The Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee is inquiring into the Fair Work Amendment (Right to Work from Home) Bill 2025.

This Australian Greens proposal seeks to make significant changes to the National Employment Standards (NES) governing requests for flexible working arrangements, including but not limited to, requests to work from home for up to two days per week. Australian Industry Group does not support the Bill and has urged the Committee to recommend against its passage.

Key issues raised by Australian Industry Group

The submission emphasises that the existing right to request flexible working arrangements – already added to in 2022 through the Secure Jobs, Better Pay changes – is operating as intended.

Employees are accessing flexible work, employers are engaging with requests, and disputes are being resolved through the Fair Work Commission where necessary.

The submission highlights that:

• Working from home is already widely used under existing law, through voluntary agreement, enterprise agreements, and the existing NES request framework.
• A recent independent review of the Secure Jobs, Better Pay amendments recommended no further changes to the NES right to request flexible work.
• The Bill would undermine cooperative and productive workplace relations by shifting away from negotiated, workplace‑level solutions.
• Creating a special and narrowly defined refusal test for some WFH requests would increase complexity, uncertainty, and disputation, while significantly limiting employers’ ability to manage operations, productivity, and competing employee needs.
• The proposed changes risk cutting across a major Fair Work Commission case currently examining working from home provisions in modern awards.

 The submission concludes that the Bill is unnecessary, unbalanced, and impractical, and would disrupt a system that is already delivering flexibility while maintaining appropriate safeguards for businesses, employees, and the broader community.