It’s my right: The state of the debate on proposed work from home rights

Last month, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, announced that the State Labor Government plans to introduce legislation establishing a right to work from home before the 2026 state election. Labor’s proposal would give both public and private sector employees the right to work from home at least two days a week if they can reasonably perform their role from home.

Although we are still some time away from seeing the proposal reflected in Victorian legislation, roundtable discussions involving stakeholders, industry bodies and unions will be held in 2025.

The Federal position

Following Premier Allan’s announcement, the Australian Greens proposed an amendment to Labor’s Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Penalty and Overtime Rates) Bill 2025 which, if it had been passed, would have provided for a Federally legislated right to work from home. The Greens’ amendment would have seen a positive obligation on employers to consider reasonable requests to work from home.

The Federal Labor government has rejected the Greens’ proposal in the Senate, meaning that at this stage, there are no changes to legislation at either the State or Federal level that provide employees with greater rights to request the ability to work from home.

Flexible work request dispute in the Federal Court

Even though there have been no legislative changes giving employees the right to work from home at a Federal or State level, avenues already exist for employees who wish to request the ability to work from home and to raise disputes about their requests.

Using one of these existing avenues, an employee of University College, a residential college in Melbourne, has brought a claim against the College, the Head of College and the Chair of the College council.

The employee’s claim alleges breaches of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) (Act) following a 2024 dispute about her request for flexible working arrangements and allegations that she has been subjected to adverse action for exercising her workplace rights. University College and the individual respondents are defending the claim.

Although the claim is only in its early stages at the Federal Court, it demonstrates that employees do not need to wait for amendments to State or Federal legislation in order to pursue the ability to work from home or address related disputes. You can see another example of the avenues available to employees here, where an employer did not have regard to the consequences of the refusal for the employee, and did not have sufficient evidence to establish that the refusal was based on reasonable business grounds.

As we previously reported, the Act was amended in 2023 to require a more robust process in responding to requests for flexible working arrangements and allowed employees to raise a dispute with the Fair Work Commission if their flexibility request was refused. In addition, the Act’s general protections regime continues to provide wide scope for employees to raise disputes about their employer’s conduct, including during their employment.

Model term considered by the Fair Work Commission

As discussed in our related article here, the Fair Work Commission is currently developing a ‘working from home’ clause for inclusion in the Clerks – Private Sector Award 2020.

The proposed new clause would apply to many administrative and clerical roles and once implemented, could be used as a model term for other Awards.

The Commission has been receiving submissions, evidence and proposed clauses from interested parties and granted an extension to 23 September 2025 for submissions and evidence in support of any response to a party’s proposed award variations. The Commission has listed the matter for further directions on 7 October 2025, following which there may be an update on the expected timing of a draft working from home clause and the Commission’s decision.

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Authored by:

George Haros, Partner
Emilia Norwood, Graduate