Thursday, 4 June 2026

 Dylan WIGHT (Tarneit) (21:09): Only the Allan Labor government will protect and legislate Victorian workers’ right to work from home – the right to work from home from two days a week to make sure that Victorian workers can save money on transport costs, not having to get on the train or indeed get in the car and fill up at the petrol station to get their way into the city or wherever else it is that their workplace is, and to help Victorians who in particular have caring responsibilities to complete their work at home, closer to where their kids may be going to school, closer to perhaps where their parents may be in care and closer to where the things that they need to do straight after work are.

We know that time lost in the car or on the train is horrendous for productivity in Victoria, is horrendous for the hip pocket and is horrendous for workers’ mental health.

The pandemic in Australia was horrendous but it was also a defining moment. It changed many things. It changed the way that we do many things here in Victoria and around Australia. One of those things that became clear through those years is that many Victorian workers, both in the private sector and the public sector, are able to productively complete their work from home. Of course there are some workers in the economy, Acting Speaker Cameron, that are unable to work from home – the job that you undertook as a plumber, for instance, is one of those. We have heard some ridiculous commentary from some corners of the Victorian public, from some business leaders, on these work-from-home provisions, but they only apply to those who can undertake this kind of work.

It is only the Allan Labor government, as I said, that will protect your right to work from home but also enshrine that in legislation for years to come. It is only the Allan Labor government that will protect Victorian workers. To pick up some of the commentary from the opposition on these working-from-home provisions, we know that deep in their hearts they do not support them. A little over 12 months ago we made this announcement, I believe at a Labor state conference, that we are going to legislate working-from-home provisions.

The Liberal Party have kind of had a buck each way: ‘Oh, we’re not sure. You know, maybe. We’ll review it. We’ll have a look. We’re not 100 per cent sure.’ But you know who has not had a buck each way? The member for Brighton. He was the Shadow Treasurer at the time, but not anymore – the Leader of the Opposition has decided to keep that all for herself.

A member interjected.

Dylan WIGHT: Yes. The member for Brighton was pretty direct on his view of working from home. You could even say that he may have stepped outside what the party’s talking points are. I have spoken a few times this week in relation to the member for Brighton and how he conducted himself in certain negotiations, and I may have made the suggestion that the Leader of the Opposition and indeed his party office find it kind of hard to control him. He is kind of a freelancer, the member for Brighton. He came out quite bizarrely and gave his views on working from home very clearly. He was the Shadow Treasurer at the time so he thought it was in his remit, with an economic portfolio, to do so. He said that there should be a policy to mandate that all workers go back to the office five days a week regardless of whether they have the capacity to work from home.

Think about what that would do on day one of making sure that every single Victorian worker has to come back to the office. This would be mandated, so maybe their employer does not want them to come back to the office but is happy for them to work from home. But under the member for Brighton’s mandate we would have tens of thousands of workers – more workers than we already do – having to get onto public transport to get into the city, the next suburb or somewhere else to go to work. Tens of thousands of Victorian workers would have to get in their car, get on freeways and public roads to come into the city, to get to the next suburb or to get somewhere else to go to work, jamming up Victoria’s public transport system, jamming up Victoria’s roads, but also costing every single Victorian worker that did have the capacity to work from home more money, either at the petrol pump or through having to put more money on their Myki. His words exactly were that ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ are being spent for these bureaucrats to work from home.

It was Peter Duttonesque. Basically what he was intimating was that work from home is some amazing benefit that only Victorian public servants are able to access. Firstly, that is just fundamentally incorrect. The amount of people who work from home in my electorate of Tarneit who work for private technology companies or indeed in other industries in Tarneit, Point Cook and Truganina is enormous. Working from home and legislating the right to work from home will be a benefit of no end to those workers. But it also gives you a pretty good understanding of what the Liberal Party – and the member for Brighton in particular – thinks of public servants in this state. We have already seen what the Liberal Party’s plans are for public servants in Victoria: $40 billion cut out of the Victorian economy and 7500 public service jobs ripped out of the Victorian economy – 7500 workers, a lot of them with families, that will go home one day without a job. They say it is only back office. You cannot take 7500 jobs out of the Victorian economy without cutting frontline services.

To be more direct about the comments from our friend the member for Brighton:

Every public servant should be turning up to work.

He said that to the Herald Sun on 1 February 2025 – as if working from home is not turning up to work and as if public servants are sitting there at home doing nothing and should be dragged back to the office, putting pressure on our public transport system, putting pressure on our local roads and putting pressure on those workers’ hip pockets. He went further, saying:

We should be requiring all public servants to work from the office.

So regardless of who is in government, regardless of who the secretary of the department is, regardless of the work that they are undertaking, regardless of their caring responsibilities and regardless of the fact that they can work from home productively, the view of, I assume, the entire Victorian Liberal Party and the entire opposition – because one of their senior members, the member for Brighton, is saying it – is that we should be mandating all of those workers to come back into the office five days a week. This party, whenever they have the chance to govern, have a long history of waging wars with Victorian workers, whether that be frontline workers like firefighters, paramedics, teachers and nurses; closing schools; closing hospitals; going to war with ambulance workers; and going to war with firefighters; or whether that be making ridiculous comments like that about people’s capacity to work from home. They have got history here. It is in their DNA. If we have a situation where we have a Wilson–Pauline Hanson Liberal–One Nation government here in Victoria, we know exactly what they will do, and that is rip rights from Victorian workers.

 Mathew HILAKARI (Point Cook) (21:19): We are a bit of a double act, but I am afraid I must disagree horrendously with my learned friend from Tarneit because I do not think we are going to have a Wilson–One Nation opposition. It will be a One Nation–Wilson opposition. There is no chance, on the polling that we see in front of us, that the Liberal government will be anything near where One Nation will be. One Nation will be over the top. I am sorry to say that, unfortunately, I do not think the Nationals will be at party status at that point. I think that is a real disappointment, because there are people who make good contributions on behalf of regional Victoria. Unfortunately, the only nationals in here will be One Nation party members, and they will be leading the coalition. In fact I am more interested in what they have got to say about working from home than what the Liberal Party and the coalition on the opposition benches have to say, because One Nation are going to be the opposition that we will have to deal with in the next Parliament.

Each Labor member is going to work hard to make sure they come back, but One Nation is going to rule the roost in those Liberal and formerly National Party seats. This working-from-home government motion goes to the heart of what we think is important, and that is giving people time with their families and that opportunity to be with them. We know that working from home delivers a workplace which is friendly for families, for both women and men, to be engaged with their children. We do not work for work’s sake. We do not work to build someone else’s economic wealth or our own. We work so that we can build a great family and a great community, and without work from home, particularly for places like I represent, that is a real struggle. If you are in the car 1½ hours each way each day, you are adding two days a week to your work week. Where does that leave opportunities for you with your family, to build those sporting clubs, to build that great life together? You do not get it without working from home. That is why it is incredibly popular in the communities that I represent, some of the most popular areas for work from home.

We took to the community some consultation – it was a huge consultation, with 36,770 survey responses from workers across this state. So many of them were from the community I represent because it is such a benefit for them. When I speak to people at the doors about work from home, it is always couched in the phrase ‘If you can and if you want to’. Not everyone wants to work from home, I get that. Lots of people enjoy working from the office. They find it provides them with a space. But so many people work from home in the community that I represent. Businesses know how good it is, because they put it in their ads when they seek to employ people. They get the best employees when they offer flexible work arrangements. We know that some people cannot work from home. The member for Melton, when he was on the tools as an ambo, he could not be working from home. We get it. So many drivers, people who run our economy, cannot work from home. We get it. But everyone benefits from it.

A member interjected.

Mathew HILAKARI: The police of course – so many cannot. But they all benefit. Everyone in our community benefits. Your partner might be able to work from home. They might be able to do it and provide some of that support for the family to make the family work. And when there are less cars on the road, the ambos, the police and the truckies all get around easier too. That is something important for everyone across our community.

The member for Tarneit did mention the Shadow Treasurer and that we needed to make some amendments to a former Shadow Treasurer, and that is that is fair enough. I have never seen a leader of a party so unwilling to trust those around them that they would take on both the senior roles – very unwilling to trust those around. I feel a bit sorry sometimes for the member for Brighton. He keeps trying to insert himself and get back in the game, and good on him. He will keep trying all the way up until the election when the relevancy of the Liberal Party will be just that bit less.

But I take us back to the 36,770 survey responses. What did the community have to say? They were pretty clear on what needed to happen. Seventy-four per cent of employees surveyed said the right to work from home is extremely important to them. I hear that every day in the community that I represent. 3200 people told us they do not feel they can even ask their current employer for the option to work from home out of fear that it will be denied or held against them. That says some really difficult things about workplaces, but it also says that governments, good governments, need to intervene, to step in. I often get the refrain from some that this is something that should be left to the employer and employee, but we know what the power imbalance is. The power imbalance is huge.

These might be the same people who think we should leave it up to the employer and employee to negotiate minimum wages. That is the sort of thing that people like that would like to see. Some people would like to see workplace safety left up to the employer and employee. I know Acting Speaker Cameron knows exactly how important workplace safety is. Without legislation, without the intervention of government, people do not get paid properly, people are not safe at work, people are not able to have a good work-life balance with so many people working.

Part of the reason we are seeing record numbers of people participating in the labour market is exactly because of work from home. Work from home has enabled more people to participate in our economy. Work from home means that you can balance your family responsibilities, as well as the responsibilities to the workplace. Of those who cannot work from home but want to, the majority had requested it and were refused by their employer. Nearly all of those who were refused felt the refusal was unreasonable and said that it created extra challenges for them at work or at home. It just means a worse working life, a worse family life.

I speak to many people across the community, in community organisations, and they say there are real challenges because people are working so much, but also commuting so much, and that commuting is a real drag on our economic prospects, on our productivity. Because if you are spending two days extra a week in the car getting to work, on public transport getting to work, of course that is going to be a massive drag on productivity if you are not fresh, if you are not able to concentrate, if you are not able to engage with your fellow employees and employers. That is a real challenge. If we talk about productivity, productivity was demonstrated in the period of COVID, which was a real challenge. There were some real challenges – we talked about teachers earlier on tonight, and we know how much of a challenge it was for teachers and for parents during that work from home period. But there have also been some real benefits. It was demonstrated in a live action way that work from home can work and does work and keeps that productivity.

People who participated in the survey talked about some of the biggest benefits. The top benefit, and I have talked a little bit about it already, more than a third of respondents said was that the one-way commute takes over an hour. That is true of the community that I represent. So working even a couple of days a week gives them hours of their life back, and it means that they can spend that time with their family in their community. The second most cited benefit was saving money. 9200 people reported that commuting costs them between $25 and $49 a week. In the current cost-of-living crisis, in the current oil crisis, an oil crisis not of the making of this Parliament, not of the making of the federal government of this country, something that has been done in foreign places by foreign leaders, well, of course, it is even more vital than when this survey was undertaken.

The third biggest benefit was focus without distractions: a quiet home environment, not a noisy open office space. Isn’t that something that goes to some of the productivity that we would like to see, that maybe those opposite who do bang on about productivity just endlessly, might want to reflect and dwell on that for a little while. The loud member for Brighton might be of the view that being loud is productive. I have never felt that that was the case.

Notably, the most common arrangement that people want is two days a week working from home. When we legislate this and we bring this to the Parliament in July, and we legislate it from 1 September, we will see that people are entitled to that two days a week where they can, where they want to, and negotiate with their employer for the remaining three days, as is appropriate. In my previous job before here, my employer asked me, ‘Matt, would you like to work from the city, a place which is chock-a-block full of people?’ The lord mayor will have a look at the stats most recently, but he said, ‘Do you want an office in town?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not. I’ll work from a desk from home and I’ll enjoy my new family.’ And it made my work life so much better and so much more productive. I commend this motion to the house, and I look forward to hearing from the opposition, surely.

 Eden FOSTER (Mulgrave) (21:29): I am surprised that those opposite are not speaking on this motion, but it gives me an opportunity to speak straight after my good friend the member for Point Cook. This motion cuts to the absolute heart of the ideological divide in this state. On one side, we have an Allan Labor government that looks at working people and asks, ‘How can we give you more control over your life, more time with your kids, your family, and less stress on your budget?’ And on the other side, we have an opposition who is so out of touch with everyday Victorians, they want to drag us back to the 1980s, before we had the internet in homes, we were using typewriters and still had the good old rotary telephone. This house must condemn the Leader of the Opposition for her profound failure of leadership.

She has failed to stop the former Shadow Treasurer, the member for Brighton, from executing a reckless campaign for a mandatory, rigid five-day office return – absolutely shameful. She has failed to call out the blatant misinformation spread by her front bench regarding flexible work and failed to support Labor’s progressive world-first plan to legislate working from home as a right for Victorians. The member for Brighton has shown he is completely out of touch with the realities of modern working life and the needs of working families. He seems to genuinely despise work from home arrangements despite their proven benefits. Last year he went so far as to demand that the government force public servants back to the office full time. He claimed the government was paying ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars to back office bureaucrats’ on some kind of ‘sweetheart deal’ by letting them work from home, and accused those dedicated staff of not delivering for Victorians. He stated ‘Every public servant should be turning up to work,’ as if the thousands of public servants who work from home are not working hard for Victorians every single day.

This rhetoric reminds me of what my mum experienced in the early 1980s. She too was a public servant, juggling life as a working single mum, living in Springvale and travelling to the city for work every day, needing flexible hours to be home in time for me to be dropped off after day care. When she asked for flexibility she was told to choose between her job and her family, and that is exactly what those opposite are telling hardworking parents to do today. They are telling those parents who can actually work from home to choose between spending more time with their kids and spending more time commuting to and from work. They are telling single parents who could work from home to choose between spending more money on travelling to and from work and spending that money to put food on the table and pay for bills.

I think it is pretty clear who is listening to everyday Victorians, and it certainly is not those opposite or their allies in Canberra. Need I remind everyone in the chamber what the federal member for Goldstein said about working from home. He outrageously called it ‘professional apartheid’. This is the shocking mentality we are dealing with. They simply do not get it on that side. They do not understand what flexible work means to people. They do not understand that flexible work is here to stay under an Allan Labor government, because we know it works for people and it works for the economy.

Before I entered this place, you might recall, my professional life was dedicated to psychology and mental health. I worked with families, young people and school communities. I know what burnout looks like. I know what chronic stress does to a family unit and the heavy, exhausting toll that is demanded when a parent has to choose between an extra 2 hours sitting on the Monash Freeway and sitting at the dinner table with their children. For the people I represent in Mulgrave flexibility is not a luxury, it is a survival mechanism for modern life. The opposition wants to paint a picture of a lazy workforce, but our government actually went out and asked Victorians what they thought. We conducted extensive public consultations on the future of flexible work, receiving over 36,000 survey responses from workers across the state. The message was crystal clear: 74 per cent of employees surveyed said the right to work from home is extremely important to them. I am hearing it on the doors as well when I talk to residents in Mulgrave. Being able to spend more time with their family, the cost of driving to and from work and the reduced stress of the work–life juggle – that is important for them, and that is what working from home helps to deliver.

The data completely refutes the opposition’s fearmongering about productivity. Many workers find they accomplish more in a quiet home environment than in a noisy open-plan office. In fact more than 28,000 respondents told us they are more productive when working from home. Over a third of Australian workers, including 60 per cent of professionals, now work from home regularly. So when those opposite attack working from home, they are not just attacking a policy, they are attacking the wellbeing of workers.

