From Westpac's courtroom defeat to Victoria's new legal right to work from home, the battle over the desk has become the defining workplace story of our time – and Australia is writing its own distinctly complicated chapter
Last October, aFair Work Commissiondeputy president did something remarkable. She ordered Westpac Banking Corporation to grant a long-serving employee the permanent right to work from home –full-time, five days a week –because the bank had failed to demonstrate that requiring her to commute two hours each way to its Kogarah corporate office was supported by reasonable business grounds.
The employee, Karlene Chandler, had worked successfully in Westpac's mortgage operations team on a remote basis for years. Her twin daughters attended a school near her home in Wilton, 80 kilometres south-west of Sydney. Westpac's hybrid working policy required all staff to come to a corporate office at least two days a week. The bank insisted this was necessary for collaboration and meaningful engagement. The commission was not persuaded. The evidence offered by the bank, Deputy President Roberts found, was generalised and insufficient.
The decision sent ripples across corporate Australia. Within days, Westpac chief executive Anthony Miller publicly reaffirmed the bank's two-day in-office policy, insisting the company had got the balance right. The Greens introduced a bill to parliament in November giving all Australians a statutory right to request up to two working-from-home days a week. Victoria announced that from September 2026, employees in that state whose work can be performed remotely will have a legal right to do exactly that. The Business Council of Australia submitted a response arguing the legislation would reduce rather than enhance genuine flexibility.
All of this, in one year, in one country –and it looks nothing like what is happening anywhere else.
A different kind of return
Cast your eyes north and west and the picture could hardly be more different. In the United States, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Amazon have ordered all staff back to the office five days a week. In Canada, the Big Six banks moved as one to require four days. The Trump administration called all federal workers back immediately and without appeal.
Australia, by contrast, is having a messier, more contested, and in many ways more interesting argument.
The country's major banks –Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB and ANZ –have broadly settled on hybrid models, not full-time mandates. NSW Premier Chris Minns sparked a national furore in August 2024 when he issued a memo to more than 430,000 public servants requiring them to work principally in an approved workplace — with less than 24 hours' notice. The backlash was immediate. The Public Service Association pledged to challenge the move. Unions NSW said workers were stunned. Victoria publicly invited aggrieved NSW public servants to consider crossing the border, promising their flexible arrangements would be untouched.
We have no plans to roll back the existing flexible working arrangements, a Victorian government spokesperson said. We know that flexibility in the workplace helps more women stay in work and more women in the workforce is better for everyone. Any public servant from NSW who likes flexibility in their workplace should consider moving to Victoria.
The national picture that emerges is one of genuine ambivalence: employers pushing toward the office, employees pushing back, and governments — state and federal, Labor and Liberal — lining up on opposite sides of a debate that has become as much about values and identity as it is about productivity.
The numbers behind the noise
The data reveals an Australia that never fully surrendered the office in the way some other countries did –and is now edging back further, but more cautiously than the headlines might suggest.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 36% of employed Australians worked from home in some capacity in 2024, down from 37% in 2023. It is the first sustained decline since the pandemic began. The proportion of Australians working from home has fallen for multiple consecutive periods, and hybrid workers are increasingly spending more time at their desks than at their kitchen tables.
Yet the Australian HR Institute's 2025 research on hybrid and flexible working found the landscape had entered what it described as a period of stabilisation. Almost half of all organisations mandate office attendance of two or three days a week. Only 18% require four or five days, or offer no hybrid working at all. These are not the numbers of a country sprinting back to 2019.
Research by CBRE found a clear divide between large and small employers. At organisations with fewer than 1,000 staff, employees typically achieve around 3.1 days a week in the office –broadly in line with what employers want. At companies with more than 1,000 employees, the average attendance is 2.6 days, consistently falling short of the 2.9-day target. Fifty per cent of large Australian organisations are not strictly enforcing their own return-to-office guidelines, and a further 19% have established no formal policy at all.
Robert Half's 2025 research uncovered a domino effect in the Australian RTO landscape –with employers 84% more likely to be influenced by what other companies are doing than by any internal data on productivity or performance. Employers are back in the driver's seat, said Nicole Gorton, director at Robert Half, and dictate office attendance, knowing others are doing the same.
The political flashpoint
Nowhere was the ideological charge around this debate more visible than in the lead-up to last year's federal election, when Opposition Leader Peter Dutton made the return of all Australian Public Service workers to the office a centrepiece of the Coalition's campaign –explicitly comparing his position to that ofDonald Trump.
The pitch met a swift and hostile response. ACTU president Michele O'Neil described it as a Trump copycat plan that would hurt working women. The Greens said it would undermine decades of progress on economic equality. Most damagingly, Dutton himself suggested that working mothers could continue to be flexible through job-sharing arrangements –a comment that ignored, as the Australian Human Rights Institute noted, the fact that fewer than one per cent of public servants are currently in such arrangements.
