But I recently took a trip from Sydney to Melbourne – and back – in one go and can confirm the low-cost, high-convenience EV dream is far from reality.

But many managers would also suspect that too much working from home also may be contributing to Australia’s post-pandemic productivity slump that is making it harder to tame Australia’s sticky 5.4 per cent rate of inflation.

The Productivity Commission’s new head, Danielle Wood, has suggested the precipitous fall in Australia’s measured labour productivity back to 2016 levels may be because of lower-productivity workers joining the workforce amid labour shortages and a near 50-year low 3.5 per cent jobless rate.

Yet, the Fair Work Commission’s first ruling on Labor’s new flexible work laws provides support for many managers’ lived experience in trying to improve productivity and respond to ever-changing market demand while not knowing whether their workers will turn up to the place of business on any given day.

It’s clearly much more difficult.

Labor’s Secure Jobs Better Pay Act gave workers an expanded right to request flexible work – including by location – on an expanded list of personal circumstances ranging from pregnancy, disability, caring responsibilities, age, to experiencing family and domestic violence.

Such requests can become industrial “disputes” that can be settled by an industrial umpire with no actual stake in the business.

In this case, a salary packaging adviser appealed against his company’s policy in support for hybrid working involving at least 40 per cent of time in the office.

Instead, the adviser insisted on working 100 per cent from home to care for his young son and to manage a health condition.

As well as dismissing the case based on the facts, a Fair Work Commissioner ruled there were “reasonable business grounds” for an employer to order employees to be in the office because of the training, cultural and productivity benefits of face-to-face interactions.

A face-to-face presence would facilitate coaching to improve the adviser’s below-benchmark productivity.

And it would more readily allow younger team members to access his experience.

Bear in mind that the whole debate about flexible work concerns white-collar workers, and working from home is a privilege not afforded to doctors, nurses, police and factory and blue-collar workers in general.

Work by the Commonwealth Bank suggests that working from home for more than a couple of days a week reduces office collaboration by a third.

The irony is that Australia has one of the world’s most rigid, overly regulated and prescriptive industrial relations frameworks, filled with hundreds of award rules and classifications dictating how businesses must run their workday operations including by only deploying labour at fixed times or else incur penalty rates of pay.

Even more ironic is that this framework once discouraged working from home by treating it as an occupational health and safety risk.

Some easing of these rigidities is undoubtedly a good thing.

And unlike asylum policy, it’s something our Government is entirely in control of.

Yet, since 2019, net migration has almost tripled.

The Conservative manifesto in that year said that Britain would welcome highly skilled workers, it’s true.

But it also said that “there will be fewer low-skilled migrants and overall numbers will come down”.

So why is net migration running at 606,000, the highest figure on record?

What happened to the promised rigour of an “Australian-style points based system”?

The answer is that Britain has, voluntarily, adopted an immigration regime far more liberal than anything it had before it left the EU.

The most obvious, glaring problem is the salary threshold economic migrants must meet to qualify for a work visa.

Astonishingly, this has been set at just £26,200 per year.

The Government is expected to announce an increase in this floor to £30,000, but even this would be well below the median full-time salary (£34,963).

And it would do nothing to close the back door built into the system: the shortage occupation list.

Intended to provide a smoothed route of entry for workers offering skills not readily available in the local labour market, this list is far too broad, and growing broader, extending well beyond doctors and nurses.

MakeUK, the manufacturers’ trade body, is lobbying for welders, lab technicians and sheet metal workers to be added.

Workers entering under this scheme can earn even less than the main threshold if they are paid just 80 per cent of the “going rate” for their industry, even if this is far below the national average.

Two-thirds of voters believe immigration is too high, yet Britain is stuck in a high migration system that the Whitehall machine is desperate to preserve.

The Treasury is incentivised to preserve high numbers to keep GDP going up, no matter what it means for those already here.

The Office for Budget Responsibility bakes high migration into its forecasts, making it impossible to lower numbers without falling foul of fiscal targets.

Universities issue tens of thousands of student visas for low-grade courses to bring in cash.

This is not the economy people voted for in 2016 or 2019.

High immigration of low-skilled workers is unfair, puts pressure on housing and public services and compresses the salaries of lower-paid wage earners.

To restore British workers’ economic status and dignity, we must raise the minimum salary, limit the shortage list and train more workers here.

Globalisation of labour markets is one of the major threats to the dignity of workers across the developed world.

“Across 40 years we have turned housing into a misery machine in Australia, and this is a stunning national fail,” he said.

“Almost certainly today … we have clicked over as a nation to housing prices being a new record high. They fell for a time as interest rates went up. We had a great experiment, terrible experiment over the past year with interest rates roaring up, and yet house prices went up. I used to think interest rates would do the trick — they won’t. We have to build.”