I can tell you, as a psychologist, that autonomy is one of the single greatest buffers against workplace stress. But right now, every day, unions are hearing from workers who are being denied reasonable work-from-home requests. Over 3200 people told our survey they do not feel they can even ask their current employer for the option to work from home, often out of fear it will be denied or held against them. Of those who cannot work from home but want to, the majority had requested it and were refused. Nearly all of those who were refused felt the refusal was unreasonable, creating extra challenges for them at work and at home. Do not get me wrong, most employers are open to their staff having that flexibility, but there are some out there that are not, and we are protecting that right for those who can work from home to be able to work from home.

Let us look at what work from home means for family budgets and the economy. By working from home just a couple of days a week, the average Victorian family saves about $110 a week in reduced commuting and childcare costs. That adds up to roughly $5300 a year back in the household budget. At a time of intense cost-of-living pressures, that amount is not trivial – it means the groceries, it means bills, it means kids’ school expenses. When asked about the biggest benefits, over 13,000 respondents said their one-way commute takes over an hour, meaning working from home gives them hours back in their life – back with their kids, their family, maybe their elderly parents, back to just being able to live life and do those things that reduce that stress just that little bit. Fewer commuters also mean less traffic and crowding for those who do need to travel, for those who do not have the option of working from home. It results in fewer cars on the road and less strain on public transport during peak hours. Over 9200 people reported that commuting costs them between $25 and $49 a week in fuel, and probably more now as the cost of fuel goes up as well. These costs are a burden to many Victorians, and we are helping them with that with flexible work options.

Our government understands that flexibility is the new reality of work. It is about moving with the times and supporting working families. Those opposite, on the other hand, want to drag us back to a one-size-fits-all notion of work life. Their hostility to something that clearly benefits so many working people just shows how entirely out of touch they are with modern Victoria. While we are looking for solutions that benefit workers, families and businesses, they are looking for someone to blame and something to ban. Only Labor is supporting workers and supporting families, and only Labor will enshrine these crucial protections into law. I call on the house to overwhelmingly support this motion. I also challenge those opposite to talk to this motion. Talk to Victorian families about why you oppose this, because it is so important. It is so important to people in my community who may have that option of working from home perhaps ripped away from them if those opposite come into power. I commend this motion to the house.

 Iwan WALTERS (Greenvale) (21:39): I rise to speak in support of this motion in condemnation of the opposition leader, who has not stopped the former Shadow Treasurer’s reckless campaign for a mandatory five-day office return. I will just unwind a little bit and reflect upon where we have arrived as a society and an economy. I would posit that the modern Australian economy was built by giants like Paul Keating, who liberalised the Australian economy, who brought down the tariff barriers, who set Australia up for a generation of prosperity and, in doing so, created an economy that exists in a really dynamic way in this day and age.

I see this every day in my own community, where the manufacturing base that formerly employed tens of thousands of people no longer exists in quite the same way. Employers like Ford are no longer there as a consequence of some deliberate policy decisions of the Abbott–Hockey government in 2014. There are still many people employed in manufacturing, but that entire supply chain has been lost. There are people working in manufacturing firms, but it is often at a smaller scale, not in that sort of heavy industry model.

Anthony Cianflone interjected.

Iwan WALTERS: As the member for Pascoe Vale rightfully says, it is a more niche, boutique setting. Tens of thousands of jobs and that sort of heavy industry in the north were lost. The member for Pascoe Vale would see the consequences of that in his own electorate. Those jobs were lost. I talked in my first speech about how there is a need for government to work to support communities through economic transition and how if we approach life through something of a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, not knowing how we would want to be treated, there is the need for government to be there to support people who have lost significant amounts and have lost their livelihoods through no fault of their own but because of the buffeting effects of international economic change, technological change and also policy decisions by government. It is therefore incumbent upon governments to support people into new jobs. That is why this government’s work in investing in TAFE, transforming and uplifting the TAFE system in this state, is so important – so it can provide that transition for people into new and emerging jobs.

As I was coming to, the collapse, or the retreat, of heavy industry like the Ford factory, Nabisco and other big manufacturers in the north impacted a lot of people. But jobs have been created in their stead – new jobs, different jobs, jobs in emerging sectors of our economy. I see these every day. I knock on doors, talking to my constituents and hearing about the issues that matter to them. Very often there are people who are at home, and I am a little bit concerned that I am disrupting their work day when I knock on their door. But because they are there, they are happy to have a chat. And they tell me how important a flexible, dynamic, modern economy is for them – that capacity to work from home. I think it is worth also putting on record that this does not necessarily work for every workplace – that has always been very clear in the Premier’s and this government’s declarations about the importance of working from home – but for many people it does.

I think we saw at the 2025 federal election that many people value that right and that capacity to work from home if and where they can. The spectre of the former federal opposition leader withdrawing that right was something quite totemic for many people who, as I see in my electorate and I suspect the member for Pascoe Vale does in his, formerly would have simply had to turn up at a workplace, irrespective of whether in actually doing so they created additional value, created additional productivity benefit or created any form of additional economic benefit for either them or the firm for which they might work. They can now work from home. They can save on a potentially very long commute, something that at the moment, in the context of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, is expensive for people, notwithstanding the fact that this government has provided a rebate on people’s registration as of Monday 1 June. Well over 1 million people have already availed themselves of that rebate.

But in addition to ensuring that where we can we are supporting people with cost of living through things like rego rebates and half-price public transport fares until the end of the year – notwithstanding those supports, it is still expensive for people to get to work. It is still time consuming, and I know this certainly from speaking with constituents who are living in growing areas of our city like Greenvale and Roxburgh Park who rely upon arterial roads like Somerton Road, Pascoe Vale Road and Mickleham Road to get to work. If people can avoid unnecessary journeys while still adding significant value for their employer, saving on potentially 90 minutes either way at the end of the day, that is in itself a good thing. It is a productivity-enhancing thing. It enables people to potentially actually work for longer while still getting a significant benefit to their recreational life, to their family life and to their capacity to collect children from school at the end of the day or indeed drop them off at day care at the beginning of the day.

It is that sort of dynamic flexibility that I see in this government’s commitment to ensuring people’s right to work from home where possible. It builds on the tradition of Keating and others who liberalised the Australian economy in the 1980s, when the technology did not exist to enable work from home in the way that it does now. But when we have an NBN and a digital economy that is ubiquitous and people have the capacity to use platforms such as Zoom, Teams and others to access the workplace and to still collaborate with colleagues, there is the capacity to do that in a way that would have been unimaginable in the 1980s when other significant landmark economic reforms were taking place.

But there is an alternative to this approach. The alternative would be to needlessly mandate for people who could potentially valuably work from home to be in the office. That sort of blunt presenteeism, for want of a better phrase, does not add value. It does not necessarily render somebody’s work more productive. All it does is necessitate journeys which could be avoided and chew up time in people’s day.

There is undoubtedly, I would argue, a value in people being able to collaborate in person, and that capacity is in no way lost as a consequence of these important reforms to enshrine people’s right to work from home. There is a collaborative benefit and dividend that comes from people working in teams, working face to face. I certainly embrace that in the context of working with my own staff. But equally that is not lost in the capacity of being able to work from home for two days a week where it is possible to do so, where people have a format of job or an economic sector in which they are employed where they can do that. The hybrid model has proven itself to be valuable both to employers and employees. There have been manifold examples that I have heard the Premier, the Treasurer and others in this government talk about in their engagement with Victorians across our economy, but industry leaders have also asserted the benefit of this kind of hybrid approach for their own workplaces and their own sectors.

It also works for employees. People who can save that time, who can save that cost of unnecessary journeys, free up capacity on our roads and our public transport network for those for whom going into an office or going to a workplace or going to a factory is a necessity. We know that congestion and those types of hindrances to people are really determined by very marginal changes in road usage. If at the margin you can lessen the demand for fixed infrastructure like arterial roads or railways and the carriages and so forth that travel on them, that creates significant benefit for all of the users of that network.

I am very mindful of the conversations that I have with people in my electorate when I am out and about knocking on doors during the workday. They are telling me how valuable it is for them to have that capacity to work from home without any diminution in their economic output. In fact I would contend that there is an enhancement of their productivity as a consequence of being able to work in a way that best suits them and their employer while also obviously saving on that commute either way, which in areas of Melbourne’s outer north like Greenvale can be 90 minutes in some instances for people going to the city. I commend the motion.

 Vicki WARD (Eltham – Minister for Emergency Services, Minister for Natural Disaster Recovery, Minister for Equality) (21:49): I rise very happily to speak on this motion, because I think that it is important for us to explore the differences in philosophical approach here. On one side you have got a party that believes in the collective. You have got a party that believes in the right of workers to have some power about their working life and to have some power about their choices. On the other hand you have got opposition parties who believe in restricting those rights.

What I have seen from my own community in the outer suburbs is how incredibly important the ability to work from home is. I recognise that predominantly my community is middle class and that there are a number of white-collar workers who do have the privilege of being able to work from home. But what is important about where I live – to go to the point from the member who just spoke – is we are some distance from the city. We are some distance from workplaces. So when it comes to where I live in the Shire of Nillumbik, for example, only 30 per cent of people work within the municipality, and in Banyule it is only slightly higher. Where I live people have to commute to get to work. And what that means is time lost. It means that there is time spent, whether it is commuting to the city, whether it is commuting to the south-east, whether it is commuting to the western suburbs or whether it is commuting to industrial precincts – people spend time commuting. That means they are not spending time at home. It means they are not spending time in their communities. It means they are not spending time volunteering. It means they are not spending time interacting, building and belonging to the community in which they live. What we want to do is give power to employees to work with their employers to ensure that where it is possible they can work from home two days a week. What that means is people get more time back. Time is valuable. Time is important to people, and I do not understand why we have an opposition who thinks that it is okay to dictate to people how they spend their time. I do not understand how a party that prioritises the rights of the individual so highly, as I know the Liberal Party say they do, should then impinge on the rights of individuals around how they choose to spend their time. It is for the employers to ensure that workers are productive. Employers can do that no matter where their employee is located. If they cannot, then they are not a good manager, and that is on them. It is not on the worker.

In my own community I have done a survey and I have had panels where I have spoken to people to understand how important it is to work from home, to have that flexibility and to have that choice. It has been overwhelming. I have got women who are not just caring for children; they are caring for older parents. Adding a commute to their caring responsibilities is causing them so much distress. It is taking away so much of their time. It is exhausting them. They can do their job at home. They do not need to be at work. They can do it and they can be productive, but it means they can also manage their other responsibilities. Why would any party want to make their life harder? I have got other women in my community who do not manage crowds well, who have got challenges. That means they can work incredibly productively at home, but they find being out in big, noisy environments challenging. They can do the work from home. Why would you prevent them from being participants in the workforce solely because of the principle that you think you need to have your worker visible to you to ensure they do their work? You see the quality of their work. You see what is produced from their work. If you are a good manager, you do not need to have full visibility of them for the whole time that they are paid in their employment.

I have got dads who are dropping their kids off at school because their house is around the corner from the school, and they can do that because they are working from home. I have got dads engaging in their kids’ lives as they have never done before. They are dropping kids off, they are picking kids up, they are taking kids to footy training – because they are home. They are clocking off and they are off at 5:30 to go to footy training, and they can do that because they are not stuck on a train, they are not stuck on the Western Ring Road, they are not stuck on the Eastern Freeway. They are home in their communities. They are able to volunteer in their communities. They are able to participate in the sporting clubs because they are there at 5:30, because they have not spent 45 minutes to an hour or more commuting.

They have more energy because they are not so tired because they are not commuting as much. It is extraordinary that that freedom of the individual, that freedom of people to move around in their community is wanting to be restricted by those opposite. It really talks to core values. It talks to the fact that the Labor Party has always been a party that intrinsically cares about the rights of workers, that intrinsically cares about ensuring that workers have the power to make choices, have the power to ensure that they have a healthy work environment, and a healthy work environment for many people includes the option to be able to work from home.

What we have on the other side is a party that has absolutely zero care for the rights of workers, who does not care about healthy work environments, who does not care about workers rights and who does not care about making sure that people can have the optimal opportunities in their lives. Because if they did care about equality of opportunity, if they did care about people having optimal opportunities in their lives and access to that, they would support the right to work from home for only two days a week. All that is being asked is that where it is possible, people have the option to work from home, and how that has become such a point of division, how that has become such a point of friction is really quite astonishing. The federal Liberal Party, the federal coalition decided that they would force public servants back, which we then knew would mean everybody back to work five days a week face to face. The backlash that they had from that decision was extraordinary, and they back-pedalled from that incredibly quickly. Why? Because it is not what people want. If you are off the noise vacuum that is Facebook, if you are actually out in community, if you are actually out talking to people rather than banging on with bots, you would find out that that is exactly what people want. People want flexibility; they want to be able to engage with their families, they want to be able to engage with their communities and they want to have the right to work from home when it is possible to do so. It is extraordinary that the right of the individual to make that choice is something that is opposed by those opposite.

What I also find extraordinary is one of the repeated refrains or mantras that has gone on for decades from those opposite which has been, ‘The market will decide. Let the market decide. Let us have a free market. The market will tell us the way things should be.’ The market has voted with its feet. The market tossed the Liberal and National parties to the kerb at the federal election and said, ‘We want to be able to have the right to work from home.’ That is what the market said, because that is what people want. People want to be in their communities. People want to be with their families. People want to have choice. When you have got the party of Menzies that is supposed to be all about choice, wanting to deny people choice, mandating how people should live their lives, forcing people to live their lives in a certain way, I think is quite extraordinary. What it tells you is that there is a value on this side of the house which is people-focused, people-centric, which is about workers and their rights at work and ensuring that they are living the best life they can with the best opportunities they can, and a party over here that wants to confine people, that wants to box people in and that only wants to talk about profit and not people.

 Kathleen MATTHEWS-WARD (Broadmeadows) (21:59): I rise in support of our plan for every Victorian who can work from home to work from home and have the right to do this two days a week. But to begin I want to thank all the workers that cannot work from home, those workers who turn up every day in our hospitals, in our schools, in our kinders, in our aged-care centres, in our factories, on our roads and in our cafes and shops, doing the essential work to keep our society and our economy running. We thank you.

I am really lucky that many of the jobs I have had over the years have enabled me to work from home occasionally, and this flexibility has worked really well for my family. It certainly helped when Dad first became a paraplegic 20 years ago and as a councillor I could work from home during the day and attend council meetings at night when Mum got home from work, so it enabled her to continue working. Flexibility has been necessary ever since. There have been times when I have been able to get my mum or aunties to appointments during the time she could not drive, and I have made that time up at night. You know how often I am working late into the night, Acting Speaker De Martino, and the hours we do on the weekends as well. That flexibility works in my job. It is one of those jobs where the flexibility can work, and I am very lucky for that. Unfortunately my daughter has been quite unwell at times, and flexibility has been absolutely necessary for Joe and I to be able to work from home at times. And we know that is the case for the vast majority of the 750,000 unpaid carers in Victoria, who contribute over $19 billion to the economy every year. Seventy per cent of these carers are women, and we know that the majority of the work caring for children also continues to be done by women.

We know that flexibility works for them. That is a story you hear over and over again. It is a story that we heard when the Premier came out to Oak Park to talk about working from home. It is the story of my friends, my family and my colleagues. It is a story of every family you speak to. They like flexibility. They do not like being told what to do. Mandating five days in the office, I just cannot understand who that works for, so I cannot understand why the opposition would want to consider that. I cannot understand who it would work for. It is just completely out of touch with the millions of families, and particularly women, who juggle and juggle and juggle, trying to get the balance right on the demands of a very busy life, and it is certainly out of touch with the women who do most of the care work.

