jess Wilson and not from a One Nation party that wasn’t even a blip on the Victorian political radar a year ago.
In many households in Greenvale and Thomastown and Mill Park and Kororoit – state seats that Labor is at risk of losing to One Nation – working from home is something other people do in more affluent suburbs.
As a political concern, it is of lower order importance to the state of the roads, the cost of food and the state of your local high school.
In Victoria, where anyone who could work from home spent nearly two years doing so during COVID, the practice is a well-established and widely accepted feature of post-pandemic life. As Allan and Carroll have both argued, the benefits to both employees and employers are clear.
This is why, according to a survey conducted by the e61 Institute last month, Victoria has the most work-from-home-friendly employers in Australia, and why 68 per cent of all full-time office workers can already work at least two days a week from home.