Mr Richardson said the problem was that “for 40 years we have had, ‘not in my backyard’, council by council decision, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, and after 40 years we haven’t built and when we do build, we attach all these conditions which make it incredibly expensive.”

He added, “I would love not to touch migration, but we have screwed this up so massively as a nation that we temporarily need to look at migration as part of this equation.”

The easiest way to temporarily ease migration numbers would be to cut back on record numbers of international students coming to the country, he argued.

“So we have now 725,000 students from the rest of the world studying in Australia — a year ago, that was 555,000,” he said.

“Yes, we sell education to the world and a lot of that we do well and some of it we don’t do as well, but it is a big part of the increase in the pressure at the moment and it is a relatively concentrated bit where we can make a change.”

Universities Australia, the sector’s peak lobby group, has argued international students fuel the nation’s prosperity and were worth $40 billion to the economy in 2019.

“The federal government needs to fund universities instead of insisting that they make money from foreign students to pay for the domestic students,” Mr Richardson said. “We can do this better.”

But he warned the “problem with 40 years of ‘not in my back yard’ is if we have perfect policies tomorrow … it’s going to take more than a decade to repair this”.

“That misery machine is not going to disappear,” he said.

“The bigger lever that we’ve got to do over time is to insist that local councils say yes to more, and the government is gently starting that process. It is up more to the states, but it has got to move and unless and until we do that, we need, I would say, students as the lever, pull back for a while.”

Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said he agreed with Mr Richardson that “we need to look at the student stuff”.

“I agree with that, it is a job of work which needs to be done,” he said.

And we have taken risks and developed the minerals that have enabled higher living standards across Australia and the world.

At their core, these are the first industries required to move humans above the most basic conditions.

Thanks to our primary industries and the many businesses they support, we live in one of the wealthiest countries that has ever existed, and Australians today have among the highest standards of living ever experienced by human beings.

The value of our agricultural and mining exports is astonishing.

Our agricultural exports are worth around $80 billion annually, our resources exports add another $470 billion.

Mining being the largest revenue producer, more than all other industries combined.

But what does this mean in tangible terms?

Each year, on average, each Australian farmer feeds 150 of their fellow countrymen and 450 of their allies overseas.

We export about 900 million tonnes of iron ore, our massive exports of thermal and metallurgical coal, now exceeding iron ore in value, lithium, and copper, nickel, rare earths, and uranium, which are vital for everything from agriculture and manufacturing equipment to medical equipment and electric vehicles, wind farms and more.

Federal taxation revenue from our mining companies alone for the last financial year more than covers the cost of salaries of all of Australia’s police, teachers and nurses.

There’s even more tax revenue for governments if state royalties and other state taxes are included.

You know, those taxes like payroll tax, stamp duty and licence fees, that were all to be abolished when GST came in.

More than a decade ago I asked the federal government to establish National Mining & Related Industries Day (22 November) and after that, National Agriculture & Related Industries Day, (21st November) so that Australians had an official day each year to celebrate these essential industries and consider: “what would my life look like without mining and agriculture?”

I was worried, and have become more worried, that we do not at times think about how we came to be so fortunate, and don’t seem to appreciate what should be common sense.

If we pile our primary industries with too many government burdens, we won’t be cost competitive internationally.

Such government costs also add to our own living costs and restrict our own standard of living.

Too often, our primary industries are not only denigrated, but we now face more government made problems than nature has ever thrown at us.

Staff are demoralised as they face the growing number of government regulations and approvals.

Once, after years of paper shuffling, they could see the light at the end of the tunnel – approvals being granted.

Now, with the mounting red tape, delays, and lack of decisions, they cannot.

To our governments, and those who wish to end the use of fossil fuels and stop the resources industry, I ask: which half?

We can produce more food, more efficiently, more cheaply, because of fossil fuels, steel, cement and plastics. The advance in human flourishing seen in the past 220 years was underpinned by the 1500-fold increase in the use of coal, oil, and gas.

Australia’s mining and agricultural industries are world leading.

Mining provides on average amongst the highest wages in the world.

Agriculture provides a lifestyle fantastic for bringing up children. We can be proud of both primary industries.

Yet our governments are not reducing or even simplifying their complicated tape, instead the opposite, loading on piles of new rules and regulations, with a huge increase in the EPBC Act alone, plus increasing net zero regulations.

And to make matters even worse, using taxpayers’ money to support lawfare and delay approvals even if finally awarded.

In addition to all this, despite a worker crisis, government policy and tape effectively prevents our own veterans, pensioners, university students, disabled, and non-violent non-dangerous prisoners from working as much as they would like to be able to improve their lives.

And, as has been reported widely, changing IR policy which will make it more difficult for agriculture, mining and many businesses to create the revenue our hugely in debt country needs.

