What if working from home was a legal right?

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It is difficult to keep up with Australia. If some of the most difficult combat laws on this planet does not go on, it brings a global embargo on social media for children under the age of 16. Or it becomes the first country to prohibit the artificial stone used in the surfaces of the kitchen associated with lung disease.

Now, Victoria’s second most populous state in Australia is planning another wonderful step: a law that gives workers in both public sectors the right to work from home for at least two days a week.

In this process, it shakes a remote work policy in a way that governments may find elsewhere.

This is a hard possibility for 83 percent of the international executives who said last year that they expect to see workers in the office full time within three years.

A similar number of Australian presidents said the same, so you can imagine what happened in August, when the Victorian Labor Party government announced its plans for the right to work from home.

“This policy will completely cost the Victorian jobs,” Ben Pfeisterer, head of the Digital Payments Group in Melbourne, warned.

He previously launched the founder of Twitter Jack Dormy’s Square Financial Services Group in Australia, and said that if any of the company started today, “I could not build it in Victoria.”

The heads of the adult retailers also lined up to strike a plan in Australia’s business council that should be canceled because it was not necessary, economically harmful and perhaps unconstitutional.

All of this makes it amazing to hear the most guarded response from the opposition Victorian liberal party, which is usually the sound of business.

“We will be based when the government provides its legislation,” the opposition leader Brad Patin told me this week. He added that it is up to the government to ensure that its plans do not pay jobs and investment between the states, and the government must listen to business. But it does not call for getting rid of the plan.

Why not? For one reason, opinion polls showed in August that up to 64 percent of the voters supported this step, which some commentators believe contributed to the rise of 10 points to support the Victorian government since the beginning of the year. It is not bad for the party that was in power 11 years ago.

After only five months, since the liberals lost federal elections, their Trump -like policy forced civilian employees to return to the office for five days a week that caused a violent reaction, and was injured in the middle of the campaign in the middle of the pregnancy.

Many factors contributed to this loss, of course, and the same applies to the poll survey in Victoria.

But the Australian political tests of work patterns are still worth seeing, not the least of which are because their work from home prices corresponds to the average for educated workers in the college in 40 countries.

There, as elsewhere, the popularity of work is not a mystery.

Mobility times for Australians who have been working from home have decreased since the epidemic decreased by about three hours a week. Economists say, for medium owners, that this reaches an annual savings of $ 5300, or about 2600 pounds.

No wonder 76 percent of Australians recently said they wanted more wages to return to the full -time workplace.

It is also not surprising that many employers offer a hybrid work when Australian researchers say that people who do half of their work at home were placed slightly more than 9 percent a week for those in full -time office. This number rises to nearly 20 percent for people who work full -time at home.

I suspect that such numbers explain the reason for real estate executives who oversee an area of ​​650 million square feet of the global work area recently for the Knight Frank Real Estate Group that they expect the main type of work style in three hybrid years.

Victoria is scheduled to submit its new law until next year and a few companies will see developments as well as the enthusiastic fans of companies with a full return to the office, such as Amazon.

The American group told me this week that it could not speculate on how the laws that have not yet been implemented affect its Australian operations. But it was “enthusiastic” for the innovation and cooperation that I saw since its employees returned to the office five days a week. Let’s see how employees feel if they get the legal right to return home.

pileita.claark@ft.com