Election 2025: Peter Dutton’s WFH backflip raises fresh questions for the Coalition

Peter Dutton’s handling of the now abandoned return-to-the-office edict looks like a spectacular own goal, writes Ewin Hannan.

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One of the many baffling features of Peter Dutton’s now abandoned return-to-the-office edict is that, on the Coalition’s own admission, it could not have been implemented for at least two years, and, even then, there was significant doubt it could be legally enforced.

Undermining your political standing with the working parents you are trying to win over looks like a spectacular own goal.

Doing it weeks out from an election with an unpopular policy that might never see the light of day looks pretty dumb. Hence Dutton’s embarrassing U-turn.

A day after announcing last month that a Dutton government would seek to force federal public servants back to the office five days a week, opposition finance spokesman Jane Hume acknowledged the Coalition would not try to override existing enterprise agreements that lock in work-from-home provisions for public sector workers until 2027.

In other words, a contentious policy that could so easily be weaponised against you with the outer-suburban parents you are trying to win over in marginal seats would not see the light of day for at least two-thirds of the way into your first term.

Moreover, even if the Coalition sought to enforce the edict from that date, months out from the next election, it would face further obvious legal, political and industrial hurdles.

First, you don’t need to be a political genius to know the Community and Public Sector Union would oppose any return-to-work clause being inserted into a new agreement and then use Labor’s bargaining provisions to force the issue to be arbitrated by the Fair Work Commission.

Second, the Fair Work Act gives employees the right to request to work from home if they are a parent, have caring responsibilities, have a disability or are 55 or older. Seeking to impose a blanket return to the office would be vulnerable to legal challenge on discrimination grounds.

The Coalition and employer groups believe the work-from-home arrangements for federal public servants are overly generous, but flipping to a blanket return-to-the-office policy would have put the commonwealth, which is supposed to be a model employer, out of step with most white-collar private sector employers and their employees who have landed at a post-Covid hybrid model where workers come to the office three days a week and work remotely two days.

Dutton’s sales pitch was made more difficult by his simultaneous commitment to cut 41,000 public sector jobs.

Given the Coalition’s lack of specifics – it took Dutton until Saturday to say the cuts would be confined to Canberra public servants – Labor and union activists in marginal seats have been having a field day, telling voters that it could be a family member or friend who face losing their livelihood.

Dutton now says the cuts will be through attrition and hiring freezes. But will that achieve the billions of dollars in savings he promised the cuts would deliver?

What if a service backlog, hello Veterans Affairs, demands more workers be put on? And surely attrition is the slow road, and no guarantee, to achieving the savings in the designated time frame.

Dutton’s assault on the public sector might have been popular among the Coalition’s rusted-on base, but even they should concede it’s been botched, with the panicked band-aid solution presenting fresh, unresolved questions for the opposition weeks from the election.