If this scenario is not changed, our youth should understand we are creating a nightmare for them – that they will be struggling with high taxes for the rest of their lives.

Many will need to forget about the Aussie dream of owning their own home, as they won’t be able to afford such an investment after meeting government tax burdens.

Even in schools, governments have been content to not educate children and grandchildren well.

In the current high school national curriculum, which mandates what every school child in Australia is taught, iron ore is referenced only twice.

Yet climate change and renewable energy are mentioned 48 times.

Mining, coal, and iron ore do not receive even one mention in the entire high school economics and business curriculum!

Price – who is also a member at the prestigious Sorrento Golf Club – doubled down on those comments on Monday night during an appearance on The Project.

“I’m teed off about this! Sorry to use a golfing pun. I was genuine when I said if he’s allowed to become a member, I’m not going to play there,” he said.

“I couldn’t think of anything worse than spending four hours walking around a golf course with Dan Andrews I mean that would be my idea of torture.”

Project host Waleed Aly questioned “why is it a big deal” if the former premier was interested in joining the club but Mr Price said the uproar was deserved after his COVID-19 restrictions.

“It’s such a big deal because of what happened during COVID,” he said.

“We were stopped from playing, that area where that golf club is, was considered part of Melbourne even though it’s 100 km out of Melbourne so all the restrictions that applied in the city applied down there.”

Mr Price added it was “really sad” to think Mr Andrews would want to play on the Mornington Peninsula – famous for its golf courses – after he banned golf during the pandemic.

That is not a happy combination.

The board’s abrupt sacking of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, on Friday stunned Silicon Valley like few other events in recent decades.

The poster boy for the generative artificial intelligence revolution, who had done so much to popularise OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot as a breakout consumer service, was ejected by four other members of the oversight board in a video call.

Several other leading lights at OpenAI, including its president, Greg Brockman, quickly followed him out the door.

Much about the story — and exactly how it will end — remains mysterious.

The board may well have had good reasons to dismiss Altman for being less than “consistently candid” with his fellow directors.

Altman’s side hustle supporting the launch of an AI chip business certainly raised glaring concerns about possible conflicts of interest.

But the board was itself less than consistently candid in explaining its decision to OpenAI’s employees, investors and Microsoft, which has heavily backed the start-up.

More than 500 of OpenAI’s 770 employees on Monday signed an open letter calling for Altman to return and the board to resign, putting the company’s future into question.

It has certainly vaporised its chances of raising fresh money at anything like the $86bn valuation recently touted.

But the affair raises broader issues about how AI firms are governed. If, as its evangelists trumpet, AI is so transformative, its corporate champions and guardians must display exemplary integrity, transparency and competence.

To be sure, OpenAI has always been a strange corporate creation.

The research company was founded in 2015 as a not-for-profit outfit dedicated to developing AI safely for the benefit of humanity.

But so vast are the costs of developing leading-edge models that it is hard for any non-commercial enterprise to remain in that game for long.

The commercial tribe seemed dazzled by the possibilities unleashed by ChatGPT’s success and wanted to accelerate.

The safety tribe appeared to have won out over the weekend, but perhaps not for long.

The employee backlash could yet bring more twists.

What does this all mean for Microsoft? Its $13bn investment in OpenAI has clearly been jeopardised — though much of that commitment was in the form of computing resources, not yet drawn down.

Yet Microsoft seemed on Monday to have triumphed by hiring Altman and several top OpenAI researchers.

As Ben Thompson, author of the Stratechery newsletter, noted, Microsoft may in effect have “just acquired OpenAI for $0 and zero risk of an antitrust lawsuit”.

Baffled outsiders must hope that the AI safety institutes promised by the UK and US governments to scrutinise the leading companies’ frontier models are up and running soon.

The call was followed by an unannounced visit to Kyiv by US defence secretary Lloyd Austin and a senior general on Monday.

Austin reassured Ukrainian leaders of Washington’s “steadfast support” as they head into a difficult winter military campaign against Russian forces.

Announcing the leadership change during his evening address on Sunday, Zelenskyy said Major General Tetiana Ostashchenko’s dismissal and the need for a change within the military’s medical forces was “obvious”.

“This has been repeatedly discussed in society, in particular in the community of our combat medics — a fundamentally new level of medical support for our military is needed,” the president said.

Military medics told the Financial Times in October that poor quality supplies and lack of medical training were costing soldiers’ lives on the frontline, as Ukraine presses ahead with its sputtering counteroffensive meant to wrest back territory and deter increased Russian attacks in the country’s east. Cheap tourniquets, many made in China, have flooded Ukraine and made their way into soldiers’ first-aid kits, medics said.

