US Edition
Australia PM candidate drops plan to end government home-working
Peter Dutton apologises for unpopular election pledge which would have involved mass redundancies
Australia’s opposition leader has abandoned a major election promise to stop public servants working from home, after a backlash.
Peter Dutton apologised on Monday, saying his Liberal-led coalition had “made a mistake” with an unpopular policy that included plans to sack thousands of government employees.
Australians head to the polls on May 3, and working from home has emerged as an election battleground. The Liberal Party said last month it would boost productivity by ending flexible working for hundreds of thousands of public service workers.
Critics of the plan, including Anthony Albanese’s governing Australian Labor Party, said it would disproportionately disadvantage women and increase commuting costs at a time when the cost of living is the primary concern for most voters.
“We’ve made a mistake in relation to the policy. We apologise for that. And we’ve dealt with it,” Mr Dutton told Channel Nine, clarifying that no changes would be made to work-from-home options.
He claimed his centre-Right coalition was only planning to target public service workers in the capital of Canberra, accusing Mr Albanese’s party of claiming otherwise as part of a “smear campaign”.
Mr Albanese, the Australian prime minister, rubbished the announcement, saying: “Nobody believes Peter Dutton has changed his mind on work from home... [He] wants to undermine work rights and in particular doesn’t understand modern families.”
The coalition also said it was reversing its plan to remove 41,000 government workers, saying it would now rely on a hiring freeze and natural attrition to reduce what it sees as a bloated public service. Mr Dutton had previously failed to say whether he planned to carry out forced redundancies.
“We got the policy wrong in that regard and we’ve made it clear, now, our position,” Mr Dutton said on Monday.
Labor and the coalition are nearly deadlocked in the latest opinion polls, with swing seats on the outskirts of major cities – among the most exposed to the high cost of living – likely to be crucial.
Labor saw a modest bounce in outer metropolitan areas in the weeks after the Liberal Party unveiled its plan to curb working from home, polling by YouGov showed. It has led narrowly in the past three opinion polls released this month.
In the UK, more than one quarter of working adults (28 per cent) were hybrid working in the autumn of 2024. Experts have argued the scale of working from home, particularly in the public sector, is a cost to productivity and the economy as a whole.
Donald Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term as US president forcing government employees back to the office five days a week.