One curious finding from the Covid era is that so-called ‘Long Covid’ was three times as likely to afflict public servants in Britain. Golly, what a shock: a ‘disease’ that cannot be physically diagnosed, and relies entirely on self-reported ‘fatigue’, disproportionately affects a class notorious for self-entitled laziness. At the same time, productivity among Australian public servants has plummeted dramatically, at a far faster rate than the private sector, even as their wages climbed far higher than the average.
So it should surprise none of us that public servants are the most enthusiastic proponents of ‘working’ from home.
Almost 50 per cent of the 33,500 staff in [Services Australia] have an approved working from home arrangement, according to astonishing new figures.
As the agency responsible for Centrelink, Medicare, Child Support and myGov, Services Australia is the public face of the government all Aussie citizens and residents will engage with at some point on their journey from the cradle to the grave.
Remember: this is the agency that is supposed to be the one government agency that deals with the public – i.e., the people who pay their wages – in person.
Yet, nearly half of so-called ‘service delivery’ roles don’t show up to actually deliver services in person. Nearly two-thirds of the ‘non-service delivery’ staff only show up occasionally. Nearly four per cent never show up at all.
While we taxpayers will rightly fume at being taken for a ride by these lanyard-toting layabouts, there’s a gleam of schadenfreude in this: the own-goal these lazy zoomers are inflicting on themselves.
E-commerce founder Ruslan Kogan, a man who actually built a business and employs people rather than shuffling forms, has been laying into the work-from-home cult with characteristic bluntness. He’s rebranded the whole racket with a term that, while unprintable here, rather neatly captures the essence of the arrangement. More importantly, he’s spotted the real victims.
“The thing about this whole working from home debate that bugs me a bit is that usually it’s those that want it the most that it’s hurting the most. The young people, the graduates,” Kogan says.
“I remember as a grad being a sponge, going into meetings, watching others, learning, taking it all in, asking questions, interacting with various departments, having incidental conversations around the office, trying to be seen, trying to be engaged.
“You can’t do that by clicking a video link every now and then. It’s really, really hurting graduates and young recruits in organisations. The people who are the future of the country.”
Exactly. And nowhere is this self-sabotage more glaring than inside Services Australia.
If they somehow survive the AI Armageddon currently laying waste to graduate roles, they are rewarded with endless, soul-sapping Zoom calls where they have to pretend to look engaged while their seniors take an hour to say what could have been sent in a three-line email.
The Senate figures dug out by Liberals Dave Sharma and Jane Hume make for grimly amusing reading. Just 55 employees on $70,000 or less – the juniors who desperately need to learn the job – are working from home three or more days a week. At least they leave a couple of days to bother turning up and figuring out how the system works.
At least they might, if there was anyone else there to actually show them. Fully 10,300 staff in the $70,000–$113,000 bracket are WFH three-plus days a week. That’s a vast cohort of early-to-mid career public servants. As for their seniors: over 1,500 executive level one and two staff, pulling between $122,500 and $168,500, are skiving off with the same zeal. And three senior executive service officers on $170,000-plus are also logging three or more days a week from the spare bedroom.
So the people who should be mentoring the next generation, setting standards and actually running the shop are the ones most enthusiastically bunking off. The juniors are left staring at a screen, wondering why their careers feel stuck, while the higher-ups perfect the art of looking busy on mute. A new generation of public servants is being trained to believe that ‘work’ is something you do in pyjama bottoms between coffee runs and online shopping.
Kogan is right. The people who demanded this arrangement the loudest are the ones it is hurting the most: and they’re too busy enjoying their ‘flexible’ mornings to notice.
The rest of us just get the privilege of funding the whole scam.