We know that care needs to be flexible, and we know that working from home at least a couple of days a week makes that care possible. Why on earth would we want to make their lives harder or the lives of anyone harder? If you took them out of the economy, the cost of that care to the economy would be extraordinary. It would be unaffordable. When I was the adviser for carers, I heard firsthand the difficulty many people had getting flexibility – this was prior to COVID – so they could continue their role while balancing their other responsibilities, flexibility so that they could continue to work and contribute to the economy and contribute to their families. Then we saw COVID turn all of this upside down, and work from home became the default, not the exception. We all pivoted. We made it work. It was not easy, but in the end it was possible for so many workers. We saw what was possible. I thought it was going to be one of the only lasting benefits out of COVID that carers could have the flexibility to work from home, that you could continue to be productive, that you could contribute, that you could still be part of a team and that you could get your work done and balance your needs and the needs of your workplace. We saw this was possible during those years. It was not even really impossible or hard to accommodate reasonable requests from workers to work from home for those jobs that can be done at home. I thought it would all be a permanent change that would make carers’ lives easier and their ability to participate in the workforce easier going forward. But what actually happened was there was this inflexible pivot back where a lot of employers would make people come back to the office for no particular reason and a lot of people who had flexibility lost that flexibility. It was unfortunate. It went back, and I think that is why there is difficulty filling some positions now. We know that the workplaces that have kept flexibility get the best workers, get the most productive workers. And actually, why would you not want happy workers? We know they are more productive.

For those carers in particular who fought really hard for those provisions, to then have them stripped back was just unfair and unfortunate, particularly when we had proven that it was so easy to actually make life flexible and that you could still do your work, contribute, be part of a team and do all that, and you could do it flexibly.

There were some workplaces that did it really well after COVID was finished. You would all come in on the same day a week so you could have those team-building exercises, there would be flexibility on different days and different teams would come in.

My husband has still got very flexible working arrangements, and his team comes in two days a week, when they are there. He goes in most of the other days as well, but they know the team is all together, and it works. It is his choice, and it works for him and it certainly works for us. It means that I can do this job, and it would not be possible without him having flexibility.

We know the employers who kept the flexibility are the ones that are thriving, as well as their employees. Those that have decided reasonable flexibility is not worth it have paid the price and now struggle to attract and retain workers who know there is a better way. We know that working from home at least two days a week works for everyone, not just women. There are the added benefits of less cars on the road, less congestion, less demand at the pump. Yet the member for Brighton seems to want to make all employers unreasonable to their workers. I just do not even know how they would feel about that. Why would you make life harder when it does not need to be and put more cars back on the road, especially when petrol costs are so high at the moment? With the mandate for public servants, it just seems quite offensive to say that public servants are not doing their job unless they are in an office. I do not think he knows these public servants. When I was an adviser in aged care during the COVID times, we were working 16 and 17 hours a day from home. I could not have fitted in a commute. There were public servants who were working that and more, and we would be on the phone to each other at 11 o’clock, 12 o’clock at night when the restrictions were changing the next day. You could not doubt their dedication to their jobs, their dedication to Victoria and their dedication to the work that they do every day.

We did some surveys, and the government found that for the biggest benefit of working from home, the top answer was ‘saving time’. More than 13,000 respondents said that their one-way commute takes over an hour, so working from home even a couple of days a week gives them hours of their life back. That is hours they can spend helping their kids with homework, cooking or volunteering. We know that especially in the emergency services if you have done a night shift at the –

Vicki Ward: The SES – working from home at the station.

Kathleen MATTHEWS-WARD: That is right.

Vicki Ward: The CFA – working from home at the station.

Kathleen MATTHEWS-WARD: That is right. At our local SES at Fawkner, I know on busy, stormy days a lot of them will take their computers in and work from the station, and it is a beautiful station. You have been there, Minister.

Vicki Ward: I have. It is a great station.

Kathleen MATTHEWS-WARD: It is one of the best we have got in the state.

Vicki Ward: And when they work from the unit – fast response times.

Kathleen MATTHEWS-WARD: Exactly – they are right there. They are ready to go; they are in their uniforms. They are working productively, and they can respond better to our community, doing the important work they do. That means that they are happy at work because they know their employer values them, values what they do outside their work, values their time with their family and values the important role that they play in our communities. We know that it works for employers too because they are keeping these incredibly dedicated people. The people who give of their time to our state emergency services are the best in the state, and who would not want them to be their employees? Who would not want to make their lives easier and make sure that they hold onto those employees? So I just think it is madness. And you look at the city at night – it is thriving. They need to pivot. You look at the businesses out in the suburbs. The cafes I go to – they love it. They absolutely love it, and why shouldn’t those businesses thrive? I just do not know why you would stick cars on the road and mandate things that people do not want. I cannot quite understand it.

Vicki Ward interjected.

Kathleen MATTHEWS-WARD: Yes, you do not care about people. You do not care about flexibility. You do not understand the role of carers, the importance of the role of carers. You do not understand working parents.

David Southwick: On a point of order, Acting Speaker, I know it is getting very late and everything else, but if the member could please direct her contribution through the Acting Speaker, because there is a lot of ‘you don’t care about people, you don’t care about this’ –

Vicki Ward interjected.

David Southwick: There is protocol here, Minister. Let us be real. Let us be fair.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Daniela De Martino): The point is accepted, and the member will speak through the Chair, please – and yes, when giving a point order, direct comments through the Chair. The member’s time has concluded.

 Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (22:09): It is a pleasure to follow the fantastic member for Broadmeadows. I will perhaps begin as she did, I thought appropriately, by recognising that while we so strongly support work from home on our side of the chamber, we recognise first and foremost that many people of course cannot work from home. We are very grateful for the work they do, and we note that many of those who cannot work from home are indeed employed by the Victorian government or deliver very important services for us. That includes our teachers and our school staff. It includes of course our Victoria Police teams. It includes our professional firefighters. It includes our early childhood professionals. Many of those fantastic people who we work with cannot work from home. And of course we have been through a process, a very necessary and important process I think, of negotiating and setting some higher wages and conditions through their EBAs for many of those staff. We on our side of the chamber believe they absolutely deserve it, in part because they do not have the fantastic opportunity that work from home provides to others. I was very pleased in fact to see in the discussions that are taking place with the AEU the minister and his team giving some further thought to whether we can provide some more flexible work to our teachers and school staff. We do hope, on that note, that we do get to a resolution. I know the minister at the table, the Minister for Emergency Services, hopes we will get to a resolution on some agreements taking place with our professional firefighters on that note as well.

We were very lucky in our part of the world to actually have the announcement about legislating work from home made at Tyler’s Milkbar in Preston, which is a fantastic cafe for anyone who wants to get along there. A shout-out to Sam, Alli and Kim up there. I have actually given them a shout-out before, and in fact they got quite a bit of publicity from appearing on the Premier’s Instagram account. I think, if I remember correctly, they did their second-biggest week of business ever after the Premier turned up there – very deserving, because they work very hard and it is a fantastic place, and I am sure many of the people who went there at that time keep going back, just as many who went there during the work from home period in COVID kept coming back. One of the things that Sam said when she spoke to the media on that occasion was just how vital work from home had been for them, particularly for getting them through that difficult COVID period and the way that, instead of that being a big negative for them, it was in fact an increase in business for them and it is what set their business on the very successful path that it has gone on today.

Indeed there are many fantastic local businesses around Preston and Reservoir that benefit from the fact that people can now duck out of their homes and go down and grab lunch there instead of being in the city. If I can add another one to the list: Luke’s Bakery. Confusingly in our part of the world there is Luke’s Bakery in Reservoir and there are now two Luke’s Bakeries on High Street in Preston. I am not sure they are actually related, but specifically a shout-out to Jim at the one at 365 High Street, where I go to very regularly from the office – a great spot to grab either the Luke’s Favourite or the Luke’s Special with the betel leaf, some fantastic banh mis that you can get at Luke’s Bakery. While I am at it actually, Subosh just a bit further up at Blue Lily Cafe does a great job. Although while I am talking about businesses that benefit, Don Guri was a fantastic cafe that was previously there, run by Fred Chih-Mao Kao, a Taiwanese Victorian who just did this fantastic Asian fusion cafe there.

I do not know if you have noticed this, but a thing that happens in life is that you expect that your favourite towns and your favourite tourist places and your favourite football club, most of these things, are pretty permanent and they do not disappear. But the thing I have noticed in life is that your favourite cafes sadly do disappear sometimes. Whatever your favourite restaurant is, it is not always a business where they are around forever. So it is sad that Don Guri has gone. And in fact a shout-out to Stefan Armentano, who used to run a place called Small French Bar, which was my favourite restaurant of all time, but sadly is also no longer with us. But while I am listing businesses local to our area that are benefiting from the Allan Labor government’s work from home policies, I might just add Sardinas run by Brooke and Adam – a great spot just a bit further up from High Street to where I was referring before.

I am going to actually put a controversial proposition to the chamber, which is that I think that the best coffee that you can get anywhere in Reservoir is actually –

Vicki Ward interjected.

Nathan LAMBERT: The minister challenges me. Possibly the best coffee anywhere in Melbourne is actually at Rick’s Barber Shop up on Broadway in Reservoir, with Rizk Al’Douwaihy and George and the team there. After you get your haircut you get a coffee, and the coffee is so good that sometimes I go there just because I want the coffee and not because I need the haircut. Fortunately for me, because I need a regular haircut, the two things often coincide.

Vicki Ward interjected.

Nathan LAMBERT: Ping’s have got good dumplings. Indeed if you are working from home, get along to Ping’s Dumpling Kitchen on High Street, just across from the second Luke’s Bakery, where you can also get some fantastic lunch – or dinner in fact later on in the day. While I am at it, actually Elia’s Trend Café there – they are a wonderful spot. They have got a great menu. I normally just duck in in the morning.

Vicki Ward interjected.

Nathan LAMBERT: Oh, the Preston Market is another. Thank you, Minister. Through you, Acting Speaker, Preston Market is a great place to get down to.

You can grab a crepe from Chantelle and the team at the creperie or go across to Rhubarb Rhubarb, a business run by Sue and Haydn, who you, Acting Speaker De Martino, happen to know well. It is another wonderful chance for lunch or indeed to pick up some organic groceries, something of which you, Acting Speaker, have a very good professional understanding. That is just running through some of the great local businesses that have benefited from our work-from-home policy.

I had the opportunity on the weekend to talk to a young journalist – Louie Cina is his name. We were at the Preston Bullants Amateur Football Club game, and we were talking about the great game they had and the real sense of community they have got around that club. We were talking about a thing that has happened in this world, for anyone who has ever read Robert Putnam: we have all got wealthier, incomes have gone up over a great period of time and people now have their own private, individualised entertainment and their own private transport. That is generally great – everyone likes that – but in all that we did lose a little bit of community. I think everyone knows this. A lot of the big sporting clubs and things like that are not quite as big as they used to be.

One of the great things about work from home is that we all thought that trend would just keep going and those local community institutions would continue to wither as people chose more and more to stay in their houses. Most families have now got two or three cars. The days when a family would have no car or maybe just one car that was taken to work and then they would just walk around the neighbourhood are long gone. But one of the great things about work from home is it has slightly reversed that trend now. People are hanging around their home and walking down to the local shops or indeed walking down to watch a local football game, as was the case when I was chatting to Louie Cina. That is another reason why it is just stunning to me that the opposition do not want to get on board and support legislating work from home.

On that note, I should just pick up on a suggestion. While we are dealing with this great community we do see a few more people driving down to their local shops, which we love to see. On behalf of Ray from Ray’s Bikes – I was saying earlier that some of my favourite cafes are gone and, sadly, Ray has had to close up shop – who said to me before he closed up shop that he just wanted to see if Darebin council or indeed the state government could invent a new form of parking arrangement that was something we would all understand. We are used to the S and the P, but maybe this thing would be a Z or something, and what it would mean is that parking was free for people who wanted to visit local businesses during the day but after 6 pm or 5:30 pm it would become residents only. He wanted that because he was like, ‘People need to be able to drive down and access Ray’s Bikes,’ as it was on High Street. I used to live near Ray’s, on Pender Street, and there was a dance academy there, so the entirety of Pender Street would fill up when the dance academy had all the people there. I do have some sympathy for his argument, so I just thought I would take the opportunity tonight to pass on Ray’s suggestion. I hope he is doing well wherever his business has gone to now.

In fact a shout-out to Nat Lutpon and Sean Carroll, two fantastic locals from that part of the world, who I know have a similar challenge because of the CorePlus Pilates studio that is just there. A shout-out to Grace, who runs that Pilates studio, if you are looking for some reformer Pilates. Again, because it is so popular, some of those side streets just absolutely fill up, and then you do have that problem for local residents that they cannot get a park anywhere near their houses. As I say, that is just one of the things. Work from home is a great thing for bringing people back to those local neighbourhood activity centres, but it does just make us think a little bit about how we are handling parking and indeed road safety in those parts of the world. We probably could do with some 40-kilometre-per-hour zones on Pender, Wilcox and Youngman streets as well.

While I am there, just a shout-out to another local of that area, Travis Dowling, who is known to many people in this place for his great work as the CEO of the Victorian Fisheries Authority, which we were discussing in this chamber earlier this week. We look forward to him continuing to make a great contribution to the public service in this state. It is such a pity – I am just warming up on this fantastic and important topic of work from home. Work from home is a fantastic reform. It supports cost-of-living relief. It is great, as we know, particularly for people with young children. It is great for carers, as the minister said, and great for local areas in Preston and Reservoir. It deals with congestion and it lowers emissions. I could go on and on about the myriad benefits of work from home, and I only hope those in the opposition will take notice of tonight’s debate and support it in future.

 John MULLAHY (Glen Waverley) (22:19): Well, what a hard act to follow that is. I think I know every single business in Preston. I am going to get down to Rays Bikes – oh, no, Rays Bikes is gone. But a bit of Pilates in the morning, Ping’s dumplings – not as good as the dumplings in Glen Waverley, I must admit, though.

I rise to support this motion and to support the Allan Labor government’s decision to protect the right of Victorians to work from home. This debate is about much more than where someone opens their laptop – it is about whether we trust working people, it is about whether we understand the pressures of modern families and what they face and it is about whether we embrace the future of work or try to drag Victoria backwards. Because make no mistake, that is exactly what the Liberal and National parties want to do. While Labor is legislating the right to work from home, the Liberals are campaigning against it. While Labor is listening to workers and families, the Liberals are listening to the loudest voices from the boardroom or from the Australian Financial Review or from the Herald Sun or from any of those rags that are out there. And while Labor is focused on making life easier and more affordable, the Liberals are focused on forcing people back into long commutes, higher costs and less flexibility.

When I go out doorknocking around my neighbourhoods, it is great to get out there on a Monday to Friday. I have got a tertiary-educated cohort of people that have moved to my electorate for education. They want the best education for their kids. What used to happen probably six, seven years ago was that you would doorknock, and in probably eight or nine doors you would get one person, probably someone over the age of 65 that would be retired. Now when you go out doorknocking, expect to spend an extra 3 or 4 hours out there because every second or third door you doorknock you have someone working from home. Whether it be male, female, whatever, they have that flexibility where they are able to look after their family, spend more time with their family, run the kids to the sports club and pick them up from school, which is something that Donna and I have as well. She gets to work two days from home, and it makes it easier for us to be able to coordinate our life, it gives more time back to us and it saves us money. All of these are the benefits that working from home gives us.

The opposition leader and the member for Brighton have shown repeatedly that they are completely out of touch with the realities of modern working life. Last year the member for Brighton launched a crusade against working from home. He demanded that public servants be forced back into the office for five days a week. He claimed hardworking public servants were somehow on a sweetheart deal. He accused them of not delivering –

A member: They want to sack them anyway.

