Interview with Peta Credlin, Credlin

3 March 2025

PETA CREDLIN: But first tonight, Liberal Senator Jane Hume has unveiled the Coalition's plan to mandate that public service workers, this is all our bureaucrats, that they must return to their offices five days a week if the Coalition is elected. It comes as employment census data shows that three years after the pandemic, some 61% of our bureaucrats are working from home at least part of the time. The Coalition believes this figure is too high, and it's driving down productivity and driving up inefficiencies. Senator Jane Hume joins me now from Sydney. Senator, thank you so much. I know you've just made this announcement, but I thought it was so important and I had to get you on the screen and tell people about it at home. I'm shocked that 61% of the public servants work from home. How do you do the job in border protection working from home?

JANE HUME: That's a very good question, Peta. In fact, around 22% of the public servants in 2019 had some form of working from home arrangements, that went up dramatically during the pandemic, as you would expect. In 2020 it was around 50% and in 2022 around 53% but you'd expect three years after the pandemic that that number would reduce. In fact, as you said, it's gone up to around 61% now. Moreover, it's been embedded into the employment agreements by the public service that have been agreed with the Labor Government. That's despite the fact that the Secretaries Board made an agreement with the Australian Public Service Commission just in 2023, that any work from home arrangements should work, not just for the individual, but also for their team and for the department. That's not the case now. Public servants have a right to demand to work from home and that’s simply not working. It’s detracting from productivity, which we know is so fundamentally important, if we are going to deliver a more effective and efficient public service.

PETA CREDLIN: When we are talking about home Jane Hume, we're not saying that they're in a suburb of Canberra, so that if they need to go to the office all of a sudden, you can get them in there. I know of circumstances where public servants out of Canberra have moved to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. They live up there all the time, yet they're supposedly running a team of two or three hundred people in the bureaucracy in Canberra. Now, blind Freddie can tell you that doesn't work.

JANE HUME: We've heard stories to my office quite recently, a public servant spoke to us, saying that a member of their team had chosen to work from home full time, but was very difficult and unreliable to get hold of, and the reason why was because that public servant was traveling around Australia in a camper van with their family. Now that's not working from home. In my mind, it's certainly not productive for their team. It's not productive for their department.

PETA CREDLIN: Got you, Jane Hume, I think I can hear my audience applauding you from home. This is a terrific move, and five days a week means you're serious. Thank you for your time.