Michael McLaren:
Well, Adam Creighton, senior fellow and chief economist at Institute of Public Affairs, he’s sounding the warning. His right to do it. He’s on the line. Always good to speak, Adam, and thank you for your time.
Adam Creighton:
Thanks very much, Michael. Great to be here.
Michael McLaren:
I mean, you and I have to be as productive as we can. Otherwise, Gemini or ChatGPT might be doing our job for us. In some ways, they probably could already do it. But there’s particular onuses they’re not on government, particularly labour governments that claim to be on the side of the worker. Not to through policies that wreak of generosity, make those workers too expensive a prospect for an employer to stick with.
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, certainly, that’s right. Look, I think this Victorian proposal to basically mandate to give workers the right to work from home for two days is… It sounds great, and it might have some popular appeal in the first instance. But the point I was trying to make in that column is, I think workers should be very careful before they self-select to be on the work from home list, because if I was a small business or an employer, and I did not want my staff to work from home, but I was being forced to allow them by some Victorian state law, then those workers would be the first to be laid off. If there was a downturn, or indeed, some bosses may even lay them off anyway, find an excuse to do so.
And as you said in your intro, they’ve got more alternatives now. They can either get the work done offshore, or increasingly, as we’re seeing from businesses like the Commonwealth Bank, Afterpay, WiseTech, Telstra, there’s been thousands of people let go, or basically white collar jobs in the last few months alone. So, they might be basically electing to be laid off by choosing to work from home. So, one stat that really shocked me from in researching that column was that 36% of workers, according to the ABS, they already usually work from home, which is quite a high fraction. That staggered me actually, because it would have been close to zero before COVID.
So, obviously it’s much, much more common now. And I tend to think it’s maybe an aberration. It’s not going to last that long because these jobs that can be done at home, they can probably be done by AI ultimately.
Michael McLaren:
Well, or at someone else’s home somewhere around the world.
Adam Creighton:
Indeed, indeed. Indeed. Yeah, that’s right.
Michael McLaren:
I mean, the point though out of that stat is also twofold in that I’m not really sure why I say the Victorian state government are keen to legislate the right to work two days a week from home, when of course that right only applies to a certain stratum of the economy anyway. But equally, clearly a lot of bosses and employees is almost like a work choices kind of way, have come to an arrangement that works-
Adam Creighton:
Exactly, exactly.
Michael McLaren:
… for them already. Why do we need a law to codify it?
Adam Creighton:
Yes, that’s right. I think it’s certainly true that in some cases, it is more productive for workers to be at home. Obviously, they save on a lot of costs and so forth. And if they get their work done, then there’s nothing wrong with that. If the employee and the employer both think it’s beneficial, then it’s a good thing that they can already do that. That’s the point. There’s nothing stopping them doing that now. And so, I think for the employers that have not allowed it, there’s probably good reason for it. I mean, one of the main ones being is they can’t monitor their staff as easily. I mean, if you’ve got someone working at home, they could literally just have the day off and they can’t be monitored.
Michael McLaren:
Some do.
Adam Creighton:
So, many bosses would not like that, and that’s understandable. So, one of the arguments I was making is I just don’t think it’s going to be the big political win that the Victorian Labour thinks it will be. And let’s face it, this is all about politics they saw last year in the federal election that the federal coalition supposedly misstepped by talking about work from home, by saying they were going to bring back all the public service in Canberra for five days. And frankly, that was probably a silly policy, I would say, both for political and economic reasons, but I just don’t think this one is going to benefit Victorian labour. I mean, of course, they are panicked.
I think the Roy Morgan poll last week had one nation ahead of Labour, which is quite extraordinary in the state.
Michael McLaren:
Well, I was going to say it is extraordinary, Adam, but judging by the track record of say the last 15 years, I’m surprised that the imbecile party isn’t in front of Labour in Victoria. I mean, how anyone could vote for them.
Adam Creighton:
No, it’ll be very depressing I must say, if they get a fourth term after what they’ve done to the state. I mean, the big one being obviously all of the corruption in the big build, but this is just a political policy and it’s probably not even constitutional. I mean, Victoria, they sent all their industrial powers back to the federal government, I believe, during the Kennett government. And this looks like an industrial matter to me. So, they’re going to try to do it through discrimination law, but someone will challenge it, I assume, and it may be struck down by the high court eventually. But if they do pass it, it’ll still be a nuisance for a year or two for small businesses in Victoria.
And there’s about 250,000 at least that employ between one and 99 staff. So, this is going to affect them certainly, and they’ll certainly be voting against the Labour Party, I imagine. And that’s actually quite a lot of votes. If you have a mom and dad business, I mean, it’s hundreds of thousands of votes that they will lose. Of course, they think that they’re going to gain lots of votes from the 1.3 million private sector workers who work for small business. But as we just discussed, many of those are already working from home in the first place. So, I just don’t see how it’s going to be a big appeal.
Michael McLaren:
No, it’s interesting though when we look at the voting base, as you said at the top of your article, if you want a clue about who the Labour Party actually represents these days, look no further than the Victoria Premier Jacinta Allan, the populist policies we said to force businesses to allow their staff to work from home up to two days a week if they want to. As you say, “It’s only the higher paid laptop class that can work from home.” The blue collar workforce, the original bulk of the party’s support base, they can’t do that. So, this is a global thing though.
