Amid cost-of-living crisis, PM seizes on working from home as a money saver
Based on assumptions about congestion and travel times, the yearly transport costs to commute two days a week would be $5789 in Sydney, $5529 in Melbourne and $4963 in Brisbane, with lower figures in other capital cities.
While Labor bases its calculations on a transport affordability index from the Australian Automobile Association, an independent group that represents motoring organisations such as the NRMA and RACV, there is no Coalition policy to stop all working from home.
Dutton said on March 13 that he wanted to scale back working from home in the public sector, a key target for the Coalition when it also says it will cut the 36,000 increase in the number of federal public service employees since the last election.
“I want Australians, particularly those who are working hard at the moment, to know that their tax dollars are being spent efficiently, which is why I don’t believe that in Canberra, 61 per cent of the public servants who are working in Canberra should be working from home,” he said.
“I think they should return to work, back to pre-COVID levels, which was just over 20 per cent of people who work from home.”
Labor said that more than one in three Australians in the labour force were working from home to some extent, with an average rate of 19 hours of work at home a week across the workforce. It assumed that Australian commuters spent 30.5 minutes travelling one way to work on average.
The energy bill subsidy will be worth $75 a quarter for the three months to the end of September and the three months to the end of December, but it will stop at that point.
Dutton said the Labor policy was a “Ponzi scheme” because it used the taxes paid by workers to return money to them to cover their energy bills, when the better approach would be an energy policy that cut the energy costs.
The opposition leader reiterated that his plan for nuclear power stations, estimated to cost $331 billion over several decades in modelling done for the Coalition, would be a better way to ensure energy supplies.