John MULLAHY: Yes, well, one in seven. He accused them of not delivering for Victorians. He declared that every public servant should be turning up to work. Think about that for a moment. The nurses administrating programs, the planners delivering infrastructure projects, the child protection workers supporting vulnerable children, the disability workers helping Victorians access services, the people who kept government functioning through some of the most difficult years in our state’s history – apparently none of that counted. Apparently they were not sitting in an office building in Melbourne’s CBD five days a week – they were not working. It was insulting, it was disrespectful and it showed just how disconnected the Liberal Party has become from the reality of modern workplaces.

What made it even worse was that he launched this attack without even consulting his own colleagues. Even as businesses across Victoria were successfully adopting flexible work arrangements, even as workers demonstrated they could be productive from home, even as families benefited from greater flexibility, the Liberals wanted to take it away with the stroke of a pen. Then, when even the federal Liberal Party realised that they had backed the wrong horse and abandoned their own anti-working-from-home position, the Victorian Liberals still refused to rule out forcing tens of thousands of public servants back into the office five days a week – what will be left of them. They still refuse to learn that lesson, because they simply do not get it. They do not understand that the world has changed. They do not understand that work has changed and they do not understand that Victorian families have changed. Their instinct is always the same: if working people gain flexibility, they want to take it away; if workers gain rights, they want to wind them back; if families gain more control over their lives, they look for ways to remove it.

The Allan Labor government takes a very different view. We trust Victorian workers, we trust Victorian families and we trust employers and employees to make modern workplaces work. That is why, from 1 September this year, Victorians whose jobs can reasonably be performed from home will have the legal right to work from home two days per week. This is a world-leading reform. It recognises something that millions of workers already know. Working from home is not an experiment, it is not a temporary arrangement and it is not a pandemic-era novelty. It is now a permanent feature of modern working life. It delivers enormous benefits.

The biggest benefit workers told us about was time – time with their children, time with their partners, time caring for their elderly parents, time participating in their local community and time simply living their lives. More than 13,000 Victorians told the government that their commute takes more than an hour each way. That means 2 hours each day spent sitting on trains, trams, buses or roads. Working from home even a couple of days each week gives people hours of their lives back. That matters, particularly for working parents, particularly for carers and particularly for people who are trying to balance the competing demands of work and family.

The second major benefit is with the cost of living. We know families are under pressure. We know every dollar matters. The evidence shows that working from home can save the average household around $110 a week. That is more than $5000 each year. That is not pocket change; that is the groceries, that is the school uniforms, that is the utility bills and that is the mortgage repayments. That is money staying in family budgets instead of being spent on fuel, parking, public transport fares and childcare costs. At a time when families are looking for relief wherever they can find it, the Liberal Party’s answer is apparently to increase their costs, to force them back onto crowded roads, to force them back onto crowded trains and to force them to spend more of their money and more of their time commuting. That is not a cost-of-living policy, it is the exact opposite.

The third major benefit is productivity. The Liberals love to pretend that people working from home are somehow less productive. The evidence says otherwise. More than 28,000 Victorians told the government that they are more productive working from home – not less productive, more productive. I know in the instance of my partner Donna when she is working from home that she does not have the interruptions of the phone and she does not have the interruptions of people coming up to her desk. She can literally focus on the work that she has in front of her. She can still beam into the Teams meetings and still get all of those updates, but she has a quiet household where she can focus on the job that she needs to get done. These are the benefits of working from home. People can structure their workday more effectively and can produce better outcomes, and the facts simply do not support the scare campaign being run by the opposition.

But perhaps the most important aspect of this reform is fairness. At the moment, whether you can work from home or not often depends on who your employer is. Large corporations often provide flexibility; many smaller workplaces do not. That means workers doing similar jobs can have vastly different rights depending entirely on where they work. Labor does not think that is fair. That is why these rights will apply regardless of the workplace size, while allowing additional time for smaller businesses to prepare, because flexibility should not be reserved for a lucky few, it should be available to everyone whose job can reasonably be performed from home.

There is another reason this debate matters. The attack on working from home is part of a broader attack on the public sector. The Liberals are not just talking about ending flexible work arrangements, they are also talking about $40 billion in cuts – $40 billion, an extraordinary figure. The vast majority of the Victorian budget is health and education. There is simply no credible way to cut $40 billion without cutting hospitals, schools and frontline services. At the same time they are talking about cutting one in every seven public service jobs. That means fewer child protection workers, fewer disability support workers, fewer people supporting our hospitals and fewer people supporting our schools. They will tell Victorians that it is only the back office jobs, but we have heard this before. Victorians know how Liberal cuts work. The cuts always start somewhere else, but they never end somewhere else. Eventually frontline services suffer, eventually communities pay the price and eventually working people are left worse off. Cuts are not an unfortunate side effect of Liberal governments, cuts are a defining feature. It is part of their DNA, and that is why their position on working from home is so revealing. They are not interested in helping workers, they are not interested in helping families and they are not interested in modernising workplaces; they are looking for someone to blame and something to cut. Labor, on the other hand, is looking for solutions – solutions that help families, solutions that help workers, solutions that improve workforce participation, solutions that strengthen our economy and solutions that recognise the realities of modern life.

Victoria’s workforce participation rate is now significantly higher than what it was before the pandemic. Flexible work has played an important role in that success. It has enabled more parents to remain in the workforce, it has enabled carers to stay connected to employment and it has enabled people with disability and chronic illness to participate more fully in our economy. I could go on and on, but I do not have the time. That is why I am proud to support this motion, and that is why I am proud to be part of the Allan Labor government.

 Josh BULL (Sunbury) (22:29): I would love to hear the previous member go on and on, because as with the member before him, it was a very important contribution and a contribution that goes to, I think, an understanding of working people in this state and a contribution that looks at the changes to workplaces within Victoria, within the country and across the globe, and a recognition of the work from home policy and an understanding around the changes that have resulted in what is before us this evening as we debate this motion. It is an opportunity for a recognition particularly of a change to family circumstance, but also a change to the way that the economy works. We saw through the pandemic through 2020 and 2021 both here and abroad that there were such significant changes to the way that the economy and business and community interacted. What I think is really important that my good friend the previous member spoke about in his contribution is the change to the home environment. For people within my electorate, about an hour from here, to understand and know that the opportunity for flexibility and that choice to be able to do those tasks around the home whilst being able to do your job is just so very important.

Vicki Ward interjected.

Josh BULL: Indeed, Minister. What we see from those opposite time and time and time again when we come into this place is an outfit that is driven by ideology, not practicality, and is an outfit that is driven by, in so many ways, punishing those within our community that want to do their best, that want to work incredibly hard, but most importantly, that want to support their family in a work–life setting that enables them to live their very best life. What we see from those opposite, whether it is on this policy or so many others, is a shameful reflection of a mentality that is stuck in decades gone by. What we do on this side of the house is deal with the practicality of circumstance, the changing global politics, the changing local politics, and a practicality that revolves around investment and support and making sure we are standing for working people. To have the opportunity to be able to listen to this motion and to hear the contributions that have been made by my friends on this side of the house is, I think, a real reflection on what this government stands for, both from a policy setting but more important than that, from a setting of values and a setting of understanding what works for those within local communities.

Growing up in the outer suburbs as I did, and as my family did – my folks moved to Sunbury in the 1970s, and at that time the town’s population, and I have spoken about this before in the house, was about 7000 or 7500; we now stand at about 41,000 or 42,000, projected to go to 80,000 by 2045 – we know and understand just what communities rely on when it comes to interacting with a workplace, and that a flexible working arrangement has so many benefits that we can indeed measure from an economic sense, but more importantly than that, from a social sense. Those things that we cannot measure are just so critically important. When I move around my terrific local community, and not reflecting on you in the Chair, Acting Speaker De Martino, but when you move around your local community as somebody who is really engaged with that community, we know and understand the importance of time spent perhaps in traffic, time spent away from family, and the frustrations that might come when you do not get the opportunity to make that additional appointment. You do not get the opportunity to be home for bedtime. You do not get the opportunity to be there for the commute to sport. All of these things matter, and they matter in a sense of the time, the connection, the investment and the value from a family sense. They matter in a way that in so many instances, as I mentioned before, are really hard to quantify.

We have got an opportunity through this place and through legislation and through the framework that the government has put in place to be able to change that. I think that is a really important and powerful thing to do. We have got to be nimble, we have got to be responsive and we have got to be practical in the way that we address these matters. I think the framework that is before us, the work of the Premier, the announcements that have been made by the Premier and of course the whole cabinet and the team are really important. It stands in stark contrast, as I mentioned earlier, to the outfit that is over the other side of the chamber. We remain focused on listening to and supporting local communities. We understand that this state has considerable population growth and the minister at the table, the Minister for Emergency Services, as a member of the government that is in the outer suburbs as well, knows and understands that puts pressure on local families, both from a cost perspective and a time perspective. What this framework does is it gives back those opportunities. I, on balance, in listening to the really important contributions from those on this side of the house, understand that we have got an opportunity to do something that changes that dynamic. When you move around your local community you hear this in many different shapes and forms, but most importantly, when you are at a footy club, when you are down the street in the local community, when you are speaking to people on the doors or on the phones, I think this is a really powerful and important societal shift, and it is an opportunity to use technology in a really important and powerful way.

There is no doubt that changes to technology have had a really significant impact on communities. I think all of us in this place, no matter which side of politics you are on and no matter where you come from, know and understand the damage that technology can do when used in the wrong way. What this opportunity gives us from a work-from-home sense is an opportunity to use that in a good way. Perhaps if we are able to, as a government and as a society and as a community, craft and shape our energy and efforts in a way that makes for technology to be used in a good way, as per this motion and as per the work-from-home provisions, then this is a really important and powerful thing. We spend a lot of time speaking about and reflecting on the way that those circumstances can do damage, but what this motion before the house looks at and what this opportunity gives us from a work-from-home perspective is the ability to use that in the best possible way. To be able to have the Teams meeting or the Zoom meeting, the opportunity to have that phone call, to do the things that you need to do from home, to do school pick-up and school drop-off, to take the kids to footy training and do all those things I think is really important, particularly for communities like Sunbury, Gladdy, Tullamarine, Diggers Rest and about seven homes in Keilor – those people within my electorate. I think that is a really important and really powerful thing.

I want to take the opportunity to remind those opposite that as they sit there and craft up their ideological message about what they think works for working families, maybe they should talk to working families.

Kathleen Matthews-Ward interjected.

Josh BULL: Imagine that. Imagine if they sat there and actually talked to working families in Sunbury or Broadmeadows or Cranbourne or Eltham. Imagine if they did that. But no, they know best. They come in here, they rant and they rave and they carry on like pork chops. But this side of the house is committed to working people and to standing up for those people and making sure they have the best possible chance in life.

 Pauline RICHARDS (Cranbourne) (22:39): In the last few weeks I have brought a few schools into this beautiful workplace of ours; I want to acknowledge Cranbourne East Secondary College, Cranbourne Secondary College, Casey Grammar and Wilandra Rise. I take them up to the caucus room, our party room. It is a beautiful room, and it is a room where we talk a little bit about what it means to have discussions. I talk a little bit about disagreeing agreeably.

I ask them to have a look at the pictures on the wall. When they walk into the caucus room, usually it takes a couple of minutes to settle down. I say, ‘Can you have a look at the photos on the wall? I want you to start at the right, and I want you to have a look at those photos. What do you notice?’ A couple of the kids will say, ‘Oh, I see. They’re all in black and white’. ‘Yep, yep – what else do you notice?’ And they start looking around and we start moving. All of those photos are the very first Labor caucus, the very first members of this Parliament from our side. I ask what they have in common – ‘What do you see?’ Usually a couple of minutes in they notice they are all blokes, they are all men. That was what this Parliament looked like. There was a whole Parliament of men. I ask them what life was like when this Parliament was represented by men. Then they start looking around, they move a little bit further around, and at that really important photo they start seeing for the first time women elected to the Parliament.

I talk to them about how that did not happen easily. We had to pull levers. It was not something we just talked about. Unlike those opposite, who freak out and oppose every opportunity for their party to introduce quotas, we had to make rules and we had to require that there be rules in place so that a proportion of those seats, Labor seats that would eventually form government, would be held by women. They start looking around – ‘Oh, look, you can see the first women there.’ And then in the next Parliament there are a few more and a few more. And of course being Cranbourne, they start noticing the diversity – people from different backgrounds. There are younger people as well, people from different parts of the state, people who have been born in different countries, people with different cultural heritage, but they always talk about the women.

That is what a workplace looks like. It changes, it evolves. How important it is that this place – this beautiful, amazing place that we have the privilege to work in and where we have the opportunity to represent our communities – is starting to really reflect our community. It is not perfect. We are definitely not perfect, but we are really starting to be representative of our community. As part of that, we start looking at what levers we have to support our communities. I have just got to say, I heard the member for Preston’s tour through Preston, and I nearly got in the car there and then to drive to those extraordinary bakeries – a lot of them called Luke’s Bakery, was it? There are some extraordinary places in Preston. There is an absolute parochial pride we have in where we live and where we represent and where we serve.

Josh Bull interjected.

Pauline RICHARDS: I hear that from the member for Sunbury.

Vicki Ward: And the relationships.

Pauline RICHARDS: Absolutely, you are right, Minister – the relationships we develop with the places that we serve. What a sweet and important role we have as members of Parliament, and that means sometimes really looking at what we can do to strengthen our communities. That is at the heart of what this important motion is, because not only are we calling out the member for Brighton for that scaremongering role he has but we are also acknowledging that the Leader of the Opposition has taken a particular path. ‘I’m in Kew. I’m in Spring Street. I have to go and duck into some of those other places’ – places where One Nation and some of those other parts of the community are maybe listening to some of the slightly more right wing commentators who have what I would have thought of as a view of the world that is perhaps represented by those photos of well-meaning people. I am going to be that optimist and say those well-meaning people who thought they knew best. But I think what we have got now is a Parliament that represents the community, that serves the community and that is looking at what the needs of our community really are.

In Cranbourne, the community I represent, I am thinking and reflecting on the fact that it is a beautiful place to live. It used to be a country town, but it is not a country town anymore.

I mean, we have got a great train line. It has been duplicated all the way out and you can go on Metro and you can get on at Cranbourne and you can get off at Parkville and you can go to Melbourne Uni. But actually I live in the community, and I am still 56 kilometres away from here. So what does that mean? It means getting up early and catching a train if you work in the city, and commuting. I have got this extraordinarily diverse community, but I do have a lot of people who commute into the city. And when I spend that time that we all do out and about in our community, I am really pleased to be able to ask people what it is that matters most, and I know. I mean, I hear it every morning: the sound of children when I wake up in the morning is the sound that is so sweet, because it is the sound of optimism, it is the sound of altruism and it is the sound of why people have chosen to make Cranbourne home – probably similarly to the people who have chosen to make Sunbury home, and that is about opportunities for their children. So for our community, like so many – actually, it does not really matter if you live in Greenvale or Narre South or Macedon or Sunbury or Eltham or Broadmeadows or Glen Waverley – people want to be with their community and absolutely people have an optimism for the future. People want to be connected, and that means spending time with their children, and if you do not have kids, it is with your neighbours and your friends. I was reflecting – I have got an elderly mother; it is also caring. They call us the sandwich generation, caring for our parents as well.

I would just like to spend the last few minutes reflecting on the role of volunteerism. I have these amazing sports clubs. I know we are all parochial, but there is nothing quite like the Casey Warriors. They are an extraordinary rugby league club with a focus on family and a focus on community. How many of those people commit their time to volunteering – not for themselves; this is about volunteering for their community. It is about their own children, but it is actually not about their own children only. It is about this perception that all of the children in Cranbourne are ours, and those volunteers, if they get the opportunity to work from home, are given the opportunity to volunteer at their rugby league club. I know that Minister Ward at the table has a bit of an affection for netball, and I have the Stallions, who are an amazing netball club run by extraordinary South Sudanese young women. Those women are coaching and leading the community and are the leaders of the future. If they are all commuting for all the hours it takes, despite an extraordinary, duplicated train line, it means they cannot get to netball to coach those other children. It means the kids cannot be at netball with their parents watching. Work from home is sensible. It is such a wholesome opportunity for us to do the things that we need to do.

