Let me save you the suspense. If your job can be done from a laptop and an internet connection, there is no good reason you should be commuting into an office during a fuel shock like this.
We already ran the biggest accidental experiment in remote work anyone could have asked for. It worked. The world did not end. Companies did not collapse. Projects still shipped, meetings still happened, and the entire knowledge economy did not spontaneously burst into flames because people were working from spare bedrooms instead of beige carpet boxes in the CBD.
And before someone rolls out the usual line that COVID was different, yes, it was. It was worse. Schools were disrupted. People were isolated. Everyone was stressed out of their minds. We were doing remote work under miserable conditions and it still held together.
This time nobody is asking you to lock yourself indoors. The ask is much simpler. If your job can be done from home, do it from home, because burning expensive fuel so you can sit in an office and wear headphones all day is idiotic.
The cost of pretending
The fuel side of this is not theoretical anymore. ABC reported on March 7 that the war in the Middle East halted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint that moves roughly 20 per cent of the world’s crude supplies. By March 10, the national weekly regional petrol average had already jumped 16.6 cents a litre in a single week. By March 12, diesel in some regional areas had risen by as much as 70 cents a litre since the war began on February 28.
Australia is not exactly sitting on a giant safety cushion either. The ABC reported that as of March 3, Australia’s strategic reserve stood at 36 days of petrol, 32 days of diesel, and 29 days of jet fuel. That is not the kind of number that fills you with confidence when millions of people are still being told to burn fuel on unnecessary commutes.
And oil does not just go into your car. It goes into freight. It goes into logistics. It goes into everything that moves from one place to another, which is almost everything you buy. The National Farmers’ Federation warned on March 12 that regional fuel pressure could quickly become a food and animal welfare issue. That is the part a lot of executives seem determined to ignore. Every pointless commute is not just a private cost, it is a dumb use of a strained resource.
The headphones test
Here is the question nobody in management wants to answer honestly. If employees are sitting in the office wearing noise-cancelling headphones all day, what exactly is the office doing for them?
You drag people in for collaboration and culture. They show up, put on headphones, open Slack, join Zoom calls with people in other suburbs, states, or countries, and spend half the day trying to block out the open-plan circus around them. That is not collaboration. That is commuting with extra friction.
For some people it is a 40-minute trip. For others it is an hour. For plenty of people it is worse. I would be looking at a stupid commute if I had to do it regularly. That is hours a week gone, plus fuel, plus wear on the car, plus parking, plus all the little costs that add up because somebody higher up the org chart thinks seeing bodies in chairs is the same thing as productivity.
And for what? To sit in a different building and do the same work on the same laptop.
The people fighting against you
The most irritating part of this whole conversation is how predictable the pushback has been.
The Business Council of Australia’s Bran Black said this week that work from home should generally be negotiated between employers and employees, and that if people can sensibly use public transport and support small businesses, they should do that. That sounds reasonable until you remember what is actually being asked here. Nobody is saying abolish offices forever and weld the doors shut. The point is that when fuel is surging, even the Productivity Commission says around 35 per cent of jobs are amenable to working from home. Those workers should not be forced onto trains, buses, toll roads, and petrol bowsers just to preserve the illusion that old management habits still make sense.
Then you get the other dodge, which is executives pointing out that retail staff, warehouse workers, tradies, nurses, and countless other workers cannot do their jobs from home. Obviously. Nobody is asking a forklift driver to move pallets over Teams. That argument is a deliberate sidestep. The question has always been about desk workers, analysts, developers, designers, marketers, accountants, recruiters, and everyone else whose job is basically a laptop with tabs open.
The refusal to answer that actual question is telling. They know plenty of office work can be done remotely. They just hate what admitting that would mean.
Other countries actually acted
This is not some fringe theory cooked up by people who never leave the house. Governments in other countries have already treated flexible work as a fuel conservation measure.
Thailand ordered public agencies and state enterprises to work from home where possible. Pakistan moved to a four-day work week for government employees and put 50 per cent of staff on rotating work from home arrangements. The Philippines shifted government offices to a temporary four-day work week, with some agencies pushing Friday into work-from-home arrangements.
That is what a practical response looks like. Fewer unnecessary trips means less fuel burned. Less fuel burned means less pressure on supply. This is not ideology. It is basic arithmetic.
The data has been screaming for years
The funny part is this is not even a leap of faith anymore. The evidence on flexible work has been stacking up for years, and the Australian data has not exactly been subtle.
The University of Sydney’s Business School wrote in April 2025 that research supports hybrid work with no loss of productivity and reduced traffic congestion. In the same analysis, 90 per cent of workers said flexibility had either improved their productivity or not changed it. CEDA found in April 2025 that working from home is saving the average Australian worker about $5,308 a year in commute time and costs. That matters a lot when fuel is climbing and everything else is already expensive.
And yet plenty of employers have gone the other direction anyway. Robert Half found in February 2025 that 39 per cent of Australian employers planned to mandate five days a week in the office for 2025, and that 84 per cent were influenced by what other businesses were doing. Read that again. A big chunk of the return-to-office push is basically copycat behaviour. Not evidence. Not output. Not results. Vibes. Office peer pressure for executives.
That is what makes this so maddening. Workers are getting hit with the bill for a management fashion trend.
Stop rewarding companies that push this garbage
If a company is publicly lobbying against flexibility during a fuel crunch, remember that the next time it wants your money.
I am not interested in giving extra cash to businesses whose leadership thinks workers should just absorb the cost of commuting because office attendance makes them feel better. If an executive wants to argue that desk workers should keep burning through expensive fuel to prop up office culture, CBD foot traffic, or somebody’s commercial real estate logic, they can wear the backlash that comes with it.
Vote with your wallet where you can. If a business makes it clear that your time, money, and sanity rank below its attachment to office rituals, believe it the first time.
This was always going to happen
Every time fuel gets expensive, the case for remote work gets stronger. Every time. The companies that kept flexibility were always going to be better positioned for a moment like this, because they are not forcing people to waste hours and money just to satisfy a managerial superstition.
And that is really what a lot of return-to-office policy is at this point, superstition. The office is treated like a sacred object. Put enough people inside it and somehow productivity, culture, mentorship, innovation, and economic growth will radiate from the carpet tiles. Meanwhile the real world keeps providing the same answer over and over again. A huge share of desk work can be done remotely. People save time and money doing it. Traffic drops. Fuel demand drops. And the work still gets done.
So yes, I am going to say it plainly. If your job can be done from home, your boss would rather you go broke commuting than admit working from home works. Because admitting it works means admitting a lot of office attendance was never necessary in the first place.
And that is the part they cannot stand.