Victoria's work-from-home push puts HR in the crosshairs
Victoria’s plan to give employees a legal right to work from home at least two days a week is rapidly turning into a test case in who controls workplace flexibility: employers and HR, or parliament.
While the Allan government is selling the proposal as a cost-of-living and family-friendly reform, large employers, regional businesses and industry groups are warning it risks driving investment interstate, complicating workforce planning and turning flexible work – which many HR teams already offer – into a rigid entitlement that is hard to manage and harder to unwind.
At the centre of the fight is a simple question many HR professionals are now quietly asking: if flexible work is already widespread, why legislate it at all – and why now?
German manufacturing giant Robert Bosch has become one of the most vocal critics of the Victorian plan. The company’s regional president, Gavin Smith, told a recent government consultation that the proposed regime could force Bosch to end its long-running internship program in the state.
“Our 20-year collaboration with the tertiary institutions to take interns into our Victorian business may be coming to an end,” he said.
Smith argued that internships and early-career roles rely on in-person mentoring and close supervision on the shop floor and in engineering teams.
“It only works when both the interns, the staff they work with and the supervisors they work for are physically present,” he said. “We want our interns on site. It’s a business, not a country club.”
For HR professionals who have spent the past few years trying to repair early-career development disrupted by the pandemic, the warning lands heavily. If the legislation locks in remote work in ways that make it harder to design onsite internships, graduate rotations and hands-on learning, the risk is that companies simply scale those programs back or move them – along with future investment – to other states.
Read more: Least engaged staff want WFH says CEO
Smith suggested that while Bosch did not intend to relocate its existing Victorian operations, the company was increasingly looking beyond the state when deciding where to commit new capital.
“Moving isn’t an option but placing all new investment elsewhere than Victoria is,” he said.
Bosch is not alone in considering its options. Explosives manufacturer Dyno Nobel has confirmed it will shift its headquarters from Melbourne to Brisbane, adding to a growing list of resources companies that have either moved or seen senior roles drift away from Victoria over the past decade.
The AFR reported that Dyno Nobel managing director Mauro Neves said .“We see labour flexibility as part of our ability to attract talent, we really think there is a value in allowing people to be flexible,” he said.
Even so, human resources leaders watching these moves will recognise a pattern: as taxes rise, regulatory layers accumulate and bespoke state-based rules proliferate, boardrooms at national businesses start asking whether their next expansion, and their next tranche of high-skill jobs, should be in Victoria or somewhere else.
Read more: Victoria's WFH proposal: Employers warn of impact on workplace culture
Read more: Is WFH a right, or a privilege? Key takeaways from WFH decision against Westpac
Nowhere is that calculation more acute than along the New South Wales–Victoria border, where moving a business is less a theoretical threat than a short drive up the highway.
Business Wodonga chief executive Graham Jenkin told the ABC many local operators were “aghast” at the proposal and already grappling with higher costs and red tape. He argued that an otherwise identical office in NSW could soon look “considerably cheaper and better off” than one in Victoria.
For HR teams overseeing multi-site workforces across state borders, that raises practical headaches: two systems of rules for one set of roles. What is an optional, negotiated flexible working pattern on the NSW side of the river could become a statutory right that is far harder to adjust on the Victorian side – even if the job and the business are otherwise identical.
The government’s political case for the reform rests heavily on its own polling. A large survey of 36,770 people commissioned by the state found that more than 74 per cent of respondents said working from home was “extremely important” to them, with a further 13 per cent calling it “very important”.
The same poll found that 82 per cent of respondents had the option of working from home, and that working from home at least two days a week was the most common arrangement. Among those who could work from home but did not, most had asked for it, and most said they had been refused.
“The survey says thousands of Victorians have been denied work from home. That's exactly why we're protecting work from home,” Premier Jacinta Allan said.
Read more: Westpac CEO weighs in on Victorian WFH plan
For HR managers, the numbers confirm what they already know from exit interviews and candidate negotiations: flexibility is now a top-tier benefit. What the survey does not tell them is how to reconcile those preferences with the operational realities of roles that require presence, the need to maintain team cohesion, or the capacity to respond quickly to changing business conditions without triggering a legal dispute.
Employer associations have been blunt in their assessment of the proposal. Ai Group’s Victorian head Tim Piper has previously described it as “little more than pure political theatre” and “a serious government overreach that undermines business autonomy and further jeopardises economic confidence in the state”.
Read more: Ai Group rejects union proposal on working from home
Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Paul Guerra has warned that moving away from the national industrial relations framework risks driving companies, and jobs, to other jurisdictions.
“If Victoria moves away from the legislated national system, businesses will move interstate and jobs will be lost,” he said.
For HR leaders, the concern is less about the headline of two days at home and more about what sits beneath it: new processes, documentation and legal tests; increased potential for disputes about what is “reasonable”; complaints from workers in non-WFH roles about perceived inequity; and the need to unpick state rules from existing enterprise agreements and national employment instruments.
Property sector worries and CBD repercussions
The property sector is also pushing back. The Victorian executive director of the Property Council, Cath Evans, has argued that the state has already adapted to flexible work after enduring some of the world’s longest COVID-19 lockdowns.
“Victorians are perhaps better adjusted to working flexibly than any other state given our status as the most locked-down city in the world during the pandemic,” she said. “With this in mind, the question really becomes why we need to legislate a system that is already working.”
Evans has warned that locking in a right to work from home will hurt Central Melbourne by reducing foot traffic, disadvantaging small businesses that depend on office workers and undermining the city’s appeal to investors. For HR teams tasked with hybrid strategies that support both employees and city-centre offices, a rigid right to stay home could make it harder to encourage in-person collaboration days or whole-team office days designed around culture, learning and innovation.
WFH can work – but HR wants choice, not a mandate
None of this is a blanket rejection of remote work itself. Many of the same employers criticising the legislation say they actively use flexibility as a recruitment and retention tool.
If working from home becomes a hard-edged statutory right rather than a negotiated condition, HR will be on the front line of resolving conflicts where flexibility simply does not fit: frontline health, hospitality, manufacturing, onsite supervision, early-career training and roles that depend on physical presence or confidential material that cannot be accessed remotely.
The Victorian government insists work from home “works for families and it’s good for the economy – it saves families money, means more people are in the workforce – and it even cuts congestion”. The survey numbers give it a strong retail message to take to voters.
But the emerging backlash from employers, business groups and border operators points to a different reality for HR. Instead of being left to craft workforce strategies that suit their organisations – including generous flexible work policies where they make sense – HR departments in Victoria may soon be navigating a new layer of state-based regulation that looks, to many, less like thoughtful workplace reform and more like an election-year promise.
For HR professionals who want the freedom to say yes to work from home when it works, and no when it doesn’t, the looming legislation is not about whether flexibility is good or bad. It is about who gets to decide.
