Fair Work Amendment (Right to Work from Home) Bill 2025 The Business Council of Australia (BCA) welcomes the opportunity to make a submission to the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee in relation to the Fair Work Amendment (Right to Work from Home) Bill 2025 (the Bill).
The BCA represents some of Australia’s largest businesses, employing over a million Australians across all sectors of the economy. Our members are committed to providing flexible, modern and inclusive workplaces and already offer a wide range of flexible working arrangements, including working from home where it is practical and appropriate.
While the BCA strongly supports flexible working arrangements, we do not support the Bill. The Fair Work Act 2009 (FW Act) already provides a robust and adaptable framework for employees to request flexibility, including working from home. On that basis, we believe this Bill is unnecessary and risks unsettling the balance carefully struck under the current system, which provides for both the changing operating structures of the workplace as well as the requirements of business so they can effectively operate, remain competitive and continue to employ people.
Australia is facing a persistent productivity challenge, with growth remaining subdued and structural pressures continuing to weigh on economic performance. In these circumstances, it is important that proposed changes to workplace regulation are carefully calibrated and clearly linked to productivity outcomes. The industrial relations system has undergone significant reform in recent years, and many employers and employees are still adjusting to that expanded regulatory framework. Introducing further changes that prescribe workplace arrangements risks adding complexity and reducing flexibility at a time when businesses need greater capacity to adapt, innovate and support a more productive economy, and should not be done without commensurate changes directed at increasing labour productivity.
By elevating working from home into a distinct statutory category and imposing a narrow refusal test, disconnected to businesses’ operational requirements, the Bill would reduce, rather than enhance, genuine flexibility, replacing tailored workplace solutions with a prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach. In doing so, the Bill also risks undermining critical drivers of business and employee success, including productivity, collaboration, supervision, safety, data security and effective training, many of which depend on an appropriate and adaptable level of physical presence in the workplace.
The positions advanced in this submission reflect and build on our submission to the Victorian Government’s September 2025 consultation on their proposed working from home legislation, which set out similar concerns regarding the risks of prescriptive statutory approaches to workplace flexibility.
In our submission we make the following observations, and in attachment 1 we provide commentary on specific clauses in the Bill.