It is suddenly very important to certain Victorians that their laptops have playdates. Every day, the laptops will travel to a communal location, where they will do parallel play for eight hours before returning home again. This is crucial to the survival of traditional values as we know them.
The Victorian Labor party has pushed back on this essential social ceremony. At the party’s state conference last weekend, Jacinta Allan announced a plan to protect Victorians’ right to flexible work, “if reasonable”. Essentially, that means people who use computers instead of hammers and Bunsen burners.
Allan isn’t suggesting we all hang out in our PJs every day (sadly). If enacted, the proposal would give Victorians the right to spend three days in the office and two days at home (or somewhere else, as long as they have a Teams background that looks like a home).
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This has upset certain people. After all, a lot can happen in two days. Chicken can go bad. A parcel can be delivered. Workers can defy their employment contracts and watch several seasons of Grey’s Anatomy.
Pushback has been quick and fierce. Most of the criticism reasonably centres on Allan’s ability to implement it: various lawyers are quoted as saying it’s unenforceable. The AFR has said it’s a “plan built on hypocrisy”, while Sky News’ commentator called it a “stunt”. Most are – rightly – calling it an obvious election ploy (it would only be implemented in 2026, if Labor is re-elected).
Less boringly, The Age referred to “the cynical artistry of legislating to protect something not at risk”. The suggestion is that Allan is campaigning to protect Victorians’ right to keep doing what they’re already doing. Which is wrong, but not in the obvious way.
In 2019, before working from home was invented, as many as 30% of Australians worked from home. Almost a third of us understood the specific joy of rolling out of bed and down the hallway instead of spending 65 minutes going somewhere else.
It wasn’t perfect. The Office People found it deeply suspicious: surely grown adults couldn’t be trusted to do any work unless a manager could see them. What if they went shopping? Played with their dog? Or simply napped all day? Despite a total lack of evidence, certain people pushed a narrative that autonomous working was a scam invented by Peter Alexander.
The pandemic amplified both the technology and the distrust. Our primary function became video calling. We learnt to dress for work from the waist up. Time trackers went mainstream – and so did mouse jigglers. We invited ourselves to fake meetings so no one would see our Teams “away” status and think we’d skived off to a pub lunch instead of emailing.
For the existing 30%, a lot of this was welcome progress. It was no longer weird to see someone’s pet/child/sentient trash pile in the background. The washing finally got done. Children saw their parents before bedtime. And way, way, way less time was wasted on commutes.
But as the acute Covid threat eased, the Office People got nervous. What if no one ever came back to the office? What if they liked this new life? What if – lord mayor protect us – they never again had to choose between catching the train and not smelling like a toilet? For these and other – secret – reasons, they began to insist people return to the office full-time.
Whatever their reasoning, they are – as ever – fighting an imaginary enemy. Remote working increased during peak Covid but it’s still pretty darn close to the 2019 numbers: 36% of Australians usually worked from home in 2024 (compared with 40% in 2021). Almost everyone still leaves their house to teach, build, cook, save lives, drive buses, grow food, sell mobile phone plans and, yes, type.
A plan – however cynical – to protect flexible working doesn’t enshrine what Covid produced. We can never go back to what we were already doing (being the weird guys who knew how to use the company VPN) and the thing I want to keep doing is quietly typing without being surveilled. This week’s criticism has merely revealed that classic conservative trope: it was already happening. You just didn’t care until you felt personally attacked.
