Crisis opens new opportunities

Indigenous leader Noel Pearson warned on Wednesday that COVID-19 government support measures were fuelling a surge in “grog chaos and gambling” in vulnerable communities from Cape York to the Pilbara. The problem is an example of adverse unintended consequences arising from good policies such as the JobSeeker supplement. Problems also have been rife at Wadeye, 400km southwest of Darwin. There, school attendance has fallen to about 30 per cent since the government’s coronavirus supplement effectively doubled welfare payments, leading to widespread alcohol abuse. However complex, the best answers to such upheavals are personal responsibility and local leadership. Given the magnitude of the pandemic, which to date has caused 823,000 deaths from 24 million known cases around the world, unintended consequences, good and bad, will extend far beyond health and economic upheaval. They are already changing how we live and work and what we buy, producing opportunities as well as problems. Enterprising designers, for instance, are refining the “working from home” look — haute hoodies — as fashion editor Glynis Traill-Nash has written. Working remotely will create opportunities for more people to live outside capital cities, boosting regional Australia. It could help create jobs in remote communities.

With almost two-thirds of federal public servants, about 93,000 staff, working from home, government ministers and senior mandarins are concerned about substandard “pyjama policymaking”, the potential waste of government office space and rising costs to taxpayers, as Tom Dusevic wrote on Tuesday. Concerns also have arisen in the services sector that by continuing to work remotely, the younger generation of lawyers, architects and accountants, especially new staff, will miss out on the practical benefits of mentoring in workplaces by experienced professionals. But resisting staff preferences for WFH will be problematic for many managers in the post-COVID world. To do so would be to risk losing some of their best people.

The Australian has long recognised that flexibility is essential to efficient, modern workplaces. Too often it has been resisted, unfortunately, by some unions that prefer rigid, prescriptive awards and centralised oversight of wages and conditions. WFH, however, should take us into a new era in which flexibility and co-operation will be increasingly important to boost productivity. Reform will be essential if young people are to enjoy living standards on a par with those their parents took for granted until recently.

Before COVID-19, Helen Trinca has reported, fewer than 2 per cent of employees worked mostly at home, and only about one-third did any work at home. That situation has been blamed mainly on bosses’ reluctance to allow staff out of their sight. Perceptions have now changed, with workplace surveys showing 60 to 75 per cent of workers and managers now expect some level of WFH to become permanent. In recent months millions of Australians have discovered the advantages of WFH: reduced commuting time, better work-life balance and flexibility. It is flexibility, for staff and employers, that can help boost productivity as industries gear up again to full throttle. Details are often best decided in workplaces. But the states, as is their wont, are taking a bureaucratic approach to the new world of work. NSW and Victoria, Adam Creighton has written, are advertising 20 high-paid jobs requiring skills in “change, culture, transformation and strategy”. The jobs carry titles such as “director of intersectionality and inclusion” (salary $249,000) at Victoria’s Justice Department. The Australian Industry Group has noted that WFH has shown the benefits of not running traditional office environments. WFH would be a draw, it said, for companies to attract talent when many people did not want to travel for more than 45 minutes to work. A concept once reserved for senior leaders and a lucky few “may just be the lifeline that organisations need to keep their heads above water on the balance sheet”. Making it work, regardless of unintended consequences, will be the challenge.