On Labor’s pitch for working from home, Allan finds her cause

3 months ago 21

In the nearly two years since she became Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan has never been entirely in sync with the Labor machine.

Where Dan Andrews was both a central cog and its chief engineer, it has taken a while for Allan and the other moving parts on Victorian Labor’s election-winning assembly line to fully understand each other and how best to roll the finished product into the November 2026 state poll.

Premier Jacinta Allan receives a standing ovation at Labor’s state conference on Saturday.

At Moonee Valley Racecourse on Saturday, the venue for this year’s ALP state conference, we saw the pieces coming together.

The premier walked in and left the conference main hall to a standing ovation, the room having been primed by a slick campaign video marrying Allan’s voice and image with the “On your side” slogan the party will use in the lead-up to the election.

When the video started playing before Allan’s putative rival, Deputy Premier Ben Carroll, had finished his speech, it was further evidence that Labor gods are now smiling on a state leader who, only a few months ago, was put in deep freeze by her own party during the federal campaign.

The change in Allan and Victorian Labor from the dog days of late summer, when senior party figures were reeling from the results of a Resolve poll published by this masthead showing only one-fifth of voters intended to vote for the party at the next state election, goes beyond the atmospherics on the conference floor.

Allan and Deputy Premier Ben Carroll embrace on stage at Moonee Valley Racecourse.

The centrepiece of Allan’s speech was a promise to legislate the right of people to work from home two days a week in jobs where this is possible.

This is very much Allan’s policy, developed by her advisers and approved by a cabinet subcommittee of senior ministers she chairs, rather that going to full cabinet or caucus for debate.

It is almost certain to be electorally popular – former federal opposition leader Peter Dutton and his campaign spokeswoman Jane Hume could ruefully attest to this – and will broaden Allan’s political persona beyond her ubiquitous, high-vis and hard hat image.

There are all sorts of unanswered questions about the policy, the most pressing one being whether the Victorian government, nearly 30 years after the state ceded its lawmaking powers in industrial relations to the Commonwealth, can actually do what it is promising to do.

The Victorian government negotiates enterprise agreements covering public sector workers but does not have jurisdiction over the working conditions of people employed in the private sector.

Allan suggested one possibility open to her government is to create a right to work from home in the state’s equal opportunity laws. This would establish legal protections against workplace discrimination for people who don’t want to go into the office five days a week.

Allan also made it clear that this option and others are yet to be fully worked through, with consultations with unions and employers to take up the rest of the year. However, she promised that one way or another, legislation would be introduced to parliament before the next election.

“We will go through that detail, but this isn’t a question about will we do it,” the premier said. “Let’s be clear – my Labor government is bringing legislation to the parliament to make working from home a right.”

For Allan, a mother of school-aged children who organises her affairs so that she can work most Fridays from her Bendigo home, work from home is emblematic of a bigger issue.

During her speech to the conference, Allan spoke of how trying to balance the demands of work and family, while meeting the cost of living in Victoria, left many families – particularly women – feeling breathless. She framed a work-from-home right as something to help put people back in control.

“This isn’t about whether the work gets done – it gets done,” she said. “This is about power. It’s about who gets to call the shots and who gets pushed around.

“We will not stand by while workers, especially women, single mums, carers, get punished for needing balance in their lives.”

This is where the politics behind the Victorian government’s legislative ambitions are devilishly clever.

Business groups, such as the Australian Industry Group and the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, are dismayed a state government, at a time when low productivity is a drag on the national economy, is talking about passing laws that would make workplaces less flexible.

Opposition Leader Brad Battin is determined to learn from the mistakes of his federal counterparts, whose poorly communicated pledge to force public servants back in the workplace became a vote killer among women of working age.

Battin’s initial response – recognising the importance of existing work-from-home arrangements while promising to review any legislation the government introduces – is studiously non-committal. How long can Battin count on his loose-lipped Liberal colleagues to stick to this careful line?

The louder business groups holler, the more Liberal MPs say aloud what they really think, the more Labor can build a scare campaign about a Battin government abolishing work from home.

The Labor machine would love nothing more than to fight the election on this issue. Jacinta Allan, after an uncertain start, may have found her cause.

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