Census 2021: Remote work ‘a geographic game-changer’

Hybrid working opens up the possibility of living further afield and only facing a commute a couple of times a week, chief statistician David Gruen says.

Chief statistician David Gruen. Picture Gary Ramage

The Covid-led shift to working from home will fundamentally ­reshape the nation, with more people able to live further from their workplace, the nation’s chief statistician says.

David Gruen said the genie was out of the bottle on working from home, and while the lockdown-­affected 2021 census might prove the high point – with 2.5 million people, or 20 per cent of all workers, at home to work on August 10 last year – going into physical workplaces will never revert to pre-Covid levels.

“We are not going back to the world before Covid when working from home was very much the ­exception,” Dr Gruen said, a reference to the 2016 census when fewer than 5 per cent of the workforce said they did so from home.

“We will come back some way,” he said. “Clearly the proportion of people working from home in the lockdown areas during Covid was very high and that’s not going to be a permanent feature.”

The second tranche of data ­released from the 2021 census on Wednesday showed that NSW and Victoria, where Covid restrictions were harshest when the ­census was conducted on August 10 last year, had by far the most people staying at home to work.

About 31 per cent of workers in NSW, more than 1.1 million, worked from home that day, as did 26 per cent of Victorians. This compared to fewer than 10 per cent of workers in South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia.

There was also an urban-­regional divide, with one in four people in capital cities working from home that day compared to one in eight in the regions.

Dr Gruen said he suspected many Australian businesses would opt for a hybrid model as the future norm, as there remained value in having people in the same room.

But working in an office environment in a big city just two or three days a week would be a game-changer for those who wanted to expand the geographical range in which they could live, he said. This would have a significant flow-on effect for infrastructure and ­services in urban fringes and ­regional areas.

“(Hybrid working) changes the calculus about whether you live commuting distance to work,” Dr Gruen said.

“If you are only coming to work two or three days a week … you might be willing to go and live in a more rural setting, and put up with a longer commute, confident in the knowledge that you aren’t doing it five days a week.”

The census data released Wednesday offered only a broad-brush view on people movement within Australia, noting about 15 per cent of people lived elsewhere than their home exactly one year before the census was taken, a similar proportion to 2016 and 2011. More detailed work on where people moved to and from during the Covid years will be undertaken by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in coming months.

Dr Gruen said another striking element of the newly released ­census data was the continuing gender dominance in certain ­professions.

 

In teaching, 98 per cent of early childhood teachers are female, as are 85 per cent of primary school teachers and 62 per cent of ­secondary school teachers, it found. Just 10 per cent of construction workers are women, though this is up from 7 per cent in 2016, and only one in a hundred ­plumbers, bricklayers and carpenters are female.

“I was struck by how extraordinarily gendered some professions remain,” Dr Gruen said. “There was a small amount of movement (since the last census) but not that much looking at professions like nurses or construction workers.

“In nursing it is still 90 per cent plus women. It shows that some sectors are particularly sticky in this regard.”