In which there's a WFH Groaning and a chance to sup on bromancer tears ...

 

As often happens, the pond warmed up for its herpetology studies by indulging in some of the light Bulwark reading that arrived in the pond's in box overnight ... as in Will Sommer's The Most Ridiculous MAGA Speech Ever Given, But this is what happens when Trump sticks an inexperienced blogger atop the Foreign Service.

Sublime. Then followed the team effort, Rake-Stepping Through the Trade War, The president’s plan is apparently just to improvise new tariffs until ... what?

There were tales of RFK Jr. and a 'behind the paywall' questioning of John Roberts ...

By the end of the session, the pond was reassured that nothing the down under reptiles could toss at the pond would match the current absurdity of US politics, and so it came to pass, because the reptiles are deep in gloom, and the best the digital edition could do was rustle up a hip-pocket war, and attempt a little mischief between comrades Albo and Tanya ...

Over on the extreme far right, ancient Troy explained the reason for the deep reptile gloom ...

The pond was tempted to indulge ancient Troy's offering ...

Dutton and his team are not ready for prime time
The Coalition campaign has been beset by ill-discipline, half-baked policies, backflips, ideological confusion and a weak team.
By Troy Bramston
Senior Writer

Dear sweet long absent lord, no wonder Troy fell to the Greeks ...

But the pond had other fish to fry, what with Dame Groan out and about, and ancient Troy, with his bromides, helping put the bromancer in a deep funk. How could the pond resist the chance to sup on bromancer tears?

To begin with the groaning, Dame Groan was deeply unhappy, and while doubters might wonder if she's ever happy, what she was offering was simply "what is totally right for me, is not at all right for thee" ...

Bungled WFH debate one of the big missed opportunities of this campaign, Personally, I’m a big fan of WFH. But even if the technology had been available, I can’t imagine working from home early in my working life. I needed to be around my colleagues, to work in teams, to seek feedback.

The Groaning began with a snap ...Senator Jane Hume during the additional Budget Estimates 2024-25. Picture: Martin Ollman

The pond did wonder if that was the Jane that featured in a recent infallible Pope ...

Never mind, on with the Groaner explaining how it was absolutely right for her, but certainly not for thee ...

Working from home has surprisingly emerged as an election issue. Earlier this year, the Coalition announced full-time public servants would be expected to return to the office five days a week, although some exceptions would be made.
The Coalition has now executed a complete policy U-turn, walking back from the requirement that public servants attend the office five days per week. Hume now claims “many professional men and women in the commonwealth public service are benefiting from flexible working arrangements, including working from home, which allow them to make valuable contributions to serving Australians.”
The ban on WFH didn’t last long for several reasons. First was its seeming political unpopularity. Coupled with the misleading impression given by the Coalition’s political opponents that a ban on WFH would apply across the workforce, the tide quickly turned on the issue. Finally, much was made of the impracticality of changing the WFH rules that apply to commonwealth public servants in the short term. The Labor government has entered into generous enterprise agreements covering federal public servants providing close to unlimited access to working from home for all public servants. Permitting WFH is the default option for managers; requests can only be denied for legitimate and verifiable reasons. These agreements don’t end until 2027.

According to opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume, “this is commonsense policy that will instil a culture that focuses on the dignity of serving the public, a service that relies on the public to fund it, and a service that respects that funding by ensuring they are as productive as possible”.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with a 'picure' of their fearless leader, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in Brisbane. Picure: Richard Dobson

Again the pond was reminded of a recent infallible Pope ...

Sorry, that really belongs later, with the bromancer, but it's part of the pond's strategy of delaying the moment when Dame Groan explains how WFH is perfectly right for her, but absolutely not for thee ...

