I really don’t understand how some people can say it is becoming harder to live a happy and fulfilling life and that we are just cogs in a machine. For my part, I have never lived through a time more conducive to a life of satisfaction, happiness, and a civilised work-life balance. My fellow workers all feel the same, not that I see much of them these days, as I will explain later. As you know, I work as the outreach and stakeholder relations manager at the Department of Culture and Social Change, as forward- thinking a commonwealth department as you are likely to find in a month of Sundays. (Well, perhaps not ‘Sundays’. We try not to use that word here, as our Culture and Inclusive Language Division has advised us that it evokes the enslavement foisted onto us by organised religion and from which we are, only now, starting to break free.).

There are basically three major changes that have taken place in our work-life cycle that have contributed to my present contended and happy state. For a start, our working week has become much more flexible. We used to work from the office five days a week. Over time, however, it occurred to our far-sighted management team that this did not necessarily mean we were actually working at the office and that the contrary was more likely to be true. Being conscious of spending taxpayers’ money wisely, they came up with a brilliant plan that got rid of the natural tendency to do nothing at work. They developed the idea that if we worked, say, four days at the office and one day from home, then that was one day less when we would not be paid for not working. Also, we would probably be just as productive at home and certainly happier. This turned out to be true, so management decided that we would work at the office for a steadily decreasing number of days until we reached our current arrangement, where we do not work there at all. Hence, we are now not being paid for not working for the whole week which is an even greater saving. When this reform was subjected to rigorous research at the Whitlam Centre For Social Equity, it found that we were just as happy, if not happier, by not working at home than if were not working at work. And no more unproductive. For instance, I have made real progress with my paper on deleting from commonwealth legislation and regulations all references to ‘he’, ‘her’, ‘she’ and ‘him’, being all relics of a bygone colonial era, and replacing them with ‘they’. That itself will save the immense time wasted on choosing pronouns. There is even talk that I might be promoted to Head of a new division to re-name federal electorates after First Nations (although not called Head, of course, a disturbingly unfortunate authoritarian title).

Secondly, the all-important terms and conditions under which we do not work have been made far more liberal than they were under the wasted years of the Coalition. Here, a  momentous reform has been introduced to give us a month of gender transition leave so that we have a month to do all of those jobs ‘relating to’ transition, like appointments with psychiatrists, buying new clothes, dog obedience classes, getting tattoos and the like. That expression ‘relating to’ comes, by the way, from the wording of the epoch-making proposal for an indigenous Voice on matters ‘relating to’ Aboriginals. You may not know, but I can now reveal as the result of an investigation by the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Guardian, Four Corners, 7.30 and Media Watch, that the Solicitor-General has given a secret opinion, only slightly re-written by the Attorney-General, that as ‘relating to Aboriginals’ means everything, ‘relating to transition’ also means everything. You might think that this is over-generous, but I can tell you it is a fulltime job to fit transition leave into a busy day when you are not working and trying to balance all of the things you are not working on. There is, however, an aspect of it that has not yet been brought up to date. Those undergoing the tyranny of transition often want to transition back after trying it for a while and some then want to transition forward again, and so on, back and forth. There has to be some limit on it of course, but management says it will look favourably on up to ten periods of transition leave per person each year.

Thirdly, our holidays are now much better. We now have an extra week’s leave, 10 days of ceremonial/cultural leave, 10 days for religious and cultural leave, 10 days for Aboriginal cultural and ceremonial leave, 16 weeks parental leave, 20 days for gender affirmation, and one day for Invasion Day. I take them all, of course, as it ensures my mental health and preserves my work/life balance which is under serious challenge from my pivotal work on pronoun replacement.

Now you can see why I maintain that we live in a much better time than, say, the ancient Egyptians. But there is still one reform as yet unresolved. The holidays are all very well and we certainly deserve them, but as we never work at the office, they will all be taken in our private time at home when we are not working. In other words, how can generous benefits relieve you from the drudgery of the office when you never go there? So, we are now proposing that our entitlements should all be doubled, the original lot we would have had if we were working and a second lot to compensate us for missing out by not working when they fell due. We think the PM is sympathetic because when the head of our department put the suggestion to him, he detected a slight quivering of the prime ministerial lip.