I mean when you think about Trump’s America, you think about what’s happening in the UK with Farage, you look at continental Europe some places, and here now with the Liberal Party and one nation, the right is increasingly the party that the blue collar worker, because they generally have more conservative social values are turning to, and the, I don’t know, would you say the middle left, if not the greens, are where some of the well-to-do are going.
Adam Creighton:
Yeah. Look, that is very true. It’s a fascinating shift. I mean, it’s true that the average income, I believe, of labour voters now are significantly higher than for the other parties and certainly much higher than one nation voters. And it’s just a reminder that it’s not really the so called workers party anymore. Basically, Labor’s the party of the bureaucracy and of higher paid laptop class workers in the corporate sector. What’s interesting is that that’s probably at most 25% of the labour force. And yet because they’re very good at politics and because they have the media on their side generally, they stay in power through clever politicking when they only represent a distinct minority of the workforce.
So, if the Liberal Party and the National Party in one nation, if they kind of marketed themselves better, they really should do much, much better than they are.
Michael McLaren:
Yep, that’s right. Just on the broader narrative, and I raised this yesterday in an editorial, the ACTU, they’re going for broke obviously. They want an extra week holiday legislated under the Employment Act, 4-day weeks. They want that trialled, obviously the trial to become a permanent fixture rather than 5-day weeks. In Victoria, again, the education union, I think down there is pushing for a trial of four day in classroom for teachers and one day working remotely or from home. I mean, how that works with the kids are still going to be in the classroom. I’ve got no idea.
I mean, it’s all heading in one direction. And the union claim, and I spoke to one of the Shoppies Union about this the other day, claimed that, well, look, no, there won’t be any productivity dividend from this. This is payback from all the productivity gains we’ve given the employer, but haven’t received compensation for in the last decade or so. Now, as you know, because you write about this and think about this deeply, the productivity boondoggle seems to be like trying to catch smoke in this country. We’ve seen very, very difficult to improve productivity.
Adam Creighton:
Yes, it is. It really is.
Michael McLaren:
But I guess the point, Adam, is how productive are we? I mean, the average Australian is certainly working longer hours than we did maybe 20 years ago. People are doing, in many cases, unpaid over time. But when we are working, how productive are we? 20 odd years ago, we didn’t have people staring at smartphones. We didn’t have work from home. We didn’t have a lot of these potential anti-productive influences in our life. So, we’re working longer, but are we more productive?
Adam Creighton:
Well, probably per minute or per 30 minutes of actually doing work, we are. But my point with these statistics, these macro aggregate statistics is they’re somewhat meaningless. I know the media talks about a great deal, but as you’ve just laid out, the boundary between work and leisure has blurred so much. Indeed, there’s very little clocking on and clocking off anymore in most jobs. And so, to work out productivity, you have to know how many hours people are actually working. And my view is the ABS just can’t know that, and it’s getting harder and harder to know that. So, I don’t really know what the figures mean. I just go back to first principles.
I think what government needs to do is they need to lower taxation. They need to let businesses and households make their own decisions about their own personal productivity, and they will have the greatest incentive to get that right because they make more money out of that. They have a more enjoyable life out of that. These measures, they shouldn’t come from the government. I know Victoria Labour saying this two day a week work from home thing is good for productivity. But I mean, no, it’s not, but you’re just imposing another regulatory burden on businesses that means more paperwork, it means more legal battles. I mean, it’s certainly not going to help productivity.
But then even then, GDP, which is the numerator, if you like, sorry to get technical, it’s the numerator in productivity, then all those wasteful things, they go into GDP as well. So, sometimes I don’t really even know what we’re measuring. So, I think it’s important to get back to basics with economics and to discourage governments from actively trying to boost productivity, because they tend to always waste money in doing so and make it harder for businesses and households to work it out themselves.
Michael McLaren:
We’ve got to ask what’s more productive, the private sector or the government sector and then I think-
Adam Creighton:
Oh, yes, certainly.
Michael McLaren:
… you get your answer where you drive it.
Adam Creighton:
We know that. Exactly.
Michael McLaren:
Just finally, of course, when the rest of us were reading Tolkien as 12 year olds or whatever you were reading, Adam Smith, yesterday was the 250th anniversary of the publication of the wealth of nations. Should a few politicians and economists go back and read that, do you think?
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, look, they really should. It’s a beautifully written book and it’s not a difficult read. Many economics techs are exploiting…
Michael McLaren:
So, CG, I tried to get into it. I found it a bit of a difficult read.
Adam Creighton:
Yeah. Look, it is hard, but I tell you, Kane’s general theory is a lot harder. And on that one, I certainly gave up.
Michael McLaren:
I never tried.
Adam Creighton:
But look, many of the insights of Adam Smith are still very relevant today. He was extremely perceptive about the insidious incentives of government and taxation. It’s worth a read. I mean, he’s often seen as his hardcore right-winger, but that’s actually not true. I mean, he saw a role for government in certain areas in terms of infrastructure and so forth, but the insights are extraordinary and it’s probably the most… I mean, except for the Bible, it’d have to be the most influential, I’d say, in history.
Michael McLaren:
Yeah, it’s certainly up there. It’s relevant even to modern day economics. Great to speak as always, Adam. Thank you.
Adam Creighton:
Thank you. Thanks, Michael.
Michael McLaren:
All the best. Adam Creighton, senior fellow and chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.
This transcript of Adam Creighton talking on Afternoons with Michael McLaren – 2GB 10 March 2026 been edited for clarity.