What should be made of this clumsy Coalition policy fiasco? After all, there are plenty of people who don’t approve of unlimited WFH entitlements. Additionally, most workers have to attend work in person. Some may feel resentful of the flexibility offered to some workers but not others.
There is a common perception that at least some workers who work from home are either having a lend of the system or, at minimum, getting an easy ride relative to other workers.
These were sentiments that the Coalition could have tapped into.
It’s worth looking at the figures. Pre-Covid, working from home was rare – and this was notwithstanding technological advances that made WFH possible. In the 2016 Census, only 2 per cent of workers worked from home on the record date. The percentage is now close to one-third of workers working at least one day per week from home. Mondays and Fridays are the most WFH days.
When it comes to the public service, this proportion is closer to two-thirds. There are some government agencies in which the vast majority of workers never front up at the office at all.
What do the economic studies tell us about WFH? What are the benefits and what are the costs? What do the studies tell us about the conditions that can make WFH a success? What is the impact on productivity? The first thing to say is remote work is only suitable for certain jobs – clerical, administrative, professional and managerial. Another important consideration is the scope (and cost) of monitoring the performance of work when undertaken away from the office.
There are some jobs where this is relatively easy but it’s more difficult where the output of workers is variable and the standard is an important variable. Devising policy advice for governments sits uneasily with working from home because of the degree of teamwork that’s involved, as well as the quality. WFH works best for routine, unchanging tasks where output is cheap and easy to monitor. But where mentoring, teamwork and quality are important, there are some significant weaknesses. Promotion prospects of those working almost entirely from home may be significantly impacted.

The reptiles decided it was the right moment to offer an AV distraction ... Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has slammed Opposition Leader Peter Dutton for his hypocrisy over work-from-home policies. The Opposition Leader abandoned his push to force public servants back into the office following public backlash. “[Peter Dutton] was on radio telling everyone that when he becomes prime minister, he wants to live in a mansion on Sydney Harbour,” Mr Marles said. “You might think starting an election campaign by announcing which mansion you would prefer to live in is the height of arrogance. “You might also think that doing it in the very same week which you're ending working from home is so out of touch. “And you would be right. But this is Peter Dutton.”

That sounded like an unseemly free kick for Marles, so Dame Groan resorted to some studies to explain why WFH was astonishingly right for her, but appallingly wrong for thee ...

There are many studies on the issue, most poor quality. One conclusion that stands out is the popularity of WFH among workers. Many have a deep appreciation for the WFH option, including avoiding daily commutes. Others value the flexibility of being able to plan the day better, even if it involves some “out of hours” work. Women workers in particular place a high valuation on WFH.
The gold standard studies have been undertaken by Nicholas Bloom and his colleagues at Stanford University. They have been able to conduct a number of randomised control trials involving large workplaces in China. (The fact these workplaces are in China may affect the results to the extent that the workers are generally more compliant than in other countries.)
In a recent study, they looked at workers undertaking hybrid work – some days at home, others in the office. They were compared with workers who worked only from the office. They found job satisfaction improved among the hybrid workers and quit rates were lower by one-third. “The reduction in quit rates was significant for non-managers, female employees and those with long commutes.” There was no obvious impact on promotion rates or productivity. Separate research by Bloom, however, found “people who worked from home full-time were about 10 per cent less productive than their fully in-office peers, due to challenges with communication, mentoring, workplace culture and self-motivation”. Another interesting Bloom finding is that the productivity impact of WFH is improved when managers have the discretion to choose who gets to work from home.
Considering the Australian case, the potentially positive impact of WFH on productivity is uncompelling. Over the very same time that the prevalence of WFH took off, productivity growth began to falter. The current level of productivity is the same as 2016. There are a number of factors that explain this outcome, but it’s hard to see how the shift to WFH has added to productivity.

Uncompelling? It's not a word the pond feels compelled to use, though perhaps it could be deployed to describe the next AV distraction, featuring the Ughmann, Sky News Political Contributor Chris Uhlmann discusses the “deeper issue” behind the Coalition backing away from its work-from-home policy. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton on Monday abandoned his push to force public servants back into the office following public backlash. “How could you get that so catastrophically wrong? ... That has cost them time and cost them skin,” Mr Uhlmann said.