The minister at the table came out to visit the SES. That is fantastic. It is going to be an amazing, sparkling new SES in Devon Meadows, and we got to spend time with the Cranbourne SES volunteers. People who work – are in paid jobs – and volunteer at the SES, the more time they have working from home is more time to volunteer, so I would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the role of volunteerism and the importance of working from home for those people who volunteer. They give so much back to our community. Whether it is the Stallions Netball Club, it is the Casey Warriors, it is the Cranbourne SES or it is my fantastic CFA, these people deserve to be able to volunteer, and working from home makes that possible. There is so much about our role in this place, this diverse, extraordinary role we have, that is important, but being able to use the levers of government, being able to legislate so that people have the opportunity to work from home, is an important and precious role.

 Gary MAAS (Narre Warren South) (22:49): It is really terrific to get up here tonight to make a contribution to this motion. I would like to speak to the motion because working from home has really transformed the way many of us work. Over the past few years flexible work arrangements have moved from being that temporary solution that was there amidst a crisis to becoming a permanent and highly valued part of modern working life.

I was really fortunate to have spent some time recently in Canada and to see how their Canadian Parliament operates and how votes in the houses are taken. I find it extraordinary that Canada has taken this notion of working from home into its parliaments, where parliamentarians can vote electronically on their phones. Virtual voting, they call it – they all tune in to what is going on and then they log in and register to vote. They can even be physically present outside of the chamber and still put their vote in. But what they have done is they have taken this notion of working from home and asked where the possibilities are. What else can be done? It is not as though they are going, ‘Hang on, let’s go back to one-size-fits-all, let’s go back to the 1950s and let’s just think how landlords can enclose the economic rent’, because deep down that is what I think it is all about really. Let us just keep it for the landlords, let us have people coming in so that there is a reason for the rent to be paid and for that money to be taken back in. That is really what is behind it.

But making work arrangements more flexible helps many people. It will help all employees to have it no longer considered a luxury or a workplace perk. It will be an essential part of achieving a healthy, productive and balanced life. The evidence clearly shows that Victorians value that sort of flexibility. But we do know that many employees still face barriers when seeking flexible work arrangements. Many fear that their request will be denied or that just making that request could negatively affect their career progression or their workplace relationships. What is even more concerning is that, among those who cannot currently work from home but would like to, the majority had already requested the option and were refused by their employer. Nearly all of these workers felt the refusal was unreasonable, and most reported that it created additional challenges in both their professional as well as their personal lives.

These findings highlight an important point: working from home is not simply about convenience. For many people, it is about having the flexibility needed to manage family responsibilities, reduce financial pressures, improve wellbeing and participate fully in the workforce. When workers were asked about the biggest benefits of working from home, the number one answer was saving time. Time is one of our most valuable resources, and commuting often consumes a significant portion of it. That means that many workers spend many hours in their one-way commute, over an hour for many, and that means workers spend more than 2 hours every day simply just travelling back and forth from work. By working from home, even one or two days a week, employees can reclaim several hours that would otherwise be spent sitting in traffic or on crowded public transport, and those extra hours can be used much more productively, whether that means completing work tasks, exercising caring responsibilities or exercising itself. They could be spent with family members, pursuing hobbies or simply getting more rest. How many times does someone ask you how you are going and you say, ‘I’m good, but I am tired’? These are the sorts of benefits that can come, including greater productivity.

For many Australians, commuting is expensive. 9200 respondents to a survey said that their travel to work cost them between $25 and $49 every week in fuel, parking fees, tolls or public transport fares.

Over the course of a year those costs can add up to thousands of dollars, and at a time when many households are facing significant cost-of-living pressures, every dollar counts. Working from home allows employees to reduce these expenses and keep more money in their pockets. The third major benefit identified by workers was improved focus and productivity. Many find that they are able to concentrate better when they are working from home. Without the distractions that are often associated with busy, open-plan offices, employees can complete tasks more efficiently and maintain greater focus throughout the day. Many report that they are more productive when working from home. For some, this means getting more work completed during the day. For others, it means achieving more milestones, meeting deadlines more effectively or indeed producing higher quality work.

What Victorian Labor is proposing are the world’s first work-from-home laws, which will come into effect on 1 September this year. Under the laws, Victorians who can work from home will have the legal right to do so two days a week. To make it happen, this government will introduce legislation to the Victorian Parliament later this year. The new right to work from home will be enshrined in the Equal Opportunity Act 2010, and we announced earlier this year that the work-from-home rights will apply regardless of the size of your workplace.

Flexible workplace arrangements also play a really crucial role in increasing workforce participation. Many talented Australians face barriers to traditional workplace arrangements. Parents with younger children, for instance, carers looking after family members and people living with disabilities or chronic health conditions often struggle with rigid workplace requirements. Work-from-home options create opportunities for individuals to enter, remain in or return to the workforce. By removing unnecessary barriers, flexible work arrangements allow employers to access a larger and more diverse talent pool while enabling more Australians to contribute their skills and their expertise. This impact can already be seen in Victoria, where workforce participation is now actually 4.4 per cent higher than it was before the pandemic. Flexible work arrangements have been a major contributor to this growth, helping people who may otherwise have been excluded from traditional employment settings. Working from home also delivers benefits to our communities and infrastructure, because when fewer people commute every day, roads of course become less congested and public transport systems experience less pressure during peak periods. This benefits not only the remote workers but of course those whose jobs require them to travel as well. While it is Labor who are looking for solutions that benefit workers, families and businesses, it is the Liberals who are looking for someone to blame and something to ban. Only Labor is supporting workers, only Labor is supporting families and only Labor will enshrine these protections into law.

 Meng Heang TAK (Clarinda) (22:59): I am delighted to join my colleagues on this side to speak on this motion on working from home. We on this side of the house condemn the Leader of the Opposition, firstly, for failing to stop the Shadow Treasurer’s reckless campaign for a mandatory return to five days in office.

I listened keenly to the contributions on this side of the house, especially the contribution by the Minister for Emergency Services, who said working from home is all about family. It is all about community, and it is all about engagement. On this side of the house, it is all about making it possible for those who want to be able to work two days a week if it is possible without interrupting or without reducing or affecting their productivity. I also listened keenly to the contribution by the member for Sunbury. He talked about the fact the world has changed and the way the work-life balance and possibilities and flexibility in work have also changed.

This brings me to my trip to China not long ago with the Whip and a few other members on this side of the house. On the last day of the trip, we visited one of what we call middle high schools. It was very interesting. The interesting part was that we saw how schools can be connected without teachers having to travel to the classroom at another school. That example gave me a lot of thought about the working-from-home possibilities we already have here back home. At that middle school in China, you have one teacher teach in his room and then the technology makes it possible to connect not only to the classroom in his school but to the other schools, the regional schools that otherwise would not be able to have teachers at that moment. That gives a lot of benefits: work flexibility and also productivity.

Coming back to the present, I also heard the contributions from many of the speakers before me about the possibilities and the flexibilities that benefit our local community. I have been out doorknocking in my electorate, and it is interesting to talk to residents who actually work from home, not just after COVID-19 when we learned that there are so many ways that we can actually connect, that we can actually learn and we can make use of the technology that was already available, in terms of Zoom, in terms of connecting through the technology. But one person – I do not remember his name, but he is in the marketing industry – I asked about what he thought about working from home and he looked at me with surprise. He had worked from home all his life, for more than 20 years. The beautiful thing was that not only did he get to work from home, but in front of his house is his work office. He has a caravan, and this is his mobile office. I thought that was wonderful. I asked him, ‘How many days do you work, two days or three days?’ He said, only when he needs to meet his team. Then he would hop on the train and come to the city, have a cup of coffee and have a meeting and go back. That is the nature of his work, and it is not only for the last couple of years, but for more than 20 years that has been the nature of his work.

A member interjected.

Meng Heang TAK: That is right. And I thought, ‘Minister, how lucky and how wonderful it is,’ because it brought me to another resident I met during my door knocking. She works as a bookkeeper, and again, she was happy to work from home. She has young kids just like mine so she can drop off and pick up her kids after school and spend a lot more time with them without travelling to the city. She only needs to travel when she has meetings with her management or with her team as a bookkeeper.

I thought, ‘This is fantastic. How wonderful it is to have that flexibility with an employer who understands that productivity is one thing and that connections with family and also with community are another thing.’

From my experience, during my time at university I worked at SBS as a broadcaster. To produce a 1-hour live program each and every broadcaster needed to come to SBS at Fed Square, regardless of where they lived, whether it was half an hour or 1 hour from the city. You came to the studio, did the translation first and then pre-recorded part of an interview with your prospective interviewee to prepare for that 1-hour live program. It needed to be done at that time. It was not long ago – it was only about 10, 15 years ago – that we had to come to the city, to Fed Square. In my case I had to, once again, hop on the train from Springvale.

A member interjected.

Meng Heang TAK: That is right. From time to time if I was late for my program, I drove in and parked in the car park underneath Federation Square. At the time it cost a lot of money, and there was the time to travel. It was not only the inconvenience but it was, I would say, unnecessary. Not long ago I learned that my former colleague, who now works at SBS, does not have to do that. She just does the pre-recording through her mobile phone at home, sends it across to the studio at SBS and then she goes on live. I thought, ‘That is fantastic, how wonderful it is.’

I could go on and on, but I just would like to come back to the bill. On balance, this is a fantastic motion on working from home. It not only benefits the employer but also the employees, the workers. Also there are the local benefits that the member for Preston mentioned in his contribution – a whole long list of benefits for the local economy. Imagine mum and dad or a partner is working from home, and then the benefits to the local community, to the local businesses, to the cafes, to the restaurants and also to the takeaway food industry. One of my friends is working from home as a chef, where she can do the packaging and her husband can deliver the food to those who are working from home.

This is a fantastic motion, and it is fantastic to be able to work from home. It is without any adverse negative impacts on productivity, but most importantly there is the time spent with family, the time spent with the kids after school or being able to drop off the kids at school. Most importantly, I think is the time that parents can have with their kids after school, which would not be possible if everybody needed to travel, let us say once again, from Springvale to Federation Square just to produce 1 hour of a live program when now you do not have to do that travelling. I commend the motion to the house.

 Daniela DE MARTINO (Monbulk) (23:09): It is with great pleasure, verve and vigour that I rise to support this motion before the house today. Working from home works, quite simply. For many people I think there sometimes can be such an imbalance in their work and their home life, and I know that there has often been for me. I remember speaking to someone once and they said a really simple philosophy to live by, a healthy philosophy to live by, is that you should work to be able to live, you should not be living to work. I think this is what is underpinning all of this. It is not about not being productive, because we know that working from home is productive. In fact – and I have said this before here – it is the Productivity Commission themselves, hardly the bastion of progressive thinking, who have come out and said that they believe that hybrid working from home is actually more productive for society. So we are hardly talking about radical, far-left people here when we are talking about the Productivity Commission actually saying that this is a really good thing for our society but it is also a really good thing for businesses out there.

Do you know who it is particularly good for? It is great for our communities. It is wonderful for my community, where for a long time there has been a real concern. A number of our old towns where we used to have potato farming – and back in the day there was the timber industry out in Gembrook – have turned into commuter towns over time. That is a concern for the people there, because when people live and work within their community the fabric of society is so much stronger. What has been great with working from home – and many others here, my beautiful colleagues who have been speaking so well about working from home and the positive benefits of this, have alluded to the fact or spoken quite directly about it – is that it benefits our local people.

My CFA captain and so many CFA captains have said to me, ‘Working from home was great for us. We had resources ready to go. If we needed to call out, our times were the best they had ever been because people were so close nearby and many of them were ready to jump up and answer a call.’ For those of us – and I am sure it is the same in your community as well, Acting Speaker O’Keeffe – up in Monbulk, we need our CFAs. We do not have professional firefighters who come to us for our call-outs; we need our volunteers. For our volunteers to be able to turn out and help us out, they need to be there. They need to be able to turn out. And working from home actually keeps them so close to our stations – and our SES. Our unit in Emerald – my goodness, they punch above their weight. I tell you, they are one of the busiest units in the state. Working from home has been an absolute godsend to them as well.

Working from home is a winner for so many. That is why we actually scratch our heads on this side of the chamber when we contemplate the position of the opposition on this. It is really hard to fathom what is bad about it. I am a former employer of many people – at least 30 at any given time in one business and the other. It was a very frontline place. It was retail. Basically the majority of my staff had to be there in the shop on the floor, but there were a couple of positions where staff could work from home, and that was in ordering, because we had automated our systems and we did not need a physical count to be able to work out what to order. I know it made such a difference to the staff who were able to work from home a little bit, because they told me.

I also know because I was able to work from home just under 20 years ago when I had injured myself. It was a job where I was meant to be in the office three days a week in the city. I used to commute all the way in. I dropped the kids off at childcare or my parents, depending on who was watching them, and schlepped all the way in. I did my work, and I did it well, I hope. Then I snapped my ACL, and I needed to recover at home. I realised my brain was still working pretty well once the strong pain medication was able to be dealt with, but I really could not commute because my leg was so sore. I was able to do some work from home. It was the first time ever I had worked from home, and my productivity went through the roof. I was able to do so much intense work without interruption, without the phone ringing, without colleagues coming and chatting and talking to me. There was no way I wanted to do that three days a week or all my days, because I still needed to collaborate with my colleagues. That is why I think putting into law the capacity for people to have the right to two days a week is a really good balance.

I was listening to fabulous contributions in my hour in the chair prior to standing up now, and it was wonderful. We did get a tour of Preston’s greatest cafes – that is for sure. We also heard about the beauty of Sunbury, and we heard the Minister for Emergency Services talking about how positive working from home is for emergency services as well. We also heard some other stories.

I was listening to my dear friend the member for Broadmeadows, and she was talking about how much of a difference working from home has made for her and her family, because she has got a daughter who suffers with illness. I too have a child who has been quite unwell for quite some time at different stages, and being able to work from home, for my husband and for me, has helped us balance our lives. It has meant that we can be there as much as we possibly can for them. In fact the poor thing is incredibly sick at the moment with flu. Dad is at home with her. I cannot be, because here we are and who knows what time we are going to, but I know that tomorrow I will have some flexibility to be able to be home with her because she is so unwell. So to my daughter, I hope you are feeling better soon if you are actually watching this, but hopefully you are asleep in bed.

There are so many benefits to it, which as I say, is why we do query why there is such opposition. I know it was mentioned several speakers ago, but it is still unfathomable to me that we had a federal member of the Liberal Party compare working from home with apartheid, which was an incredibly terrible thing to say. It was egregious, really. It was so offensive to so many people. But to be that strongly convinced that working from home is terrible that you compare it to apartheid is beyond offensive. I cannot understand why there was so much anger and vitriol coming out at the time. I am just delighted that people will, where it is reasonable, have enshrined in law that right to be able to work from home two days a week.

And it is not for everyone. We know that not everyone can do this. We know that our incredibly hardworking emergency services, professional personnel, the police, the paid firefighters, our nurses, our doctors, our paramedics and our fabulous teachers do not really get the opportunity. They cannot really work from home, although I do note I was reflecting on the member for Preston, who was discussing the fact that we are looking at ways potentially to be able to assist teachers to do some kind of work from home, and I think it is important, because people want it.

