Australia’s WFH conversation is not about what’s best for the economy but our lifestyle | David Penberthy

If you reckon you can do your job from home, there’s someone somewhere else who could do it just as easily, probably more cheaply, writes David Penberthy.

Singapore’s visionary founding father Lee Kuan Yew declared in the 1980s that Australia was at risk of becoming “the poor white trash of Asia”.

The comments were wrongly taken as insulting and racist; they were in fact a bluntly honest account of our economic backwardness.

Australia was a closed country that protected struggling industries through the dead hand of tariffs, struggling with high inflation and rising unemployment, maintaining sclerotic nationalised businesses which would perform better in private ownership.

Yew’s point also went to our levels of productivity, set against the prodigious Malay-Chinese work ethic and market principles which were rapidly turning his nascent South East Asian nation into the powerhouse it is today.

I just spent a week in Singapore and was struck by the frequency with which I was asked the same question by many locals.

The first thing I did on arriving was download the Grab app, their version of Uber, and in the course of 10 days made about 30 trips using the rideshare service.

With my wife and two younger kids in the back, I always sat upfront with the driver, and in the course of making chitchat was asked on five occasions whether it was true that the shops in Australia closed at 5pm. Oh, maybe 6pm, I’d reply defensively, but they’re open until 9pm in the suburbs on Thursdays and 9pm in the city on Fridays.

The response elicited bemusement and polite laughter. “Really?” the drivers would ask. They had heard rumours of this madness but didn’t believe it could actually be true.

This handy conversational focus group of Singaporean Grab drivers suggests that, as a nation, Australia is still known in this part of Asia for not working very hard.

Our other topic of conversation on these trips around Singapore involved our respective experiences of Covid lockdowns.

Singapore and South Australia had similar and successful responses to the pandemic, with a huge uptake of vaccines due to a well-organised mass rollout and short periods of lockdowns by world standards. Like us, the people of Singapore spent seven weeks cooped up in 2020, with two circuit-breaker lockdowns lasting a couple of weeks in 2021 to limit the Delta and Omicron variants.

The consensus in Singapore now is that all this is a thing of the past. The shops are packed, the hawker centres are full and – crucially – every worker is back in the office as life returns to normal.

It is on this last point where Singapore and Australia differ vastly in terms of their emergence from Covid. And again, the words of Lee Kuan Yew provide a brutal but effective pointer in explaining that difference.

Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew waves to journalists in 2008.

Singapore is the world’s most powerful illustration of the productivity and profits that can be derived from collaborative and creative office-based work. I am sure that much or some of the work being performed in those thousands of office towers could technically be done from home, or done from home after a fashion.

But the consensus in Singapore is that it should not be done that way. The success of the country in finance, IT, telecommunications and supply chain management all stems from a conviction that the command-and-control structures of the modern office achieves the best results.

Here in Australia the conversation is different. And it’s not based around what’s best for our jobs, our employers and our economy, but what’s best for our lifestyle.

There should be no question about the need for greater workplace flexibility so that people can juggle the requirements of parenting with their working role. There is an argument that a few regular hours off to play sport or take part in some community activity can lead to increased workplace productivity, provided you make up for the lost work time elsewhere. Equally, if people want to work a four-day week in return for a 20 per cent pay cut, good luck to them, provided their business can accommodate the adjustment.

But what should not be acceptable is this idea that working from home is now some human right, where a virus-fuelled necessity becomes the new normal, to use an old Covidism, now that we have got a taste of life spent half on the laptop and the other half in the garden or on the couch or skiving off having coffee with a friend.

People are having a lend “working” from home. I can think of several workplaces which have changed for the worse as a result of a sudden experiment in human survival transforming into an ongoing experiment in human indolence.

People walk through Adelaide’s Rundle Mall. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Kelly Barnes

He would not have been familiar with the term, but Lee Kuan Yew would describe all this as bludging if he had the word at his disposal. We are now seeing Australia’s well-documented enthusiasm for bludging manifest itself in union claims for permanent WFH arrangements at the federal level.

Those claims have now succeeded and could flow onto the state bureaucracy, increasing pressure on the private sector to follow suit.

As Bruce Djite warned in these pages earlier this week, the death knell this could spell for cities as an entity has not been considered. Not to mention its impact on revenues for the governments and councils managing those cities, and the operators of service, retail and hospitality businesses within once-bustling CBDs.

This is the weird and dumb thing which the WFH enthusiasts fail to comprehend. Their new-found love of having the freedom to do nothing at home on the boss’s time could very swiftly become formalised, where they genuinely have nothing to do, and nothing to fund it with.

If you reckon you can do your job from home, there’s someone somewhere else who could do it just as easily, probably more cheaply.

The likely location of these people isn’t in South Australia. It’s in Asia. In places like Singapore, a joint built out of nothing off the back of hard work and resourcefulness, where even the Grab drivers will tell you that shops are designed to be open and offices are designed to have people in them.