Billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes declares flexible work must be left to businesses
Mike Cannon-Brookes embraces flexible work and rejects ‘draconian’ mandates, even the one proposed by Jacinta Allan to legislate two days a week at home.
Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, the hybrid work evangelist who declared his employees can work from anywhere, slammed work-from-home mandates as an encroachment on the rights of businesses by government.
The billionaire and climate activist was equally dismissive of the integrity of emissions reporting by companies, after Atlassian’s disclosures revealed it emitted tens of thousands more tonnes of carbon from business travel than intended. Other ASX companies were hiding their emissions in footnotes, he claimed.
He once branded mandates “draconian” and has stuck to that mindset as Atlassian expands to 1000 staff in Jacinta Allan’s Victoria where the Labor government wants to legislate the right to work from home two days a week for private and public sector employees. This is widely opposed by business leaders on legal and ideological grounds.
“It’s not like you’re picking an AFL team for life,” Mr Cannon-Brookes volunteered. He has
650 staff in Victoria and predicts the software company will grow to 1000.
“The entire work from home, remote work, distributed work, whatever we call it debate, I always find like it’s one people, media, both they want to polarise to the edges,” he said on Thursday.
“It’s like ‘everyone should work from home’ or ‘everyone should work in an office’. I just don’t think either of these two makes sense, right? There are going to be businesses that fall at different points. There are going to be people who enjoy different experiences.”
Ms Allan’s policy, which she wants to legislate in 2026, has drawn fire from executives including Westpac CEO Anthony Miller who said the balance must be left to employers and the market.
Mr Cannon-Brookes said Melbourne is the fourth-fastest growing city for Atlassian employees, with a rate on par with San Francisco, and attendance of 75 per cent. The office is split across two levels in ANZ Bank’s former headquarters in the Queen & Collins building.
Atlassian initially trialled a “connection hub” for employees in Flinders Street. But Mr Cannon-Brookes said since the permanent office opened, attendance rates have doubled. Eighty per cent of its furniture is second-hand or re-used from previous tenant, HR software titan Elmo and the office is catered.
But Atlassian’s Victorian success story is complicated by a broader internal contradiction. The company’s very growth — fuelled by its distributed workforce and a 282 per cent surge in global headcount over five years — has been directly linked to a failure in its climate goals.
The company’s annual sustainability report revealed emissions from business travel soared 135 per cent, causing the company to miss its 2019 goal to reduce travel emissions by 25 per cent this year. This surge stems from the policy’s required “intentional togetherness” events, forcing globally spread teams to meet face-to-face several times a year.
While Mr Cannon-Brookes was quick to highlight that emissions per employee dropped by 38 per cent due to the substantial headcount increase, he said that balancing travel with emissions reduction remains a “huge challenge for every business.”
He used the company’s candid self-critique to launch a broader attack on Australian corporate accountability, criticising Australia’s biggest companies for what he called incomplete carbon reporting.
“We don’t have any asterisk selected scope three, which is a statement I would like to be removed from the ASX 200,” he said.
“We track our emissions in a much more comprehensive way than most businesses,” he said, criticising peers who fail to measure emissions like employee commuting or working-from-home power usage. This, he suggested, enables companies to omit a full picture of their climate impact under scope three requirements meant to capture the full life cycle of emissions.
“If you’re working in Geelong and need to travel here (Melbourne) for a meeting, this is business travel. If I’m working in Fitzroy and I come in, that’s commuting,” he argued.
“We also track the emissions of people working from home. We can’t say, ‘oh, if you’re working from home fine, we don’t have to count your electricity to run your computer’. No, that’s not fair.”
Mr Cannon-Brookes, the largest shareholder of AGL Energy, declined to make an assessment of Chris Bowen’s dual jobs as Climate Minister and president of negotiations at COP31, saying, “It’s up to him”.
He was upbeat about the state of Australia’s tech sector, despite the government failing in its target for the nation to employ 1.2 million tech workers by the end of the decade.
“Tech is the largest industry in the world, it is also growing very fast … That’s really good, but what we should be thinking about is how are we faring against Germany, Ireland, Singapore … what are they doing? And what are we doing? We have a great industry here. Question is, are we keeping pace?”
He said while start-ups and pure tech companies were “accelerating” their pace, the broader economy risked falling behind.
“R&D spending, as we’ve seen across Australia, is relatively low for our economy. That’s the long term worrying thing, and that’s not the tech industry, per se. That’s technology in every other industry.”
Originally published as Billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes declares flexible work must be left to businesses
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