Deeper issue? If that's deep, give the pond the back of a cereal box to read ...

So much reptile gloom, so much unhappiness, and so finally to why WFH is compellingly right for Dame Groan, but intrinsically wrong for thee ...

Personally, I’m a big fan of WFH. I can be in my study or sitting at a chaotic kitchen table surrounded by grandchildren. I can even be in a tent in Wadi Rum. It doesn’t really matter where I am, I can generally belt out a column and file.
But that’s me. And I have had a long professional career leading up to this point. Even if the technology had been available, I can’t imagine working from home early in my working life. I needed to be around my colleagues, to work in teams, to seek feedback. It’s inconceivable that I could’ve progressed if I’d been sitting at home in my PJs working on a screen all day. For the life of me, I can’t see how I could have performed well if my children had been running around doing who knows what. I would still have needed childcare.
Had the Coalition explained its policy better, it might’ve stood a chance, although nuance would have helped. But as long as the labour market remains tight, the WFH phenomenon is here to stay.

In short, and in essence, a long winded exercise that was deeply uncompelling.

The pond almost felt compelled to look for entertainment elsewhere, what with the FT offering EU issues US-bound staff with burner phones over spying fears, European Commission officials heading to IMF and World Bank spring meetings advised to travel with basic devices

It's over,  it's burner phone time for any wary traveller, and speaking of it being over, the cawing Crowe, once a lizard Oz reptile, offered bad news in another place, We thought Trump was dragging down Peter Dutton. Now we know why (archive link):

...Every day, it seems, even more Australians regard Trump as a threat to the country. Only 40 per cent of voters said his election as president was bad for Australia when we asked the question after his victory in November, but that rose to 60 per cent in March and now stands at 68 per cent.
This might have helped Dutton if he had responded differently. Early in the Trump presidency, 34 per cent of respondents said the opposition leader was the best leader to deal with Trump, while only 18 per cent said the same for the prime minister.
This was seen at the time as a verdict on Dutton’s strength when he was accusing Albanese of being weak. The Labor theory, however, was that this merely showed that many Australians thought Dutton was more likely to get along with Trump because he was more like Trump.
In other words, what seemed like a positive for Dutton quickly turned into a negative once Trump’s tariffs took effect on the global economy.
There is no cut-and-dried line between conservatives and progressives on these findings. A clear majority of Coalition voters – 58 per cent – say Trump is bad for Australia. The Trump cheer squad is now a very small club.
This explains how the Trump effect drags down Dutton. It extends across political lines because Trump is so deeply unpopular. The Resolve Political Monitor finds that 35 per cent of undecided voters are less likely to vote for Dutton because of Trump, and 36 per cent of voters in marginal seats say the same.

Cue the bromancer, wailing and whining and moping, and in the process running up the white flag. Please join the pond in supping on his tears ...

For those not into reading the small print:

The header: This is the worst election campaign I’ve ever seen, This is a government that plainly deserves to lose against an opposition that plainly doesn’t deserve to win. Here are two once proud teams playing the worst game ever seen to decide the wooden spoon.

The caption for a splendid piece of colouring in: This election? A lot of talk, about nothing much.

The mystical injunction: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

Dame Groan having already offered a lot of talk about nothing much, it was the bromancer's turn ...

Is this the worst election campaign we’ve ever had? A government that plainly deserves to lose against an opposition that plainly doesn’t deserve to win?
I feel like WH Auden sitting in a bar at the end of the 1930s: “As the clever hopes expire of a low, dishonest decade.”
Out in the real world, terrible things are happening. Australia’s circumstances are being transformed in fundamental and dangerous ways: the relentless militarisation of China, the downgrading of alliances by the US, the threatened implosion of the global trading system. Internally we face chronic problems that could easily, and soon, become crises – chronic debt and deficit; woeful productivity; no credible path to hi-tech; an incentive-sapping tax system; every discouragement to invest; crippling energy costs; ludicrous government and union costs; increasing bureaucracy, complexity and difficulty in doing business.
Now comes another report showing a calamitous collapse in the standards of basic mathematics taught at schools (and this after eye-watering sums of money spent on education).

