Home truths
Peter Dutton has learned the hard way that while Australia often looks to the US for direction, they are still two very different countries.
Every so often, the news serves up a reminder that Australia is not the United States, and in fact the two countries are in many ways quite different. The federal Coalition’s volte-face on work-from-home arrangements for the public service is one of those times.
As our chief political correspondent Anthony Galloway revealed in his deep dive into the U-turn, which has dominated coverage of the election campaign for the past 48 hours, the return-to-office push for public servants never went through shadow cabinet, and some Coalition frontbenchers voiced reservations about the plan once they found out about it. This, in turn, has raised some concerns about the opposition’s approach to policymaking, Anthony reported.
The return-to-office policy has now been ditched, following a ferocious Labor scare campaign that incorrectly implied private sector workers could also be permanently forced back to the office. A separate but related plan to slash 41,000 jobs in the bureaucracy has also been walked back.
Efforts to rein in the public service at a time when the federal budget is deteriorating do have merit. But the problem for the Coalition was not just the WFH policy itself, which clearly alienated women. It was the way it was framed for voters.
