PM vows to help people work from home to ease cost of living

Labor is vowing to help Australians work from home so they can save thousands of dollars on annual transport costs in major cities, opening a new front in a budget fight with the Coalition over financial help for households.

The new flashpoint adds to a dispute over energy bills after Treasurer Jim Chalmers revealed subsidies worth $150 for millions of households, prompting the Coalition to accuse him of drawing on taxpayer funds to make up for a broken promise to cut power bills.

Labor is seeking to make working from home a political issue.Credit: Peter Rae

The government is trying to claw back ground in the opinion polls by using the federal budget on Tuesday night to list practical financial help for households, ahead of a formal decision to hold the federal election in the first weeks of May.

But with the budget heading back into deficit after two years of surpluses, Labor has limited means to offer financial help without being blamed for fuelling inflation and delaying further cuts to official interest rates.

On Sunday morning, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seized on the issue of working from home to accuse Opposition Leader Peter Dutton of wanting Australians to pay more each year for transport to get them to their workplace.

But Dutton has not called for the private sector to halt working from home and has instead focused his criticism on the number of public servants who are allowed to work remotely for several days a week.

“No one is banning work from home arrangements. That is a Labor lie,” said Coalition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume.

“It’s shameful the way the Labor Party has tried to twist this policy into something it isn’t.

“Similar policies are in place in the United Kingdom, New Zealand and in NSW implemented under the Minns Labor government. But flexible work has to work for everyone: the individual, the team and the department. This is a commonsense policy that reflects the arrangements for everyone else outside of the Australian public service.”

The Labor attack is based on a calculation that Australians would pay $3056 in transport costs on average nationwide to get to work two days a week, the key figure in the assumption about what they would have to pay if the Coalition opposed working from home.

After taking into account parking costs of $20 a day, Labor estimated the total cost would be $4976 on average.

Based on assumptions about congestion and travel times, the yearly transport costs to commute two days a week would be $5789 in Sydney, $5529 in Melbourne and $4963 in Brisbane, with lower figures in other capital cities.

While Labor bases its calculations on a transport affordability index from the Australian Automobile Association, an independent group that represents motoring organisations such as the NRMA and RACV, there is no Coalition policy to stop all working from home for every worker.

Dutton said on March 13 that he wanted to scale back working from home in the public sector, a key target for the Coalition when it also says it will cut the 36,000 increase in the number of federal public service employees since the last election.

“I want Australians, particularly those who are working hard at the moment, to know that their tax dollars are being spent efficiently, which is why I don’t believe that in Canberra, 61 per cent of the public servants who are working in Canberra should be working from home,” he said.

“I think they should return to work, back to pre-COVID levels, which was just over 20 per cent of people who work from home.”

Albanese said Dutton was “out of touch” with his criticism of working from home, positioning the government as a supporter of the approach because it helped women in particular.

“They’re working effectively because they can work online. This is an advantage in modern families that have enabled them to take advantage of it,” he said.

“It is also meant for working families where both parents are working. They’re able to deal with those issues, of working from home – [it] has enabled them to work full-time. And therefore it has increased workforce participation, particularly for women.”

Labor said that more than one in three Australians in the labour force were working from home to some extent, with an average rate of 19 hours of work at home a week across the workforce. It assumed that Australian commuters spent 30.5 minutes travelling one way to work on average.

The energy bill subsidy will be worth $75 a quarter for the three months to the end of September and the three months to the end of December, but it will stop at that point.

Dutton said the Labor policy was a “Ponzi scheme” because it used the taxes paid by workers to return money to them to cover their energy bills, when the better approach would be an energy policy that cut the energy costs.

The opposition leader reiterated that his plan for building nuclear power stations, estimated to cost $331 billion over several decades in modelling done for the Coalition, would be a better way to ensure energy supplies.

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