I am going to share some statistics with the chamber, which are very contemporary because I just confirmed them about 3 minutes ago. I went on to seek.com.au to have a look at the number of jobs requiring people to be onsite versus jobs allowing a hybrid situation where you can work from home. Nationally – and it was current about 15 minutes ago – there are 137,642 onsite positions available throughout the country and 24,186 hybrid. Now, quick maths tells me that 17.5 per cent of the jobs advertised on Seek are hybrid – or around thereabouts. In Victoria the figures are really interesting and telling: onsite, 28,544; hybrid, 7036. We are up at 24.6 per cent. We know it works in this state. But what we need to do is make sure that we are protecting employees to have this right ongoing so that their bosses cannot say, ‘Do you know what? Changed my mind. I think you should really be in the office, because I just want to always be watching you because I don’t trust you enough.’ That is a terrible relationship there as an employer. We should be able to trust our employees, because we know that people genuinely do the right thing. So making sure that they have the right to be able to work from home is an absolutely fantastic thing.

We know that already in Victoria we value this. We value it as employees, and I think most employers value it. Good employers know that if they want to keep good employees, wherever it is possible to give them the opportunity to work from home they absolutely should. But for those employees who might not have great bosses who are forward thinking, we are making sure that we are taking care of them, so that when they say ‘No, I can reasonably work from home two days a week,’ we are going to make sure that from 1 September they will have the legal right to be able to do so – and I celebrate that. I will end where I started. We should be able to work to live; we should not be living to work. Finding that balance in our lives – these busy, busy lives we lead – and being able to contribute to our communities is fundamental.

 Paul MERCURIO (Hastings) (23:19): I am very happy to stand and talk to this government motion on working from home:

That this house condemns the opposition leader for failing to:

(a)   stop the Shadow Treasurer’s reckless campaign for mandatory five-day office return;

(b)   condemn the Shadow Treasurer for spreading misinformation on working from home; and

(c)   commit to Labor’s plan to legislate working from home as a right for Victorians.

I think it was in the first month or so of being a member and being in the chamber and being very green, not really knowing how it worked and all of those things, that I remember the member for Brighton talking. I am not sure what he was talking about, but he was obviously debating an issue and he brought up the fact that he worked really, really hard, so hard that he sacrificed time with his wife and sacrificed having time with his children. He talked about how that affected him. Being sort of green in this place, after he finished he left the chamber and I went out and had a chat to him and just said, ‘You know, I heard what you said, and I’m really sad that this is the case. I think it is really important. I have got kids and a wife and it is so important that we make sure we make time to be with our loved ones. Kids grow up and before we know it, they have gone and they are living their own lives. They call you once a month and come home with the washing and all those sorts of things.’ I thought the member for Brighton kind of took it on board. He seemed to understand what I was talking about.

Then maybe a week or two later in the chamber, he spoke about the same thing, spoke about the fact that he worked incredibly hard, that he sacrificed his time with his children and his family and he found that hard. So I guess I am a bit angry at the member for Brighton. I guess empathy is certainly not one of his strengths, and he is certainly showing that with wanting people to not work from home, but to make people sit in this same box as him, which is possibly to go to the office every day and resent it, sit there in the office, work hard and think about what you are missing at home and the time that you could be having with your wife and the time you are missing out on with your kids. It is very disappointing that the member for Brighton would try and put the rest of the population in this sort of unhappy box that he seems to happily be unhappy living in.

I think too there have been a lot of wonderful things said in the chamber tonight, obviously only from this side of the chamber. One of the things I want to talk about, and one of the things I want to yell out loud, especially to the member for Brighton, is that working from home can be and is a lifeline for many people. I talk about my daughter with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and connective tissue disorder. I look at her working life. She is, and many people are like her, someone that desperately wants to have a meaningful life. She is someone who wants to work and I have watched her struggle. In our society, you go to work. And yes, as the member for Brighton says, you go to work from 9 to 5, or 9 to 8, or whatever it is. It does not matter how you feel, if you are unwell, but you stick at it and you work and ultimately what you end up doing is harming yourself because you are trying to fit into this box that everyone else says you need to.

I watched my daughter want to work, want to earn a living and want to have a meaningful life. But I watched her also harm herself and damage herself because physically she was not able to do that. She changed jobs a few times. She retrained. She wanted to be a dancer and an actor, and she could not do that. She was an au pair, but she could not carry babies because of her bad back. She became a bookkeeper and she had a job in a trucking company. That was quite good, except she was not able to sit for long and she was not able to stand for long. So she was not able to go to the office five days a week, and she changed it down from five days to four and then four to three. But unfortunately, the attitude at the time was, ‘Either you’re in the office or you’re not actually working for us.’ So many people like my daughter had to leave that office and find another employer that had empathy, that would support someone that effectively had a disability. They did not see the disability as not being able to do the work and not being able to be passionate and committed and intelligent; they saw it as a disability that you were unable to sit in an office all day. So my daughter found a job where she could actually work from home and she went from one day or two days a week.

But unfortunately, as connective tissue disorder took over her life more and more, she had to ask to work from home more often until eventually she started her own business. That way she could –

Richard Riordan: Acting Speaker, I call into question the state of the house.

Members interjecting.

Richard Riordan: I think on a night like this it is important that the right amount of people make a quorum.

Quorum formed.

Paul MERCURIO: I was talking about respect and integrity and saying that working from home is not just about choice. Working from home is actually a lifeline for some people. The lack of empathy and respect shown on that side to do that act then just shows that there are people that do not deserve to be sitting in this chamber and hopefully will not be sitting in this chamber next Parliament.

Working from home is more than just a simple idea. It gives people the ability to have a meaningful life. Not too many people have spoken about that today in the chamber, and that is okay – my lived experience is a little bit different. Working from home gives some people meaning, purpose and the ability to have an income, to be part of a team, to contribute and also to have a social life. You are stuck at home because you are unwell, but if you have a job, you are able to communicate and work within a team, and that is so very important. It is a side of this motion and this issue that I do not think we are looking at enough. It is about empathy and being considerate and kind to all of those people, not just people that can fulfil a full-time job but people that want to live a meaningful life. I might just finish by saying my wife does not like me working from home.

A member interjected.

Paul MERCURIO: You have seen the photo of me in the garage. I was in the garage because I was making phone calls and my wife did not want to listen. Sometimes I do not like working from home because my wife wants to come in and ask me about things and jobs around the house, but what an absolute pleasure it is to be able to sit in my house and work but also enjoy the love, warmth and company of my wife, so I support this motion.

 Paul EDBROOKE (Frankston – Minister for Consumer Affairs, Minister for Cost of Living, Minister for Renters, Minister for Men and Boys) (23:29): I join the motion:

That this house condemns the opposition leader for failing to:

(a)   stop the Shadow Treasurer’s reckless campaign for mandatory five-day office return;

(b)   condemn the Shadow Treasurer for spreading misinformation on working from home; and

(c)   commit to Labor’s plan to legislate working from home as a right for Victorians.

And I would say that I am a little bit flustered. I am a little bit shocked. I have just had a conversation with the member for Gippsland East, and working from home harks back to something that some of our diggers wanted to do. The member for Gippsland East and I were just talking about the Kokoda Trail, and the member for Gippsland East is a scholar and a gentleman; he has done the Kokoda Trail quite a few times and enjoys the history of it. I said, ‘This is my grandfather’s service number’, and the member for Gippsland East used his iPhone to look it up, and he brought up my grandfather’s record. It turns out there were a couple of acronyms; one was AWOL, which means absent without leave. Well, my grandfather was on the Kokoda Trail. He got a bit sick of the authority. He got a bit sick of the malaria, got a bit sick of the Japanese, and decided he wanted to work from home. And I think he might have. I think he might have got there. I think they might have got him in the hospital, and they might have sent some of the judiciary there, and they might have made a rule that he had to go home. So with that, this is not such a bad idea, and I think Victorians back it.

The member for Brighton might be out of touch, but certainly we know that thousands and thousands and thousands of Victorians will benefit from Labor’s world-first work from home laws, which will come into effect on 1 September 2026. I think under these laws Victorians will benefit greatly – Victorians who can work from home and who will have the legal right to do so at least two days a week. To make this happen we have to introduce legislation to the Victorian Parliament in July, which obviously is next month; it has come up pretty quick. The new right to work from home will be enshrined in the Equal Opportunity Act 2010. We have seen various stakeholders and certainly various members of the opposition are quite passionate about their adversity to this policy, but what I am really interested in is what the workers are saying, and that is clear, it is transparent and it is black and white. Work from home arrangements are overwhelmingly popular and productive. In fact, more than one-third of Australian workers, including 60 per cent of professionals, work from home regularly already.

Our government conducted extensive public consultations on the future of flexible work, receiving 36,770 survey responses from workers across our state, and the message was crystal clear. The message says that the opposition is out of touch. The opposition is totally out of touch. In that survey 74 per cent of employees surveyed said the right to work from home is extremely important to them. Seventy-four per cent of employees, over 3200 people, told us that they do not feel they can even ask their current employer for the option to work from home, often out of fear it will be denied or held against them. 3200 people – and I think that might include my grandfather; he was afraid to ask, so he just took it. Of those who cannot work from home but want to, the majority had requested it and were refused by their employer. Nearly all of those who were refused felt the refusal was unreasonable, and most said it created extra challenges for them at work and at home.

When asked about the biggest benefits of working from home, the top answer was saving time, and if there is one thing I have learned as the member for Frankston and now the Minister for Cost of Living, it is people want to save not just money, but time. More than 13,300 respondents said that their one-way commute takes over an hour, so working from home even a couple of days a week gives them hours of their life back. The second most cited benefit to working from home for Victorians was money, so time and money. Over 9200 people reported that commuting costs them between $25 and $49 a week in fuel, parking or public transport fares. That is real money saved when they work from home.

It is about this time of night – what is it, 25 to midnight – that is a great time to talk about that 20 per cent off rego, the over 1 million Victorians that have applied for it and the more than $38 million that has been paid out already to more than 200,000 people. $186 in the back pocket, $372 in the back pocket with two cars. Oh, what a feeling.

That is money that is spent on car servicing. It is money that is spent putting food on the table. That is money that, if you are in a situation where you can work from home, will soon no longer be spent on fuel or public transport costs to get to work. Speaking of public transport, obviously two months of free public transport preceded public transport fares being half price, at $5.40 from $11.70, to get anywhere in Victoria, and that will be until the end of this year. That is helping. But what would help a lot of people as well would be working from home, where they do not actually have to incur even those half-price fares, as good as they are. Of those who could not work from home, in this review the majority had requested it and were refused by their employer, as I said, but 9200 people reported that commuting costs them $25 and $49 a week in fuel, parking and public transport fees. It was the member for Hastings that brought up parking fees, because parking fees can be an absolute killer. Again, it is real money they saved.

The third-largest benefit of working from home, according to the people that involved themselves in this questionnaire, was being able to focus without distractions. Many workers find they accomplish more in a quiet home environment than in a noisy open-plan office. In fact more than 28,700 respondents said they were more productive when working from home, whether in terms of getting more hours in or hitting more milestones. Notably, the most common arrangement people wanted was two days a week from home. That was the opinion of 10,207 respondents. That is exactly the kind of balanced approach our government supports: a mixed or hybrid approach of office and home that maintains team cohesion and supports the CBD while also giving families flexibility. I noticed the member for Monbulk talked a lot about her local community, where people working from home energise that local community. People are getting their lunch from the cafes, coffee from cafes and shopping in retail. It keeps those communities alive and economies charged. The benefits for families and the economy go on and on and on. We have heard so much about that point from members on this side of the chamber. Flexible work is not just some perk for a few. It is a game changer for families. It is a game changer for equality and participation in the economy as well.

One thing that is not often picked up in the area of special development schools is that we know accessibility can be an issue for young men and women. They are in the SDSs, and the world around them is designed to make sure they can thrive. It is purposely done that way. Once they get out into the workforce, often things are not that way. There are some amazing employers out there that provide accessibility, and they enjoy the fruits of working with people with different abilities and people who might be on the spectrum. I have heard so many stories about when you get someone who might be on the spectrum and they just do so much good work. When they have got their focus on something, you cannot take it off them. I have even heard that in some areas they can be the best workers for different businesses. Working with some of the autism spectrum organisations is certainly a privilege, but this is the kind of information that you might not necessarily hear out in the world, outside of being an MP or being in that community role. Certainly working from home helps this cohort.

Working from home helps people who might not necessarily have the accessibility to get on public transport to go to work or to get in the car to go to work, but they still can contribute meaningfully and at a level where employers value them and employers want them to work. Often getting to work is that barrier. Working from home is something that breaks that barrier, in that we now have enough technology. One thing I guess that came through COVID was an accelerated vision of what working from home looks like when you have computers where you can see your colleagues on the screen and you can share documents. The world got a little bit smaller. I absolutely commend this government motion.

 John LISTER (Werribee) (23:39): I first would like to apologise for what will become a little bit of a history lesson, in my contribution on this motion, that substantially condemns some of the comments by Liberal and National leaders but also commits to our plan for working from home to be as of right for Victorians. In reflecting on this motion, and I think I have referred to this before, working from home is our next industrial revolution. The ways that people are working are changing, and I reflect on some of the attitudes towards the changing nature of work from the start of the Industrial Revolution, often pinned to the invention of the power loom in 1790 by Edmund Cartwright, basically taking away –

Brad Rowswell interjected.

John LISTER: There is a link. It is not as tenuous as some of the question time links today, but it is definitely a link with the power loom. The power loom revolutionised that way of working, because traditionally weaving was done as a cottage industry, literally in cottages, mostly by women as well, as a way to have that independent income from their husbands, who would have been working as ploughmen or as part of a cooperative or for the landed gentry. It was a cottage industry – working from home, producing those goods – but the power loom came along and really disrupted that. With that came a lot of the issues that we have seen with work and work patterns for the last 200 or so years.

In the 1830s we saw the proliferation of things like the power loom and other mechanised ways of producing goods. These inventions definitely substantially improved the quality of life for billions of people, but at the same time that came at great cost. As we remember, in parallel with the Industrial Revolution came lots of social upheaval where movements were formed, particularly the labour movement, to try and maintain that dignity of work and that dignity of the human.

In what is now the next industrial revolution, the next change in this pattern of working, we need to make sure that we are not returning to that factory-style office of having people lined up in rows, in weird cubicles, getting around that work when they can now do it from home, where we know there are social benefits that have been lost for 200 or so years from that time of cottage industry when people had the means of production in their homes to be able to earn a good wage and earn money for what they produced.

In these modern times, as we are reflecting on the changes that we are seeing and on working from home, this is something that is particularly important for communities like mine in the outer western suburbs. I have spoken about this on a couple of occasions in this chamber. Whenever I have been out doorknocking around Wyndham Vale or Manor Lakes – you go out at around lunchtime sometimes and see who is around – it is amazing. In nearly one in three or one in four houses there is someone working from home. There is that little front room that you see from the door, with a computer set up. They are working from home, and you knock on the door, and they politely say, ‘Oh, sorry, I’m on a Teams call.’ Or they have to stand there and wiggle the mouse a little bit because they have been reading a document and want to make sure their online status stays on on Teams.

A member interjected.

John LISTER: Yes, come back after work, that is true – stop interrupting me – which is fair enough, because it is legitimate work that they are doing. Quite often, when I reflect on the statistics in my community, this work is in fields like information technology and cybersecurity, as well as professional industries and financial services and the public service, which I will touch on in just a moment. It is particularly important for my community to protect that right to be able to work a portion of that week from home.

In protecting the right to work from home we are not necessarily saying to employers that they cannot have that conversation around how that work is done or how that can be done between locations. What we are saying really is that you cannot force your employees back to your factory-style office, your panopticon in Collins Street, without necessarily considering their right to be able to do that job if they can from home.

