What I thought was going to be an irritation turned out to be a source of admiration. Even inspiration.
At 5.15 am during the first sleep in my new apartment, I woke from a sound in the apartment above me. It was like a wardrobe door being slid along its rail four times, with a ten second pause between each lap.
That something this innocuous could generate enough volume to penetrate through a concrete floor seemed unlikely.
But there it was again the next morning. In fact, I hear it every day, at the exact time, to the minute, except for Sundays, when the mystery sound starts 15 minutes later.
It was possible, I considered, that someone lived above with an OCD affliction of which rising nervous tension in their body was soothed only by their hand rolling doors back and forth at 5.15 am, except for Sunday when the affliction demanded a 5.30 am kick-off.
Two things happened which made me reflect favourably on the sound. First, it helped me resolve a long-held ambition of getting up earlier. I’ve come to use it like a bedside alarm. And it’s proven just as reliable.
The second is that I discovered its actual source. It was not coming from the apartment above, but from below. There is a café on the ground floor. The sliding sound was the café’s owner sliding open large bifold glass doors to spill his café floor space out onto the pavement, creating this large indoor/outdoor seating area for his customers to drink coffee at tables.
I’ve discovered the café owner opens for business at 5.15 am Monday to Saturday, then indulges in a lazy sleep-in, and opens Sunday at 5.30 am.
It is not just him… There are four coffee shops nearby, and three of them open shortly after 5 am, catering to the beachside suburb’s early dog walkers, swimmers, kayakers, surfers, and tradesmen.
Most close around 4 pm, meaning their owners are doing 10.5 hours of work, six or seven days a week. The café owner in my apartment block does 74-hour weeks. Every week.
It is instructive to contrast this work ethic with the new Department of Finance Enterprise Agreement, recently approved by the Fair Work Commission.
Every section, indeed nearly every paragraph contains information that makes your eyes roll.
Let me start by listing the various categories of leave entitlements in the agreement. In the brackets beside the leave type, I list the maximum number of days off at full pay.
Annual Leave (20); Personal/carer’s leave (18); Long service leave (dependent on time served); Miscellaneous leave (by discretion)…
NAIDOC leave (1); Cultural leave (1); Paid parental leave (90); Stillbirth leave (10); Pregnancy loss (5); Premature birth leave (calculated from birth date to 37 weeks gestation)…
Compassionate leave (3); Bereavement leave (3); Emergency response leave (20); Defence reservist leave (20); Annual defence sick leave (45); Domestic violence leave (not capped, by discretion)…
Leave without pay (up to 30 days, unpaid); Purchased Additional Leave (up to 20 days, before tax money); Canberra public holidays (12); Annual Canberra public service close down between Christmas and New Year (3).
It is instructive to compare those leave entitlements with the café owner’s paid leave entitlements. I list them here: None.
Reading further into the enterprise agreement, you come across the range of ‘free’ supports that are provided. Here is a selection:
Time off to donate blood; Free influenza vaccinations; Leave to attend courts and tribunals; Employee First Nations cultural training; Diversity training; Lactation and breastfeeding support; Disaster support; Paid study leave ($7k per year)…
Motor vehicle allowance (if approved); Free counselling services (personal and professional), including for family members; Access to an ethics advisory service.
Once again, I compare these to the support entitlements of the café owner: None. And if they do take a break, then they must spend their own money to hire an extra set of hands for that time off.
In fairness to the public servants, perhaps with all these leave and support benefits the net result is a group of super motivated individuals bursting to get back to the office and preserve Australia’s national interests.
Well, we’ve learned over the last 12 months, partly from ALP ministers telling us so, that the consulting firms are now running Canberra. PWC, KPMG, etc.
The Minister for the public service, Katy Gallagher, even issued a dictum in October last year, preventing Departmental Secretaries from outsourcing public service ‘core work’ functions.
Think about how extraordinary that is. It is like the Australian Institution of Sport CEO writing to their pole vault scholarship holder to stop them from outsourcing pole vaulting.
With the consulting firms doing all the work, and very generous leave and support entitlements, what do you think was one major point of contention at the last enterprise negotiation?
That’s right: work from home. And on this matter, the unions representing the public service workers had a huge win. The government can no longer impose a general cap on the days spent working from home, so the starting point for any negotiation is 100 per cent of days at home. This is what the agreement says:
‘Finance will not impose caps on groups of Employees on the time that may be approved to work from home or remotely, with each request to be considered on its merits.’
I guess it makes sense. If the consulting firms are doing all the work and there are so many ways to take leave, is there any point in coming to work at all?
The obvious question to ask is whether once weekends, public holidays and the Canberra shutdown are taken into account, are there enough business days left for the public servants to exercise all their leave entitlements…?
Meanwhile, I know exactly what time the café owner will wake me up tomorrow, and it will be the same time as for the next 365 days.
Nick Hossack is a public policy consultant. He is former policy director at the Australian Bankers’ Association and former adviser to Prime Minister John Howard.