Has the extremity of the election turned the bro Auden gay? 

Best not dwell on that, best turn to an interrupting snap, Anthony Albanese. Picture: Pool/Getty Images

At this point the bromancer turned to military matters, as you'd expect of our very own Reichsmarschall des Großaustralisch Reiches ...

Our bizarre election campaign exists in a kind of parallel universe. It embodies crude, fiscally irresponsible electoral bribery combined with focus group-driven, drooling nonsense about whether we can “work” three days a week from home or four, or punishing supermarkets for making profits.
Here are two once proud teams playing the worst game ever seen to decide the wooden spoon.
Of the two campaigns, Albanese’s has been by far the slicker, and also the more dishonest. A height of extreme absurdity was reached by Defence Minister, Richard Marles, demanding shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie, a former SAS officer, stand down because seven years ago Hastie commented that: “The DNA of a close combat unit is best preserved if it is exclusively male.”
The idea of Marles demeaning Hastie’s fitness to serve, after Hastie repeatedly put his life on the line for Australia in Afghanistan, is contemptible. It helps, I suppose, to distract from Labor’s monumental failure in defence, such that our military capabilities are weaker now than when Albanese came to office.
But the Liberals enabled the Marles attack by disendorsing a Liberal candidate who had also opposed the inclusion of women in army close combat roles. The Liberals now say there were other problems with that candidate. But to disendorse him ostensibly for opposing women in army close combat roles is exactly the sort of foolish, cowardly avoidance of controversy that drives voters to fringe parties.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap of a villain and a bromancer hero, Richard Marles. Picture: David Geraghty/NewsWire, Andrew Hastie. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire ...

Inspired by that hastie pastie sighting, the bromancer stayed on the attack ...

For everyone knows in reality that Hastie is right. It’s absurd to suggest that women should serve in close combat roles in infantry or special forces. It’s against common sense, against biological reality and it’s also wrong in principle.
Women serve courageously in many other combat roles and are welcomed in them; occupations such as fighter aircraft pilots, surface warfare officers on ships, submariners and many other such jobs. Women are as courageous as men, and in these roles perfectly competent. But close combat is entirely different. People should read the medal citations for our VC winners to see how gruesome, bloody and violent it is. Moreover, the physical standards for such units are derived from what the strongest, fittest couple of per cent of men can possibly achieve. To admit women in any numbers means radically diminishing those standards and thus compromising combat capability.
Anyone who thinks women should serve in close combat units such as the SAS should explain why we don’t have integrated teams – men and women in the same team – in rugby league or Aussie rules. Or why we don’t have integrated boxing rings. It’s just ideology versus reality, yet again.

Don't get the pond wrong. It would much prefer that the bromancer tossed aside his civvies and led from the front and showed womyn what for and how a real man fought, but the pond couldn't help but notice how the reptiles had perversely parked a piece from Parker uncomfortably close to the bromancer's ... and it seemed to give his stiff upper lip a bit of a pummelling.

Pummel away Parker:

Yes, women do belong in frontline combat roles

Australia faces the real prospect of conflict in our region. Faux culture wars such as this serve only to distract from the serious task of preparing our defence force for the challenges ahead.
By Jennifer Parker

Stripped of snaps and AV distractions, this was the nub of it:

