A Jobless Carroll for Young Victorians

Some laws announce their costs. Victoria’s Work from Home Bill hides them.

As reported in the Herald Sun today and as a feature of my opinion piece in the same paper, HR Nicholls has modelled the impact of this Bill on Victorian hiring.

Put simply, if passed it will cost about 1,800 young Victorians their first job every year: more than 5,000 first jobs by the time the Government’s own review begins in 2030, and on our upper case as many as 13,000 a year.

The Government has produced no number of its own because presumably it never asked the question.

Our modelling is not plucked from the air; it is built on the most comprehensive study yet of early-career hiring.

In May, researchers at the London School of Economics and Oxford examined 243 million hires and 407 million job ads across four countries, including Australia, asking why youth hiring has collapsed since 2022, with entry-level hiring down 14 to 29 per cent even as senior hiring rose. The assumed culprit was AI but the data says otherwise.

AI and remote-work exposure strike almost the same occupations, and when tested jointly, the AI effect collapses to statistical insignificance while the remote-work effect survives every robustness test thrown at it. The paper’s title tells the story: The Broken Ladder.

The mechanism is one every employer understands, even if nobody in the Victorian Cabinet appears to have met one lately.

A first-jobber is hired as an investment, lower output now in exchange for the value created as they learn, and that investment depends on cheap supervision and learning by proximity, both of which remote work destroys.

So firms do not sack young people; they stop hiring them. One in every 33 job ads in exposed occupations has quietly lifted its experience bar beyond three years.

The study’s authors are not opponents of flexible work, and nor are we. Their conclusion is that the frictions are manageable through anchor days, structured onboarding and deliberate early-career development. That is precisely what this Bill confiscates.

Its refusal grounds are exhaustive, its onus is reversed so the employer must prove unreasonableness notice by notice, with no power to vary or suspend an arrangement once begun. Every practice the evidence recommends becomes something to be defended at a tribunal, item by item, in writing, within 21 days.

The Government understands this perfectly well; its own Bill says so.

Apprentices, trainees, graduates and employees on probation are excluded from the entitlement, which is a written admission that people learning a job need to be at the job. The admission expires the day probation ends, at which point the full entitlement vests and the learning is presumably complete.

This is the evidence on which HR Nicholls built its modelling, applying the study’s coefficients to Victorian hiring.

We would welcome the Government contesting our numbers. It would first need to produce some of its own, but don’t hold your breath: no modelling, no impact statement, no analysis of any kind, which for a world-first entitlement covering millions of workers is quite the oversight.

And the losses land in the state that can least absorb them, because Victoria is already the hardest place in Australia to do business.

It carries the heaviest state tax and compliance burden in the country, the mainland’s highest unemployment at 5.1 per cent, youth unemployment of 11.8 per cent and rising against 10.4 nationally, roughly 7,700 young Victorians unemployed purely because of the state they live in, and, alone among the states, fewer job ads than before the pandemic.

The new losses will never make a headline: someone allocating next year’s graduate program between Melbourne and Sydney simply notes that one city now adds a statutory work-from-home process and tribunal exposure on every refusal to that list and approves the application with an NSW postcode before the coffee cools.

So how has Victoria’s new Premier responded to this evidence? With the oldest trick in the Labor playbook.

Pass the Bill in August. Delay it until 1 July 2027, safely past the November election. Face the voters before anyone has felt what the law does.

A government that believed this law was good for Victorians would want them to feel its benefits before they vote; this one has decided Victorians should vote first and find out later.

The consultation was the same play run again, tick-a-box theatre from start to finish. We coordinated some of the nation’s peak employer bodies to write jointly to the Premier on 31 July asking that the Bill be withdrawn; almost a month later, that letter has not received a response.

Other business leaders were welcomed into the Premier’s office and were heard with great courtesy, after which the Bill emerged exactly as it went in. Nothing the regulated parties said changed a single clause; the only output was a new start date.

In Spring Street this is called consultation. Everywhere else it is called scheduling.

Ben Carroll introduced himself as neither Daniel Andrews nor Jacinta Allan, promising partnership with business. One month in, the claim does not survive.

Announce a world first for the cameras. Ignore the evidence. Call a meeting consultation. Hide the start date behind an election.

It is worth pausing on that phrase, world first: a jurisdiction is occasionally first because it is a pioneer, and rather more often because everyone else read the evidence and quietly declined.

This is not a new government. It is the old one, running the old plays, with the product unchanged. Only the spokesperson is new.

The Premier says he will consider anything sensible, and sensible is not difficult to describe. Drop the Bill.

Or, if he believes in it, let it commence on 1 September and submit it to the voters’ judgment in November. What is not sensible is passing a law in August, hiding it until July and asking for votes in between, while the modelling goes unanswered and the employers’ letter goes unacknowledged.

Dropping it would also be exactly what Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan would never have done. And the Premier did tell us he wasn’t them.