In a survey that was done through Engage Vic a lot of good data came out, particularly from the top 10 postcodes with the most participants in that engagement process. When this engagement process was running, I ran a little digital constituent cafe, as I call them, but it was online for those people who did work from home so they could engage with me just as I do with people down at the cafe every couple of weeks. This survey showed that the most responses were from Point Cook, which does not surprise me, and coming in second was Truganina – or Truga-nee-na, depending on who you ask. There is a bit of controversy out in my part of town. I just get away from the controversy by saying Trug. All the OGs say Trug. And then at number 4 is beautiful Wyndham Vale, so I think it is particularly important. We have many great bricks-and-mortar businesses like Kippers fish and chips and cafes like Tuckers. I know there has been a bit of a conversation about bricks-and-mortar businesses today, and this is not necessarily going to disrupt bricks-and-mortar. If anything, encouraging working from home will help those bricks-and-mortar businesses, those services, in our local communities to be able to better serve our community and get more business.

Returning to this idea and this principle behind working from home as being a disruptor to our patterns of work, not only is it disrupting the way that we are working but we are also disrupting those patterns of movement throughout the suburbs. We know that we cannot continue to sprawl the way that we have, although those opposite have said that they want to fast track more development in the western suburbs which I will continue to remind my community of. We want to have managed growth that builds our inner city while steadily growing our outer suburbs. Why is this important when it comes to working from home? Well, we are looking at around 20 or so per cent of people currently, according to the last census in 2021, who are working from home in Wyndham, that is 21 per cent or so that are not trying to commute. I know in my community, getting people to and from Melbourne has been one of the biggest challenges. For a long time, we only had one river crossing into Melbourne, and with the West Gate Tunnel that has obviously been alleviated quite significantly. But trying to move people around is one of the biggest challenges with urban sprawl, and that is why we need to think differently. We need to disrupt.

Unlike the previous industrial revolution, in which the power loom came in and saw cottage industries die and the Luddites going out and breaking those looms, we do not have to break these looms. We can take this new pattern of work and protect it and make sure it works for the workers, not necessarily just for business. But we do know working from home is good for productivity. We all know how annoying it is getting interrupted by a colleague when you are sitting in the bullpen at an office block, having them come over and try and talk to you. When I used to work in a big office area at a school, I used to put my noise-cancelling headphones on with a sticky note that said, ‘Please do not disturb me, I am easily distracted.’ Sometimes having that dedicated time to do the grunt work or to do that work that requires focus at home is really, really productive. But then also having that time to collaborate with your colleagues is also important as well.

I know I have taken us on a little bit of a history lesson this evening, but I think working from home and looking at those disruptions that we can do – and when I say disruptions, I am not talking about negative disruptions; I am talking about how we are getting ahead to the future, how we are offering that vision of the future for Victorian workers. That is something that Labor does: we offer the future. We do not turn back to the past. We are not the Tories trying to keep the factories running with their workers coming in 16 hours a day. We are here to try and be those disruptors and provide those new ways of working and protect those new ways of working. I commend this motion, very slowly, to the house.

 Kat THEOPHANOUS (Northcote) (23:49): Work from home – this is a fantastic motion and so very worthy of debate, though it does not seem to have been much of a debate tonight. The Liberals, the Nationals and the Greens are nowhere to be seen – missing in action again. It has been hours, I think, and none of them have stood up, which is really disappointing. So clearly protecting work from home does not feature highly on their priority list. Perhaps they do not see it as an important part of our modern way of life, or perhaps they do not see the pressures that households are under to balance their busy lives. Well, Victorians feel those pressures, and they sure as heck care about work from home.

The Northcote electorate has one of the highest proportions of people who do currently work from home in the state, and we are really proud of that. I see this when I knock on doors in our neighbourhoods. Time and again people will open the door and chat to me about how they are working from home that day. They are spending their time working from home, and they will tell me about how much easier it is to be able to do this, how much more productive they have been, how much money and time they have saved on travel and on child care. Fundamentally, they convey to me the importance of having choice in their lives. The Liberal Party wants to take away that choice. They are laying in wait, planning to end remote work and force thousands upon thousands of people back to the office. They have said it really explicitly, and why they do not have the guts to come out here and try and defend that position now is curious indeed.

This debate goes to the heart of what kind of workforce, what kind of economy and what kind of society we want to build in Victoria. Do we want a modern economy that recognises the realities of contemporary working life? Do we want to support working families and carers and people with disability to participate fully in the workforce? Do we want to give Victorians more flexibility, more choice and a better quality of life? Or do we want to drag workers backwards into a one-size-fits-all model that belongs in another era? That is exactly what those opposite are proposing. The member for Brighton has repeatedly demonstrated that he is completely out of touch with the realities facing modern workers and modern families. Last year he demanded that public servants be forced back into the office full time. He accused public servants of not delivering for Victorians, and he declared that every public servant should be turning up to work in the office. What an extraordinary thing to say, as though productivity is measured by where somebody sits rather than the work that they do.

The reality is that Victorian businesses and workers have embraced hybrid work arrangements. More than a third of Victorians already work from home regularly, and the data tells us that it improves workforce participation. It is not a perk. It is an essential part of adapting and evolving our modern economy into one that also enables livability, because we are not just economic units, we are people. We are people with lives and families, hobbies and passions, aspirations and hopes, commitments and burdens and complexities. What it means for people to have that time back cannot even be quantified. Think about what it means to give thousands upon thousands of Victorians the chance to see their kids in the morning rather than sneaking out the door before they wake up to take the train. What does it mean for the health and wellbeing of those families? I know how has impacted my family when I have had to leave before being able to see the kids in the morning. It is hard. We cannot quite measure it. We do not yet have a measure for what that is, but I think that every single one of us feels that intuitively, and we know that it means a hell of a lot.

Our world-leading Labor reforms will protect the right to work from home.

Under our plan Victorians whose jobs can reasonably be performed remotely will have a legal right to work from home two days a week. I know that people have questioned why this needs legislating. Why not just leave it to the market, leave it to the employers to offer? We see a problem with that, and Victorians do too. Our government undertook a really extensive survey on the future of flexible work. More than 36,000 Victorians participated, and the message could not have been clearer: 74 per cent of respondents said that the right to work from home was extremely important to them. More than 3200 people told us they did not feel comfortable asking their employer for that option, not because the arrangement was unreasonable, not because the work could not be done but because they feared the request would be rejected or held against them. Think about what that means: thousands of workers feel unable to ask for flexibility that would improve their lives and their families’ lives because they fear negative consequences. That is precisely why legal protections matter.

The consultation also revealed the practical benefits of work from home: how it supports people to be in the workforce, particularly those with caring responsibilities, disability, neurodiversity or chronic illness. But the most commonly cited benefit was time. More than 13,000 respondents reported commuting more than an hour each way. For those workers, even two days working from home each week means hours of their lives returned to them, hours that can be spent with children, hours that can be spent caring for ageing parents, hours participating in community life or simply hours that can be spent resting and maintaining their wellbeing. Then there are cost savings. The modelling says that the average Australian family can save about $5000 a year when you take into account commuting and parking and childcare expenses going back into people’s household budgets. The other benefit was productivity. More than 28,000 respondents reported being more productive when they did work from home – not less productive, more. They told us they were able to focus better, avoid distractions and get more work done. Interestingly, we also heard that the most popular arrangement was not full-time remote work. It was not five days a week at home, it was two days a week – a balanced model, an arrangement that allows workers to enjoy flexibility while maintaining strong workplace connections, supporting businesses, supporting the CBD economy, spreading that to local economies like those in Northcote and recognising the realities of modern life.

We understand that not all workers can work from home. Our teachers, our nurses, our firefighters, police, ambos and the many hospitality workers in my community in Northcote – these people work incredibly hard, and we are deeply grateful to them. Although work from home may not be the arrangement that they personally have, work from home still benefits them. It may be their partner who can put the washing on at home to save everyone time in the evening. It may be their adult child who can drop in more often. It might be their neighbour who can mow their nature strip because they have got time on their hands. Or it might be none of those, and it is simply the fact that their climate has less emissions because less people need to travel to and from the CBD each day and there is less pressure on their transport network.

Work from home is overwhelmingly good – good for families, good for communities, good for wellbeing, good for our economy. It is honestly hard to fathom how the Liberal Party can oppose work from home or why they want to drag Victorians backwards. Labor wants to move Victoria forwards. We understand the realities and the pressures and the challenges facing modern families and modern working life arrangements. Only Labor stands up for working families. Only Labor is prepared to enshrine work from home in law. We will not force workers back into the office as though we are in the 1950s. That is another era. We are in this era now, and we support work from home. I commend this motion to the house. It is an important motion, and I encourage those opposite to get up and talk to it too.

 Alison MARCHANT (Bellarine) (23:59): I am going to try and do this motion justice at midnight. I think this motion really is an incredible motion to speak about in this place. We have seen so many changes over the last decade in terms of workplace changes. Prepandemic there were a lot of us that maybe would have liked to work from home but were not sure how that was to be done or how to approach it with our employer and say, ‘Do you think I could do one or two days at home?’ It was an unusual conversation to have in the workplace. Then we had a pandemic, and lo and behold nearly everyone was working from home. We found Zoom and we found Teams and we found all this technology that would enable us to work from home. I do not think I have actually worked harder in my life. Working from home with two children who were being homeschooled, still trying to do a job and having caring responsibilities throughout the pandemic felt exhausting at times, but that did not mean my productivity went down; it actually went up. I found time to do my work, and I found time to do the things that I loved at home, but I found a balance too. I am someone who likes to throw themselves at their work, and I certainly did that still from home. Things have changed since then. I know a lot of people really enjoyed that flexibility throughout the pandemic, so as we have come out of that and our world looks different, this is certainly a motion that we need to be talking about. How do we get the balance right? How do we give families and working people the right balance?

I would like to talk a little bit about this motion and how it relates to the wonderful Bellarine communities. I meet a lot of people who have moved to the Bellarine in probably the last five years or so or less, and they say to me, ‘I wish I’d moved to the Bellarine a lot earlier.’ I am biased, but it is a magical place to live. But a lot of them say, ‘I’ve been able to move to the regions because I can now commute only a few days to Melbourne,’ or, ‘I can work from home.’ They were looking for that lifestyle balance. They were wanting to have a smaller community. They wanted to have connection to their community. They wanted to live in a beautiful place like the Bellarine, but they were still connected to their job in Melbourne or their job maybe in a town like Geelong. The Bellarine gave them that balance, and that is what our Labor government is aiming to do: give people back a balance and give people back some time. It will also give people back some money. It is not about working less, it is about living better. That is what working from home is about.

Like I said, a while ago many people would be travelling up the highway from the Bellarine to maybe go to Melbourne or Geelong and they would be sitting in traffic or they would be sitting on trains. That is time away from their families. It may be time away from caring for parents or children. It is time away from volunteering in your community. It might be time away from even just looking after yourself and having time for yourself. I will acknowledge now that not everyone is going to be able to work from home – that is a given. As an ex-primary school teacher, I know that would be really difficult. We did do it in the pandemic, but it would be really challenging to do that now. We need to give thanks to those workers who actually keep our economy going – our nurses, our teachers, our police. We have very much a front line of workers that will not be able to work from home, but that does not mean it cannot benefit everyone and cannot benefit their community as well. It goes beyond individuals. It does strengthen your local community.

I just want to talk about how it looks for the Bellarine. I like to move around the Bellarine. I do not go to my office very often. I like to do meetings out and about in the Bellarine and meet people where they are at. I often see people with laptops in cafes doing their work or with laptops at the beach. They are still being productive and they are still doing their job, but what an office to have, the Ocean Grove main beach. You can sit there on a beautiful day, have a coffee and do your work. What that has done is generate and sustain our local economies for ourselves. They will go to the bakery, they will have lunch, they will shop locally, and that money will stay in our local community.

I have spoken to a lot of business owners across the Bellarine who tell me that often their busiest day is that Monday or Friday where people have paired it with a weekend obviously, but they do the working from home on the Monday, and they are busier on some particular days. Those customers obviously are locals, supporting our local economy.

When we talk about supporting regional Victoria here in this place I hear a lot from the other side to say that we do not support regional Victoria, which is absolute rubbish, particularly when we have many regional MPs on this side. We know that we continue to invest in regional Victoria. They do want to cut, and I grieve – this is not the grievance debate, but I grieve for what that would look like for our regions if the other side were to be in power. We want to make sure that our regions are thriving, and we continue to invest in that. Working from home helps achieve that as well – our regional economies can be boosted by working from home.

It helps families. I think about single-parent families. I have got a really great support network around me, but I am not sure how people do it when they are on their own and do not have a support network. To be able to work from home and have an option to do school drop-off – maybe you have a sick child and you have to race to the school to pick them up. You are already at home, you are working, you might be having to do the pick-up. These arrangements and these juggles that we have to do as parents – it really is about giving parents time and less stress in their lives. It is not just good social policy, this is good economic policy as well, particularly for women and particularly for people who may have a disability or are neurodivergent or have reasons why their productivity is better at home.

I think about those who come to the Bellarine. Like I have said, they come for that lifestyle. They love their careers, but you should be able to buy a home in our beautiful Bellarine and still build a career. We want to attract those skilled workers. That is how we build our sustainable economies outside of Melbourne and it is how we ensure the Bellarine continues to thrive.

As I have said, it is not for everyone, this motion. We know that not every job can be done from home and we are really, really incredibly grateful for those people who continue to work on the front line. But this motion does say that simply when a job can be reasonably performed remotely, workers should have the right for that flexibility.

I think about working from home, and it is about trust. I think the pandemic showed us that people can be really productive from home. Businesses can certainly adapt. Our technology is evolving. Our teams can stay connected. Many workplaces have found that their outcomes are better than simply sitting at a desk. The world has changed. The world of work has changed, and our laws should certainly recognise that reality. Not long ago there were proposals that required people to come back to the office five days a week. That was proposed by some on the other side and from the opposition at a federal level. It certainly was abandoned pretty quickly, because it highlighted the different views of how we will work going forward, and they basically wanted to take us backwards. They did not recognise the technology or the way that work has changed. And as I have talked about, regional communities such as the Bellarine can enormously benefit from this flexibility.

I have spoken to families, I have spoken to businesses and I have spoken to those even who will not be able to work from home. I have always had a really positive response to this type of legislation to give working families that flexibility. I really feel like this is a policy that will make sure that our families are stronger and they have more time and more money, and it really does create more healthy communities, and that is what we want to see, especially on the Bellarine.

 Jordan CRUGNALE (Bass) (00:10): I rise after the clock has struck midnight on this fine new day to speak on a matter that goes to the heart of modern working life in Victoria: how we support people to live, work and thrive in a way that reflects the realities of our time. Because when we talk about work, we are not just talking about jobs or desks or buildings, we are talking about people and we are talking about people trying to balance life, care and career. We are talking about people building a future and families trying to fit everything in. We are talking about outer metro and regional communities, such as the one in the electorate of Bass that I know very well, where opportunity must reach beyond the boundaries and tyrannies of distance. Today we are talking about something simple yet profound, giving people more control and flexibility over how they work, specifically, the right to work from home where it is possible and where it makes sense.

To be clear from the outset, this is not a radical idea. It is not a fringe or social experiment, and it is not a passing trend. Flexible work is a reality. It is a reality shaped by technology, by changing expectations, not by chocolates, and by the lived experiences of millions of workers who have shown us decisively that productivity, accountability and innovation do not depend on sitting in the same chair five days a week. Yet despite this, we continue to hear voices calling for a return to a one-size-fits-all model of work, a model that belongs to another era, dare I say a previous century. It was an era where the diversity of our workforce was not recognised, an era where care responsibilities were invisible and an era where the idea that someone could contribute meaningfully from outside a central office was dismissed outright. But Victoria is not that place any more.