The Ukraine war has been called the bloodiest conflict since World War II. As of July 2024, 10,000 women were serving in frontline combat roles. Try telling them – from the safety of an Australian lounge room – they don’t belong there. But that’s exactly what the now disendorsed Liberal candidate for Whitlam, Benjamin Britton, did last week when he doubled down on his claim that women didn’t belong in combat.
The idea of women in combat is not new – it dates back centuries. That this topic has re-entered mainstream political debate is dangerous and damaging. It risks undermining the morale of our defence force and stoking a culture war at precisely the moment when we should be focused on enhancing capability.
National security is a bipartisan priority, with both sides acknowledging the strategic uncertainty Australia faces – war in Europe, instability in the Middle East and China’s assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific.
Yet instead of strengthening our defence capability, recent political discourse risks undermining it. The resurfacing of comments from Britton – calling for the removal of women from combat roles to “fix the military” – and a 2018 interview in which opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie claimed the “fighting DNA” of close combat units was “best preserved when exclusively male” do exactly that.
It’s important to clarify what combat roles actually entail. These are positions that engage directly with enemy forces – traditionally found on warships, in fighter aircraft and on the battlefield. But as the character of war has evolved across the five domains – land, sea, air, cyber and space – so too has the nature of combat. The lines are increasingly blurred, exemplified by growing recognition of drone operators as combat roles. Today, defining a combat role is far less clear-cut than it once was. Which only reinforces how ludicrous it is to exclude 50 per cent of the Australian population from these roles.
Australia’s journey towards fully integrating women has been a long one. Women have proudly supported Australian military operations since the Boer War in 1899. In 1990, the chief of navy lifted restrictions on women serving at sea, with Royal Australian Navy women deploying in frontline roles during the Gulf War aboard HMAS Westralia. By 1998, the navy allowed women to serve on submarines.
In 1992, most Australian Defence Force roles were opened to women, with only a few exceptions remaining – clearance divers, combat engineers, infantry, artillery, airfield defence and special forces.
In 1992 the Royal Australian Air Force opened fighter pilot roles to women, though uptake has been slow because of cultural barriers rather than capability. Yet even before that, in 1990, female RAAF pilots were already flying C-130s in combat-related roles, and by 2000 women were serving as navigators in Australia’s F-111 strike aircraft.
While admittedly the nature of conflict across the domains is different, these are combat roles where women’s lives are on the line and the sacrifices are just as real.
The journey towards the inclusion of women in land combat roles in Australia has been slower. While ADF women have made key contributions to peacekeeping missions since the 1990s, it wasn’t until 2011 that the formal ban on women serving in land combat roles was lifted – extended to special forces roles in 2014.
This was despite the first woman earning her commando green beret as early as 1981 and women serving as combat medics alongside special forces in Afghanistan before the policy change.
But what of Britton’s specific comments? Setting aside his apparent misunderstanding of the broad range of combat roles, he expressed concern about “women’s hips”.
It’s true that studies in Australia and Britain have found that body armour designed for men can have adverse physical impacts on women. But these same studies conclude that such issues can be resolved through improved design. It’s not a reduction in protection, just a redesign to fit the body it’s intended for.
And what about the success rates of women in these physically arduous roles? In 2018, the director of workforce strategy for the army told a parliamentary committee that attrition rates for women in combat roles were broadly the same as those for men.
Likewise, the proportion of applicants, male and female, who fail to meet the physical employment standards for these roles shows no significant gender difference.
As for the so-called fighting DNA of close combat units – I’ve never served in land combat – it’s an experience that deserves the respect of a grateful nation. But based on my operational experience, from service at sea during the second Gulf War to chasing armed drug smugglers in the Caribbean, I can say this: the fighting DNA of a warship is strengthened, not weakened, by diversity of all kinds – including gender.
Australia faces the real prospect of conflict in our region. Faux culture wars such as this serve only to distract from the serious task of preparing our defence force for the challenges ahead.
Jennifer Parker is an adjunct fellow in naval studies at UNSW Canberra.

Phew, was that the reason that the bromancer slipped in the line I may be wrong about all this. Good people can disagree?

See that line in context, see the bromancer in deep confusion and despair ...

