When Adriana Saraga and Peter O’Brien were looking to move out of Melbourne, they followed the railway tracks.
“When we first started looking for somewhere to live, we were following the V/Line,” O’Brien says. “We just narrowed down the search based on that.”
Both have roles where they can work from home three to four days a week. They say it was this flexibility that allowed them to move out of the city in favour of a more affordable and balanced lifestyle in the regions.
The couple and their two young children have now called Ballarat home for almost three years. O’Brien says the regional city had everything the family needed: schools, shops and essential infrastructure. “We got a relatively new house for much less than what we would have paid in Melbourne,” he says. “And the V/Line is quick and cheap to [the city]. It was a no-brainer.”
Having moved to Australia from Italy in 2017, Saraga says she was initially scared about leaving Melbourne and the friends she made. But she has warmed to the “feeling of community” that characterises regional areas.
“I didn’t even need to ask for permission to move regional,” she says. “If we didn’t have the opportunity to work from home, we would be forced to live in Melbourne, still be renting and the renting market is absolutely atrocious.”
Victorians could soon have a legal right to work from home two days a week under Australia-first laws announced by the premier, Jacinta Allan, this month. The legislation will be introduced to parliament next year. A public survey on the policy received more than 18,000 responses – a record for the state’s online consultation portal.
Melanie, who did not wish to use her surname, moved to Ballarat for a new role last year. She says the ability to work from home made her and her partner’s decision to relocate from the inner-city suburb of Fitzroy easier.
“This role was a promotion and provided new challenges for me,” she says. “My partner is a software developer and works remotely, so he was willing to move.
“We like living in Ballarat because it has everything we might want in a city but the people are so much friendlier. We have wonderful neighbours and have met a bunch of people in our neighbourhood.”
She says if the new proposal were to be enshrined in law, it would mean their current working arrangements would be assured no matter who they worked for.
Inga Lass, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne faculty of business and economics, says thelaws may encourage some to move to regional communities within a reasonable distance of Melbourne.
“Working from home two days per week likely means that some workers will accept longer commutes on the other days and move further out of the city, where housing is cheaper,” Lass says. “However, I do not believe that it will result in people moving into very distant areas in large numbers.”
Lass, whose current work focuses on the effects of working from home on worker wellbeing, says there are significant benefits from working from home several days a week.
“Not only do workers save on commuting time but they also tend to have greater schedule flexibility and experience less interference of their work life with their family life,” she says. “We also see increased job satisfaction, at least among women.”
Good for families, or a ‘complete overreach’?
Working from home policy became a flashpoint in the recent federal election campaign, with Peter Dutton reversing an unpopular policy mid-campaign to restrict flexible for public servants.
The Allan government’s proposal has also been criticised by some – the newly re-elected Liberal MP for Goldstein, Tim Wilson, described the policy in the Australian Financial Review as “professional apartheid” – but the Victorian opposition has remained quiet. Some business and property groups have also criticised the plan, with the Committee for Melbourne chief executive, Scott Veenker, describing it to SBS News as “another regulatory burden” and a “complete overreach”.
Allan, a mother of two, often works from her home in Bendigo, two hours north of Melbourne. She says the working from home policy “works for families and it’s good for the economy”.
Allan says there are no rules governing working from home beyond workplace-specific policies, and workers don’t know where they stand.
“If you can do your job from home, we are making it your right,” she says.
Saraga, who works in HR, says if there’s one thing employers should have learned from Covid, it’s the fact that “we don’t have to be attached like leeches to the office”.
“I find it such a backwards kind of thinking,” she says. “To think that you can only take talent or hire people that are living within a 10km radius from the office.
“It sounds so counterproductive.”
