Dear pollies: take working from home from our cold, dead hands

Elon Musk speaks during a press conference at SpaceX's Starbase facility near Boca Chica Village in South Texas.

Pam Johnson was opening the mail at her kitchen table in her Seattle, Washington home while her 82-year-old husband, Ned, sat across from her sipping coffee when she received the terrible news. Ned was dead.

A letter addressed to Pam from the couple’s bank, dated February 19, 2025, extended corporate condolences and urged her not to fret at this difficult time.

“You wake up one day and discover you’re dead,” Ned told The Seattle Times.

The letter went on to explain to the not-yet-ready to be widowed Pam that the US Social Security Administration had been in contact with the bank and more than $US5000 in payments had been deducted from the account. Not only was Ned dead, he had been dead since November and social security payments issued since he left this mortal coil were to be sent back from whence they came.

Ned also discovered his medical insurance had been cancelled and his credit score had gone to zero, as it does for any American whose death has been recorded by the SSA.

One reporter reached for the predictable literary cliche that people who haven’t read Franz Kafka make, describing Ned’s battle to prove he remained in the vertical as “a Kafkaesque quest”.

Honestly, it was more Hellerian than Kafkaesque. In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, squadron physician Doc Daneeka became the living dead. Daneeka was rorting the system, asking pilots to place him on the manifests for a boost to his wages. When a plane that Daneeka was supposed to be on went down, he was pronounced dead by the military machine.

Daneeka’s goose was really cooked when his wife received a form letter from squadron leader Colonel Cathcart that read: “Dear Mrs, Mr, Miss, or Mr and Mrs Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action.”

Mrs Daneeka cashed in the life insurance, packed up the house and kids, and moved to pastures greener. The last we read of “Dead” Doc Daneeka is as a dishevelled shadowy figure, invisible to all, left to scrounge for food on the fictional island of Pianosa.

But back to the Johnsons, where Ned had found himself stuck in a digital morgue. Sniffing the breeze, progressive media swarmed around the couple in the hope of uncovering a Department of Government Efficiency stuff-up. The Seattle Times was joined by CNN and Newsweek. All were salivating at the prospect of an Elon Musk hit job.

Alas, it transpired that Ned’s demise was not attributable to Musk’s chainsaw sculptures of the federal bureaucracy. The SSA issued a statement that it recorded the deaths of three million Americans a year with errors of reporting occurring at a rate of less than one-third of 1 per cent. In other words, Drop Dead Ned has about 9000 mates in any given year.

Clutching his passport, Ned entered the human zoo of the SSA’s offices in Seattle. In what might well have been a brief Kafkaesque scenario, Ned, after enduring a 10-hour wait, had his forehead stamped “Alive”. The five grand the SSA had hived off was returned. It was clear his sudden death was not the fault of Musk’s DOGE. The long wait at the SSA’s office to transfer Ned back to the living was, according to a tweet from the DOGE account, due to a productivity-sucking “hybrid work-from-home model, which is currently being transitioned to a full work-from-office model”.

Chris Minns speaks at a press conference in Sydney. Picture: Jason Edwards

Now I have no idea what a hybrid work-from-home model is, other than it sounds like the sort of a thing a car manufacturer would say. But the politics of work from home is like comedy. Getting the message right is great but it’s all about the timing.

In August 2024 NSW Premier Chris Minns received pats on the back when he demanded the state’s public servants start using the office furniture again. Yet the small print on Minns’s edict was that it a) contained no timeframes or deadlines; and b) exemptions would be left to the discretion of department heads, where they had been in the first place. It was a stunning piece of hollow populism, an announcement essentially about nothing that had tongues wagging and keyboards clicking across the country for days.

Fast forward to February and, deep in fake campaign mode, the Coalition pulled a similar stunt with the commonwealth’s public servants. Later this was clarified to include only public servants in Canberra. All the Coalition leadership wanted to do was a little harmless policy virtue signalling to tradies in the ’burbs, many of whom have wives and partners who … work from home.

The timing was terrible, the messaging worse. Screams from constituents have been audible in Coalition electoral offices around the country ever since. Already on the outer with the high-income earning women on Sydney’s north shore or Melbourne’s leafy eastern suburbs, the Coalition had managed to upset another class of women under the subtext they were freeloading bludgers. WFH became WTF?

Joseph Heller

The backflip and pike with somersault was as gracefully performed as can be expected under the circumstances. Senator Jane Hume, who in a previous ideological metamorphosis had supported WFH, was thrown under Canberra’s light rail. That was the minimum price that had to be paid.

Now the Coalition is desperate to move on. It is early days and the campaign is still in shadow-boxing mode. Perhaps a large chunk of 51 per cent of the electorate will forgive or just plain forget. The alternative is that the Coalition has merely reinforced its unpopularity with female voters, an electoral phenomenon that loomed large at the 2022 poll.

There is a third possibility – less likely, admittedly – that Canberra public servants could all wake up tomorrow to find they have turned into enormous cockroaches and would have no choice but to work from home.

Now that’s Kafkaesque.