None of this is even to approach the deeper questions of equality but differences of men and women, and the need to educate men in the obligations of special courtesy and protection they owe to women. Very few armies have women in close combat roles. The Israelis tried it, and reversed course.
However, I may be wrong about all this. Good people can disagree. But by fixing on this issue as the public reason to disendorse a candidate, the Liberals declared such perfectly mainstream opinions effectively forbidden. They made the Marles attack inevitable. It’s one thing to avoid needless culture wars. It’s another to have no sense of your own identity. No wonder the One Nation vote has risen as the Coalition’s vote has sagged, for there’s very little policy difference between government and opposition in this depressingly low-rent campaign.

Quick, time for an AV distraction, Political Reporters Rhiannon Down and Jack Quail are on the campaign trail this week in the lead up to the 2025 Election.

That didn't help the bromancer, who kept on being deeply confused ...

Marles also accused Hastie of being in hiding. That’s unfair, but it’s astonishing that a failing opposition has made no national use of Hastie. What’s going on? 

Yes, it's deeply unfair to say the pastie Hastie is in hiding, and yet the hastie pastie is in deep hiding, and what's going on?

The full autumn of the bromancer's discontent kept flowing from his keyboard ...

This is a weak opposition frontbench (matched against a pretty weak cabinet, it must be said) and the opposition brains trust has decided to hide what talent and substance it has.
There’s the continued mystery of why we don’t have an opposition defence policy yet. Shadow cabinet has considered various defence spending targets as a percentage of GDP – 2.25 per cent, 2.5 per cent, 2.75 per cent and 3 per cent, achieved over different time frames.
It’s internally divided, partly because some shadow ministers believe Defence spends money too inefficiently to be given any more. Which is surely about the most defeatist, doleful and impotent response to a national crisis ever recorded in the annals of Western politics.
If the opposition believes defence is important, it should have been campaigning on its policy weeks ago. Releasing it at one minute to midnight shows you don’t really believe in it.
The opposition has been tactically a mess. Why introduce reforms to work from home if you’re going to run away from them at the first whiff of grapeshot?

By golly, did the bromancer just retreat into Napoleonic, or perhaps Carlyle delusion? Was he calling out the Duttonator and his troops as cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Was there no-one up to his own brave Napoleonic standard?

How unhappy was the Napoleonic bromancer ...

In a campaign where Dutton is trailing, desperately struggling to communicate any message at all, why hold the campaign launch, replete with a new set of electoral bribes, on the same day Albanese holds his launch with a competing set of electoral bribes?

Oh the pond has a few cartoons for that ...

The bromancer was so low, so down, experiencing such a bummer, that the reptiles wheeled out a snap of the only person who could buck him up ...the object of his long-held bromance, his beloved onion munching Tony Abbott.

Oh surely that would put a little mustard in the old digger's step ...

Sadly, it didn't work, all it did was remind the bromancer of what had been had been forgotten, of glorious victories long lost in the mists of time ... of comrades long departed from the field of battle ,...

The last time the Liberals won from opposition was in 2013. Tony Abbott had strong messages, communicated in clear, headline-like slogans: stop the boats; scrap the tax; fix the budget. All memorable lines that told the electorate what Abbott planned to do. He won a landslide victory. Can anyone nominate a single memorable line, a single moment of cut-through, from the opposition in this campaign?

Such despair, and yet there have been many memorable lines, celebrated by many a 'toon ...

Nothing pleased the bromancer, nothing placated him. His war on China was slip sliding away, off into the distance, with even Xmas now just an outside chance ...

Our external environment is changing dangerously and profoundly, the defence challenge is immense but doable if we’re serious about it. Yet as of writing there is no intention to hold Foreign Minister versus shadow minister or Defence Minister versus shadow minister debates. It’s easy to see why the government, with its dismal record, wouldn’t want such debates. But why isn’t the opposition demanding them? These issues may not figure in focus groups, but they’re hugely consequential for the national interest.
The lack of such debates is not the least way the nation is being failed by the faux-clever hopes of this low, dishonest campaign.

Cheer up bromancer, there's always hope on struggle street, at least if the immortal Rowe is any guide ...