What a wonderful thing it must be to spend other people’s money? And the sound you can hear? They’re the alarm bells going off across the economy as the first local council in Australia signs an in-principle deal with the Australian Services Union for a four-day working week – at five-day prices.

What could possibly go wrong when a union and a bureaucracy negotiate with other people’s money? This is the case in Tasmania – as the City of Launceston tries to jump an economic chasm in one giant leap. Falling short has consequences: ratepayers will bear the bruises.

Not so, believes the council’s CEO Sam Johnson, who says the four-day-deal is a nationally significant step in modern workplace reform. It is, he says, ‘A bold and progressive proposal’ that will ‘deliver real benefits for our people as well as improved service delivery for the community we serve’. ‘Bold’ and ‘progressive’ may not be the words shouted when Launceston residents pick up the phone for a council ‘service’ on a Friday or Monday.

The deal allows Launceston Council employees to work ‘30.4 ordinary hours over four days for 100 per cent of their current five-day salaries and receive a range of improved wage, allowance and leave entitlements’. The ‘workers’ will vote on it in February. Reporting on the issue, the AFR quoted ACTU secretary Sally McManus saying, ‘Unions are fighting for shorter working hours to win back time for themselves and their families.’

McManus pitches work as evil and employers as villains. One can only assume her version of workplace nirvana is no work at all. The AFR also quotes the Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion at Work which says studies in Europe on four-day weeks had found ‘at worst no reduction in productivity’.

Logic tells us that it can only mean one thing: such workplaces are currently slacking off, taking five days to achieve what they can do in four. Any wonder productivity rates in Australia are at their lowest in years? In 2022-23, Labour productivity fell 3.7 per cent, the sharpest decline on record.

In response to Launceston’s latest brain snap, business leaders across Australia are calling it out – arguing productivity at work cannot increase, or even stay the same, if you work a day less for the same pay.

The Launceston Council argues it is losing workers to the private sector. But ask private industry which way the leakage is going and it’s a different story.  Take Exhibit A: a concrete business in regional Victoria which has struggled to retain truck drivers lured by the bigger bucks and better conditions offered by surrounding local councils to drive their rubbish trucks. In the Concrete v. Garbage Truck wages stand-off, the company believes council garbage trucks win every time. But after Launceston, it won’t be leakage from the private sector, it will be a mammoth flood.

It will be a case of All The Rivers Run unless private industry adopts the same four-day frolic. And therein lies the evergreen problem: commercial reality versus the socialist-inspired bottomless bucket of local, state and federal government budgets.

As the ACTU admits, Launceston is just the first bullet fired from a loaded gun now pointed at Australian boardrooms.

Once upon a time, the great thrill of private industry was the ability to own your destiny, to run your course, to make independent decisions to forge success. Who else could know your business better?

But these days, it is not only unions telling them what to do and how to do it; social enterprises and like-minded governments are aiding and abetting the browbeating of businesses into unproductive submission.

At unknown, but mammoth expense to taxpayers, the workplace religion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is running rampant down government corridors. Thousands of taxpayer-funded jobs are dedicated to honouring the socialist behemoth: one look at the DEI Strategy 2025-2028 of the Department of Infrastructure says plenty.

In times of economic trouble, a diligent government might consider trimming such bureaucratic fat born of ideology. Yet the high priestesses of this flimsy faith believe it their duty to fill every private workplace corridor with the same DEI theology.

For example, take the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, WGEA. It exists to make private companies comply with their gender ideals, and if they don’t, the consequences are potentially devastating. Public naming and shaming is just part of their toolkit.

This is the same WGEA that demands gender standards of private companies but not of itself. As Janet Albrechtsen reported in December, ‘three-quarters of its full-time continuing staff and more than 80 per cent of its top three levels of employee were women’. Perhaps on reporting day to WGEA, a workplace gender imbalance might be rectified by employees identifying as the other sex, or required gender, just for the day. Problem? Solution.

Of course, which genders the WGEA wants balanced is a question for another day. After all, there are 26 letters in the alphabet.

The DEI intrusion on workplaces is a not-so-funny joke and like most left-inspired dogma, is hypocrisy dense.

DEI relies on optics: what does the workplace ‘look’ like? The irony is this: discrimination law says you can’t judge on ‘looks’ such as sex, gender, race, religion and so on. Yet DEI requires – indeed demands – that people are judged on that basis, the very thing employers are supposed to ignore.

DEI also makes enormous assumptions.

It assumes diversity is achieved via appearances. The ABC is a great example of this – and yet its monocultural output provides a counterargument.

Equity is not equality – and the oft confused terms should be understood to sit at opposite ends of the political spectrum: equity being one of the great pillars of socialism.

And for the purpose of simplicity, inclusion can be better understood as the exclusion of all things male, pale and stale.

In Australia, inclusion also refers to workplace programs such as ‘Cultural Safety’. The Indigenous culture is the only one studied in these courses. Yet they are mandated in many workplaces – and worse – annual professional accreditation for anaesthetists, for example, relies on such courses being completed. In this case, it is overseen by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, which acknowledges its cultural safety training courses are based on Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu version of Australian history. Say no more.

Such ‘inclusion’ is as unnecessary as it is offensive to health professionals, who, when saving lives in a surgical environment don’t give a hoot about the colour of the patient’s skin or their preference for yarning circles. In that moment, their focus is purely on the toxicology, pharmacology and physiology of their patient. They respect all patients.

Yet with such regulatory powers in place, is there any wonder Australian bosses are scared into silence, submission and subordination to socially ‘inclusive’ policies.

For the sake of their survival, 2026 should be the year that businesses take back control of their beliefs and boardrooms.

They don’t need advice on how to run their companies from people who have never run their own firms, never taken a risk and turn green at the thought of independent thinking.

Let Launceston be a lesson – not just to ratepayers, but to shareholders too.

Companies need to speak now or forever hold their peace in the queue for a government four-day job at five-day rates.