The backlash was severe enough that Dutton abandoned the policy before polling day. We've made a mistake in relation to the policy, we apologise for that and we've dealt with it, he said in April. It was a remarkable about-face –and, as many analysts noted, one that came too late to repair the political damage. The Labor government, under Anthony Albanese, took the opposite view throughout –championing the right to flexibility as a benefit to women, to carers, and to the regional economies where many public servants now live and work.
The Albanese government won. And the contrast between what followed in Canberra and what happened in Washington could not be more pointed. While US president Donald Trump ordered every federal worker back to their desk on his first day in office, Australia's federal public service has moved in the other direction. The APS's own 2025 State of the Service report found that 80 per cent of public service employees accessed some form of flexible working arrangement in the past year, up from 71% in 2020. Services Australia –the government's largest employer, with more than 31,000 workers — recorded a 15-point increase in its work-from-home rate. Flexible working arrangements, the report found, have become a key tool for recruitment and retention across the service.
The legal frontier
What makes Australia's debate genuinely distinctive is the extent to which it has shifted from the boardroom to the courtroom –and now potentially to the statute books.
The Westpac case was not an isolated incident. The 2023 Secure Jobs, Better Pay legislation strengthened employees' rights to challenge refusals of flexible working requests through the Fair Work Commission, creating a legal framework that has no real equivalent in either the United States or Canada. Where American workers have largely no recourse beyond resignation when an employer mandates their physical presence, Australian workers –at least those in protected categories –have the right to contest a refusal, and a commission empowered to order the employer to change its position.
The Greens' Fair Work Amendment (Right to Work from Home) Bill 2025, currently before a Senate committee, would go further still, extending a baseline entitlement to request two days of remote work a week to all employees, not just those with caring responsibilities or disabilities. The Business Council of Australia has argued the bill would substitute tailored workplace solutions with a prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach. The Australian HR Institute has said the existing framework is already working well and further legislation is not needed. A Senate committee inquiry is examining whether it should proceed.
Victoria has already answered the question for itself. From September 2026, Victorian employees whose roles can reasonably be performed from home will have a legal right –not just a right to request –to work remotely at least two days a week. It is the first such provision of its kind in Australia, and possibly in the world among large comparable economies. Whether it remains a Victorian exception or becomes the national template is one of the central questions now before Australian policymakers.
The city equation
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Australia's major cities –and Sydney in particular –have been grappling with the economic consequences of empty office towers in much the same way as New York, London and Toronto, though with a different and somewhat more hopeful trajectory.
Data from the Property Council of Australia showed positive take-up for office space exceeding 100,000 square metres for the first time in three years in the year to January 2025. Office foot traffic data showed Sydney's CBD at roughly 70% of its pre-pandemic levels. Not a full recovery, but moving in the right direction –and driven, in large part, by what commercial real estate analysts have called a flight to quality.
Premium and trophy buildings –those with the best amenities, access to public transport, and modern fitouts –are experiencing strong demand and near-full occupancy. Older, lower-grade towers are being shunned, their vacancy rates stubbornly high. The implicit deal being struck between employers and employees across Sydney and Melbourne is becoming clearer: if you want people in the office, you need to give them somewhere worth coming to.
CBRE's Australian head of office research Tom Broderick put it plainly: organisations expecting a continued improvement in attendance rates need to invest in the quality of the space itself, not simply in the mandate to fill it.
What workers actually think
For all the corporate memos and parliamentary manoeuvring, the Australian workforce's position has been remarkably consistent.
Surveys consistently find that around 93% of Australian office workers want to come to the office at least part of the time –they simply do not want to come every day. The median preference among office workers is roughly two to three days in the office a week, which happens to align reasonably well with what most large Australian employers are requiring. The friction –and there is genuine friction –arises where employers push beyond that range, either through poorly enforced mandates that breed resentment without producing results, or through legally contested attempts to require full-time office attendance from employees whose jobs demonstrably function at home.
Research from the Melbourne Institute and Roy Morgan found roughly 40% of Australian workers desire more working-from-home time than their employer currently permits. AHRI's data found that 45%of organisations report hybrid working has had a positive effect on productivity. CEOs for Gender Equity has warned that full-time in-office requirements would disproportionately harm women, particularly those with caregiving responsibilities, and undermine years of progress on gender equity in the workforce.
An unresolved question
Australia has not resolved this debate. It may not resolve it for years.
What it has done is choose a more litigious, more legislated, and ultimately more employee-protective path than either the United States or Canada. The Fair Work Commission sits as an ever-present backstop against the worst employer overreach. State governments are experimenting with statutory rights to flexibility that go beyond anything federal law currently provides. And the memory of a federal election campaign in which the push for full-time office mandates was resoundingly rejected by voters has given flexibility a political valence here that it does not carry elsewhere.
The Westpac case, at its core, was not really about one woman's commute, or one bank's meeting culture. It was about who decides where work happens –and what burden of proof an employer must meet before they can force the answer to be here, not there.
Australia, at least for now, has decided that the burden is real, the proof must be specific, and the default is no longer automatically in the employer's favour.
The office isn't dead. But in this country, it has to earn its commute.
