Victoria's work-from-home law just stalled. Do the work anyway

On Wednesday, Victorian employers were reading about the concessions they had won on the state’s work-from-home laws: 28 days to respond to a request instead of 21, and an obligation to cover only essential equipment like a laptop and software rather than a share of someone’s internet and power bills. The bill looked like it was going through.

On Thursday afternoon it went sideways. In the upper house, a motion to refer the bill to a parliamentary inquiry passed 18 votes to 17, led by Shooters, Fishers and Farmers MP Jeff Bourman with the coalition and crossbench behind it. Animal Justice MP Georgie Purcell, who voted for the referral, said the amendments were substantial and that members had not been given enough time to give them the consideration they deserved.

The inquiry has to report back by 20 October 2026. As SmartCompany reports, there is only one sitting week left before the 28 November state election, and Premier Ben Carroll has indicated Labor will not add another one to get the bill through. So the bill is delayed rather than dead, but it is not becoming law this term.

For the record, this is what it would have done: given eligible Victorian employees a legal right, not a request, to work from home two days a week, starting 1 July 2027 for employers with 15 or more staff and 1 January 2028 for everyone smaller.

Two dates just disappeared from your calendar

If you employ people in Victoria, nothing changes on Monday, and the 2027 and 2028 deadlines you may have quietly pencilled in are gone.

Worth being precise about what has not gone, though. The federal right to request flexible working arrangements already exists under the Fair Work Act, and it has teeth. Parents, carers, employees over 55, people with a disability, pregnant employees and people affected by family violence can all ask. You have 21 days to respond in writing, you have to discuss it and genuinely try to reach an agreement first, you can only refuse on reasonable business grounds, and the Fair Work Commission can arbitrate if you get it wrong.

So “can this job be done from somewhere other than the office?” is already a question you can be asked, and already a question you have to answer properly. The Victorian bill would have widened who could ask and removed your ability to say no. That is a real difference, and it is the part that just got parked.

The deadline was doing a job you should not have outsourced to Parliament

A compliance date is a useful thing. It puts a line in the calendar, it unlocks a budget, and it turns “we should really sort that out” into a project with a name.

Losing it is a genuine loss, and the honest risk now is not legal. It is that a stalled bill becomes a reason to stop, and the work quietly slides to the bottom of the list until the next government puts it back on the agenda. Because it will come back. Both major parties went into this week broadly accepting the principle, and the Shadow Attorney-General had said the coalition had no plans to change the legislation in government before voting to refer it.

But the deadline was never the reason to do this. It was just the prompt.

The actual test has nothing to do with the law

A work-from-home request is only a headache when the honest answer is “no, because the job needs someone sitting at that particular desk”. And most of the time, when that is the answer, it is not the job that requires the desk. It is where the information lives.

Five questions worth answering properly:

• Where do quotes come from? A spreadsheet on one machine, or a system anyone authorised can open and send from?
• Where does client history live? If the answer is “in Sharon’s inbox”, the business has a single point of failure with a mortgage and annual leave.
• How do bookings get taken? A paper diary or a shared calendar nobody can see remotely is a building-shaped constraint on a business that could otherwise run from anywhere.
• Can someone answer “what did we quote them in March?” without walking to a filing cabinet?
• What can exactly one person do? Not “what is one person best at”. What would simply stop.

None of those are compliance questions. They are the same questions we work through in an audit, and they are why connecting the tools you already have usually beats buying another one.

What we actually see when we look

We review Melbourne businesses every week, and the pattern is consistent enough to be boring. Established, well-reviewed operators, often twenty or thirty years in the same suburb, running a real business on an arrangement that only works when one specific person is in one specific place.

The recurring shapes, without naming anyone: a contact button that quietly sends enquiries to a domain the business does not own, so nothing arrives and nothing bounces. A business that owns a perfectly good domain but publishes a Bigpond or Gmail address, so the mail lives in a personal account rather than the business. A promotions page still advertising last summer’s offer, because the only person who can edit it is busy. Phone as the sole way in, which means the business is open when someone is standing next to the handset.

Not one of those is a work-from-home problem. They are all the same problem, which is that the business runs on physical and personal access rather than on a system. The WFH bill would have put a date on fixing it. The bill stalling does not make any of it less expensive, it just makes it invisible again. A dead enquiry path costs you the job whether or not anyone is working from the kitchen table.

The other bill this week makes the same point

While the Victorian bill was stalling, the federal government released draft legislation to ban non-compete clauses for workers earning under $190,100 a year, the current high-income threshold under the Fair Work Act, with consultation open until 2 October 2026. Co-worker non-solicitation and no-poach arrangements are in scope too.

For a lot of service businesses, the non-compete was doing a job a system should have been doing: stopping the business walking out the door with one person. If that clause goes, the protection has to come from somewhere, and it will not be a clause. It is client history in a CRM rather than in one head, processes written down, and quoting and follow-up that survive a resignation.

Two unrelated bills, one week, same lesson from opposite directions. Being dependent on a particular person in a particular place is a commercial risk, and it was a commercial risk before anyone tried to legislate about it.

Three things worth doing in the next month

Not an eighteen-month program. Three things, in order of how much they pay back.

1. Move one thing off one machine. Pick the single most important process that currently lives on a desktop, in a personal inbox, or in a drawer. Quotes are usually the right answer, because they are where the money is. Get it into something accessible from anywhere, with the history attached.
2. Fix the enquiry path and time it. Send yourself a test enquiry through every route a customer might use: the form, every email button, the phone. Confirm each one arrives. Then check how long a real reply takes, because the first five minutes decide the sale and most businesses take 42 hours. An enquiry path that only works from the office is not a WFH issue, it is a leak.
3. Write down what only one person can do. One page, one afternoon. You are not solving it yet, you are finding out whether you have a staffing plan or a hostage situation. This is the same exercise as asking what stops when a system goes down, pointed at people instead of software.

Each of those pays for itself on a normal Tuesday when nobody is working from home, which is rather the point.

The func.digital take

The useful thing about this week is the clarity. For about a month, “we have to sort this before July 2027” was a reason to modernise how a business runs. That reason evaporated on Thursday afternoon in a vote about procedure, which tells you it was never a very good reason.

The good reasons did not move. A business that can be run from anywhere is a business that keeps taking enquiries when someone is home with a sick kid, survives a resignation, can hire from a wider pool than a twenty-minute drive, and does not lose a job because the only person who knows what was quoted is on leave. That is worth doing on 12 September 2026, with or without a bill.

If you want a plain read on how much of your business depends on one person being at one desk, that is exactly what a free digital systems audit looks at: where your enquiries actually land, what only lives on one machine, and which of your processes would stop if someone did not come in tomorrow. No jargon, no hard sell.