While Ukraine does not disclose its casualty figures, the US estimates that about 130,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been injured and about 70,000 killed since President Vladimir Putin launched Russia’s invasion. Moscow’s military is believed to have lost roughly 120,000 troops, with another 280,000 wounded, according to US estimates.

Austin’s trip to Ukraine, accompanied by Gen Christopher Cavoli, head of the US military’s European Command and Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, was his second since the outbreak of conflict. Washington is Kyiv’s largest political and military backer, having provided more than $74bn of military assistance, humanitarian aid and financial support.

A package announced by Austin on this trip included additional air defence capabilities, artillery ammunition, anti-tank weapons and other equipment.

Zelenskyy called the meeting with the two “very productive”.

“Of course, we discussed the situation on the battlefield and its prospects — how we can enhance both our defence and our ability to advance,” Zelenskyy said, adding that he was grateful for the latest US military assistance. “In particular, there will be more artillery — shells that are needed right now.”

President Joe Biden has pledged to back Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invading forces “for as long as it takes”. But he faces challenges in Congress, where some Republican lawmakers oppose continued aid for Ukraine or want to place conditions on the assistance.

“We, along with our allies and partners, will continue to support Ukraine’s urgent battlefield needs and long-term defence requirements,” Austin said after meeting Zelenskyy.

Kyiv’s latest military shake-up came after Zelenskyy met newly appointed defence minister Rustem Umerov to discuss Ukraine’s military priorities, which would include prioritising high-quality tourniquets, better training, digitisation and clearer communication in line with Nato standards.

“There is simply no place for such problems as subpar tourniquets,” Umerov wrote on Facebook after his meeting with the president.

“There will not be much time to wait for results,” Zelenskyy said. “Changes need to be made quickly.”

Ostashchenko was replaced by Major General Anatoly Kazmirchuk, who heads Kyiv’s main military clinic. While Ostashchenko’s dismissal was largely met with approval from Ukrainian military medics, some questioned the appointment of Kazmirchuk.

His appointment, combat medic Rina Reznik wrote on the social media platform X, was “not a productive decision”.

“I wanted a charismatic leader as the commander of the medical forces,” she said. “But I hope the new commander will at least be careful in his decisions and actions and will rely on the [military medical] community.”

Ostashchenko’s removal came after media reports last week that she and two other military leaders could be fired. Independent news outlet Ukrainska Pravda reported that Umerov might decide to replace her, as well as Oleksandr Tarnavsky, the general leading Ukraine’s struggling southern counteroffensive, and Serhiy Naiev, a lieutenant-general and commander of the joint forces.

Umerov was tapped by Zelenskyy to lead and reform the defence ministry in September. His appointment followed a corruption scandal within the ministry over allegations that it was paying inflated prices for food and military jackets for the country’s soldiers.

In her most expansive remarks about wages since becoming governor, Ms Bullock warned that rapidly rising labour costs were posing a challenge to the central bank as it battled to get inflation back to its 2 to 3 per cent inflation target.

Annual wages growth hit a 14-year high of 4 per cent in the September quarter, as aged care employees and low-paid workers received large one-off wage rises due to decisions made by the Fair Work Commission.

While the Albanese government has celebrated the increase in nominal wages growth, Ms Bullock said it needed to be matched with an increase in productivity to keep inflationary pressures in check.

“But we haven’t had any productivity growth in Australia for a number of years,” Ms Bullock said during a panel discussion at a conference hosted by ASIC.

“Although wage rises of around about 4 per cent in a normal context of productivity growth aren’t necessarily inconsistent with our inflation target.

If we don’t have any productivity growth, they’re on the high side and they’re going to contribute to rises in costs.”

The 3.6 per cent decline in labour productivity over the past 12 months means unit labour costs – the difference between wages and productivity – are growing at a brisk 7.5 per cent.

“Members agreed that whether further tightening of monetary policy is required to ensure that inflation returns to target in a reasonable time frame would depend on how the incoming data alter the economic outlook and the evolving assessment of risks,” the minutes said.

The minutes noted that the RBA’s current economic outlook was predicated on one to two interest rate rises over coming quarters. This includes the November rate rise, and implies one more move may be required, which would take the cash rate to 4.6 per cent.

Echoing her predecessor Philip Lowe, Ms Bullock pushed back on a perception that high inflation was a product of supply-side developments in petrol prices, rents and energy.

“But actually there’s an underlying demand component to it as well, and that’s what the central banks are trying to get on top of.”

The minutes cited the strength in demand as one of the reasons the board opted to deliver its 13th cash rate increase earlier in the month.

“High inflation was being underpinned by above-average price rises for a wide range of consumer goods and services. There was clear evidence – most notably for services price inflation, which was quite brisk – that this owed to domestically generated pressures associated with aggregate demand exceeding aggregate supply.”

Ms Bullock said the key to stopping further falls in real wages was to restore low and stable inflation.