Brad Rowswell: Acting Speaker, I draw your attention to the state of the house.

Quorum formed.

Jordan CRUGNALE: We are a modern, dynamic state, and our government understands that. We understand that flexibility is not just a convenience; it is a necessity for a fair and productive society. That is why we are taking action to enshrine the right to work from home into law. From 1 September 2026, Victorians whose roles can be performed remotely will have a legal right to work from home two days a week. Not as a favour, not as something to be quietly negotiated behind closed doors, but as a right: clear, fair, legit and enforceable. This reform will be embedded in the Equal Opportunity Act 2010 because, at its core, this is about fairness. It is about recognising that access to flexible work should not depend on your bargaining power, your industry, or your willingness to take a risk by asking. It is about ensuring that people can have a genuine, respectful conversation with their employer about what works best for them, without fear that the answer will be an automatic or unreasonable refusal.

The evidence in support of this approach is overwhelming. We have listened directly to Victorians, tens of thousands of them. Over 36,000 people shared their experiences, their challenges and their hopes for the future of work, and what they told us was remarkably consistent. Nearly three-quarters said that the right to work from home is extremely important to them, with three out of every four workers saying this matters deeply. This is not a niche issue. This is not a marginal concern. This is a mainstream expectation across our workforce. And when we asked about the benefits, the answers were clear: time, money, productivity, balance. More than 13,000 people told us that their commute takes over an hour each way. That is more than 2 hours a day – 10 hours a week lost to travel. Imagine what it means to give even part of that time back: time to spend with children, time to spend with loved ones, time to care for loved ones, time to invest in health, in community, in life. This is not abstract. It is tangible, meaningful change in people’s daily lives. And it is not just about time, it is also about the cost of living.

There is an important dimension to this conversation and one that is often overlooked but has been iterated here in the contributions from this side. When people work closer to home, they do not just benefit individually, their whole community benefits. Local cafes see more morning coffees and lunchtime trade. Small retailers welcome more foot traffic throughout the day. Gyms, parks and recreation spaces become part of people’s regular routines, not something squeezed into an already exhausting commute. The volunteers at our clubs, whether they be sporting, artistic, social, support groups, community groups, environmental groups, cultural organisations, food relief, our emergency services, lifesaving, CFA or SES – the list is elongated – and their commitment to having their community at heart means, when they are able to work from home, they can make it to their kids’ training, attend call-outs and not have to navigate a long commute, dedicated as they are already. They have more time and space and that mental space as well. Working from home helps people coordinate their lives in a more human and sustainable way – grabbing a coffee from a local business, as I said, taking a walk along the local trail or supporting a nearby childcare centre or school pick-up without stress. This is how we strengthen local economies and build more connected, vibrant communities – by enabling people to live, work and participate right where they are.

Over 9000 people reported spending between $25 and $49 a week just getting to and from work, and that adds up. It adds up to groceries. It adds up to having more fuel in the car. It adds up to school expenses. It adds up to real pressure on household budgets. And when we talk about easing the cost of living, this is exactly the kind of practical measure that makes a difference.

Far from reducing productivity, flexible work enhances it. More than 28,000 respondents told us they are more productive when working from home, more focused, more efficient and better able to meet targets and deliver outcomes. This should not surprise us. When people are trusted, when they have autonomy, when their lives are supported, they do better work. And that is not just good for individuals, it is good for businesses, it is good for our economy and it is great for our local communities. In fact flexible work has been a key driver of increased workforce participation in Victoria. More people, especially parents, carers and people with disabilities, are able to enter or stay in the workforce because of the flexibility that work-from-home arrangements provide, and that matters.

It is also about balance. The most common arrangement workers told us they want is not full-time remote work, it is two days a week, a hybrid model – a model that maintains connections with colleagues, supports our CBDs and local businesses and fosters collaboration while still providing the flexibility people need. That is exactly the balanced approach our government is delivering. And yet, despite all of this evidence, despite the voices of workers, despite the economic benefits, despite the clear and practical advantages, we still hear calls to roll this back, calls to mandate a five-day return to the office, calls that dismiss flexible work as somehow lesser or less real. These steps are out of step with modern Victoria. They ignore the lived reality of working people. They underestimate the capacity and commitment of our workforce, and they risk dragging us backwards at a time when we should be moving forwards. It is not just a debate about where work happens, it is a debate about trust.

 Belinda WILSON (Narre Warren North) (00:20): Where else would we rather be at 20 past midnight on this wonderful Friday morning than with –

Brad Rowswell interjected.

Belinda WILSON: I am simply asking everybody in the chamber where else they would like to be, member for Sandringham, and I know there is nowhere else you would like to be rather than in this chamber.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Wayne Farnham): Member for Narre Warren North, through the Chair, please.

Belinda WILSON: What a delight it is to have the member for Brighton finally join us in the chamber at this fantastic hour, after we have been talking about his motion. He has been busy entertaining the troops out of the chamber today, busy fundraising for his campaign. He has had all of Brighton in here, raising money. What a great event he has had. Look, I am here to discuss working from home –

James Newbury: It was a Jewish community event.

Belinda WILSON: That is fabulous, member for Brighton. I am sure –

The ACTING SPEAKER (Wayne Farnham): Member for Narre Warren North, through the Chair. Member for Brighton, do not yell out across the chamber.

Belinda WILSON: It is fabulous to see that you are supporting our wonderful Jewish community, member for Brighton. But tonight we are hearing all about working from home, and what would we like to be talking about more than that at this hour of the morning.

All I can say is this is one of the most incredible policies that the Labor Party have come up with. I have amazing evidence for this, and that is my incredible daughter. I will say, at the ripe old age of 51 that I am, I had the old-fashioned sense, in my youth, that everyone had to work from the office. But I can tell you that legislating working from home is going to be absolutely life-changing for many people in my electorate, and my daughter is a great example of that. As someone who joined the workforce for the first time only a couple of years ago, she actually works from home four days a week some weeks, five days a week some weeks and one day a week some weeks. Her workplace, a very big organisation in Australia – I will not name them – have a very flexible workforce. What I see is an incredible shift and change in her health, in her mental health and also in the way that she works. Interestingly, while I was leaving to come into Parliament this morning, she was heading off to Pilates and was able to get home in time to start her day bright and early at 8:30. She is able to do a lot of extra activities because she is closer to them, being able to work from home. I have had this discussion with many, many people in our community about what a difference this is going to make.

Many people on the other side have questioned why we would want to legislate this. What they do not understand is that not every workplace, not every boss, is as flexible or sees the benefit that we see in this. The facts have spoken, and many people tonight have spoken about that. I would especially like to mention the member for Hastings, who spoke wonderfully about his incredible daughter. He made a number of points, which I had actually forgotten, about this incredible policy that we have. One was about people that actually cannot physically get to the office as they are struggling with certain health ailments but still have so much to give.

I remember really, really fondly when my children, 20 years ago, started school. The principal got up at that point and said to us as the very eager parents sending their first child off to school, ‘Your child is going to do a job that no-one has even thought about yet, and they are going to work in a very different way to what you’re used to and what you do.’ I think that is really, really true. As the member for Hastings was talking to us about earlier, five years ago his daughter actually would not have been able to work at all. I think when we look at how that affects the capacity for so many different people, flexibility really changes people’s lives.

The other thing that I find so interesting is that we have this incredible mindset that we work 9 to 5, take an hour for lunch and that is our day. The workforce and the flexibility of the workforce have really, really changed. The other thing that I find so interesting is that often from the other side we hear chants and points being made about how a firefighter, a nurse or a plumber is going to work from home. They are not going to because that is not how it works. Not everyone is going to be able to work from home. But what they can do is they might be able to stay at home and do their paperwork. Not all nurses are on the ward. I know that I have got a couple of friends that are nurses that work in the back of house, and they may be able to do some of that work from home. What it does is it brings about a lot more flexibility. The other thing is that not everyone lives close to the city. In my community we are a good hour via public transport into the city. With the amazing new Metro Tunnel you can actually get to the city in 58 minutes. Driving in takes a little bit longer, because there is always a lot of traffic depending on what time you are leaving.

One of the other points, again that I never thought of either, is about taking your kids to activities. I know how much of a difference it makes dropping your child off at their dance class or their soccer game or soccer training and you being able to pick them up. That might not mean that you are able to do that every single day of the week, but it might mean that you can do it a couple of days a week. It might mean that you can actually help out in the canteen during your lunchbreak. It might actually mean that you get to spend an extra half an hour, hour or 2 hours with your children, and everyone knows that children are happier when their parents are around and involved in their lives. The other great thing that I know the member for Cranbourne spoke about earlier was volunteering. We all know what a difference volunteering makes to our community and how it makes people feel. By being able to be at home a couple of extra days a week, we know that you are going to have more accessibility to going and helping out in your community.

I think the other interesting thing about working from home is that it has a ricocheting effect on people. It is less cars on the road. It is more money in the pocket of the employee because they are not having to pay for petrol to drive into work. I know from firsthand experience that it also gives much more of a sense of self-worth, I would say, by being able to manage your time. Some people on the other side have this ill-conceived feeling that working from home means that you are going to work less. I know that what it does is it has you probably working more hours with more concentrated time. There is more productivity. You are not being interrupted by people in the office, and you are concentrated in your space working. The other great thing about working from home is that not everyone sits at a desk all day. Not all of us work the same. We do not all sit down and work from a very conceived, closed and quiet space in everything we do. I think that is one of the other great things about working from home, because you can work in a space and with flexibility where it works for you.

The other thing is that this is new. It is different. I think it is one of the most fabulous things that we are introducing. The great thing is that it will be legislated in September, which is really close. Can you believe it is June? Wow, where has the year gone? It will come into the Parliament in July, which is absolutely fantastic. It is my absolute pleasure to commend this motion to the house.

 Martha HAYLETT (Ripon) (00:29): I rise to speak on the motion that this house condemns the Leader of the Opposition for failing to stop the Shadow Attorney-General’s reckless campaign for a mandatory five-day office return, condemns the Shadow Attorney-General for spreading misinformation on working from home and for failing to commit to Labor’s plan to legislate working from home as a right for all Victorians. What we are hearing from those opposite shows just how out of touch they are with the realities of modern working life and with the needs of working families across Victoria. Because of them, flexibility at work is not something to support; it is something to apparently attack.

The member for Brighton has made his position very clear, and we have heard that from many other speakers this evening. He has been very openly hostile to work-from-home arrangements, despite the overwhelming evidence that they benefit workers, families and the economy. Last year he demanded that the government force public servants back into the office full time. He claimed without justification that working from home was some kind of sweetheart deal and accused hardworking public servants of failing to deliver. He even said:

Every public servant should be turning up to work …

as if the thousands of public servants working from home are not working hard every single day for Victorians and as if they are not delivering essential services, supporting vulnerable people and keeping our state running. He did not even consult his own colleagues before launching that attack, which seems to be a common theme of his. Even after others in his own party, including federal colleagues, softened their stance, he and his leader still refused to rule out dragging tens of thousands of Victorian workers back to their desks five days a week. We have even heard comparisons from their allies equating working from home to extreme and offensive concepts, which tells you everything you need to know about the mindset that we are dealing with from those opposite.

They simply just do not get it. They do not understand that flexible work is not a fad, it is not a luxury and it is not going away. Flexible work is here to stay, especially for young parents who are both trying to juggle working with child care and school arrangements on top of everything else in their daily lives. We know that working from home works for people in rural communities who want to connect to more job opportunities. We know that it works for people in our growing regional suburbs like Lucas, Miners Rest and Smythes Creek in my electorate who then do not have to commute to work in busy Ballarat or Melbourne.

That is why our government is acting on this legislation. As the member for Narre Warren North so perfectly put it previously to me, from 1 September 2026 Victoria will lead the nation with world-first work-from-home laws. Under these laws workers who can do their job from home will have a legal right to work from home two days a week. But this progress is at risk, as we know, because those opposite are not just attacking flexible work, they are planning cuts – many, many cuts and deep cuts – which is very much in their DNA. They have announced a plan to rip $40 billion out of the budget. Let us be honest about what that means. The majority of state spending goes to health and education, so you simply cannot cut $40 billion without cuts to hospitals and schools. We already know part of their plan includes cutting one in seven public sector jobs. That means fewer nurses, fewer child protection workers and fewer disability support staff. They might try to dress it up as a back office reduction, but we know that cuts at that scale do not stay in the back office. They hit the front line, they reduce services, they hurt communities and they shrink our economy, because when you cut jobs like that, you are not just cutting costs, you are cutting livelihoods. This is not responsible economic management, it is reckless. It is exactly what Victorians have seen before. Cuts are part of their DNA, as I have previously said.

In contrast, I am much more happy to say that our government understands what modern work looks like and what modern families need. We have listened to workers. We have heard from more than 36,000 Victorians through public consultation, and the message could not have been clearer. Nearly three-quarters of workers told us that the right to work from home is extremely important to them. Thousands said that they do not even feel comfortable asking their employer for flexible work because they fear it will be refused or, worse, held against them. Among those who have asked and been refused, most said the decision made their work and home life harder. These are not just abstract policy debates, these are real experiences. It saves time – hours every week that would otherwise be spent commuting. It saves money on fuel, parking, public transport and child care. For many families, that adds up to more than $5000 a year back in their pockets.

That is not a small amount. It is groceries, it is bills, it is school expenses. In the cost-of-living crisis that we are in now, we know that every dollar counts, and more than $5000 a year back in pockets really does add up.

It also boosts productivity. Tens of thousands of workers have told us that they are more focused and get more done when working from home. Importantly, it boosts participation in our economy. Flexible work helps parents, carers and people with disability to stay in jobs and build careers, including women. The amount of women that I have doorknocked in suburbs like Miners Rest, Mitchell Park, Lucas, Smythes Creek, Haddon, Smythesdale – there are so many areas where so many women are at home when you knock on the door at 2 o’clock on a Wednesday because they are working from home and they have that flexibility and they know that they can go do the pick-up at school and then they can get back to work. As the member for Narre Warren North put it, not everyone is just working 9 to 5 anymore. Sometimes people might be working into the evenings or earlier in the morning. That flexibility is what really matters, and that is what we want to see with these work-from-home arrangements.

While we are looking forward, building a fairer, more flexible, more productive economy, those opposite are looking backwards. They very much want to drag us back to a one-size-fits-all, 1950s, male-dominated model of work, a model that does not reflect how people live today, a model that does not support working families, a model that simply does not work anymore. At its heart this is about choice. It is about trusting workers, and it is about recognising that when we support workers, we strengthen families and we strengthen our economy. Only Labor is backing that future. Only Labor is supporting families, and only Labor will protect these rights in law.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Wayne Farnham): The member for Macedon, when Leader of the House, moved that the ‘Working from home’ motion as it appears on the notice paper be agreed to. The member for Mordialloc moved an amendment to this motion. He proposed:

That the word ‘former’ be inserted before the word ‘Shadow’ wherever occurring.

The member for Brighton moved an amendment to the member for Mordialloc’s amendment. He proposed:

That after the word ‘occurring’ insert ‘and after the word “Victorians” insert “and that this house notes how stale and political this sledge motion is”’ be inserted.

The house will first deal with the member for Brighton’s amendment to the member for Mordialloc’s amendment. The question is:

That the words proposed to be inserted by the member for Brighton be inserted.

All those in favour say aye. All those against say no.

Danny O’Brien: On a point of order, that was somewhat confusing, Acting Speaker. Could I just seek clarity so I know what we are voting for?

The ACTING SPEAKER (Wayne Farnham): If you are supporting the member for Brighton’s amendment, you say aye. The people against say no.

Assembly divided on James Newbury’s amendment: