When a body like Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) — a public-sector institution charged with grappling Australia’s economic malaise — declares its staff now get eight “wellbeing days” a year without needing a reason, you know you’ve left the realm of public service and wandered into courtier-class delusion.
This gem emerged as part of the latest enterprise agreement signed off by the Fair Work Commission: staff earning up to about $101,800 get their usual 18-day personal leave bucket transformed — with eight of those days recast as “wellbeing leave”, no doctor’s note needed, no questions asked. On top of that — because why not — there’s also a 5 per cent pay rise baked in for the same group.
Stress, PDFs and Free Lunches
Let’s pause and consider what that actually means. These are well-paid administrators, economists and functionaries — the people who spend their days drafting memos, conjuring up regulations, issuing warnings about productivity shortfalls, and telling real workers that they need to tighten their belts to keep the economy stable.
Now they’re being told: “If the thought of another inter-departmental Zoom makes you feel anxious, don’t worry — take a day off.”
Meanwhile, out in the real Australia — the farms, the mines, the construction sites, the trucks rolling at dawn — people are busting their backs in heat, dust, diesel and danger. Real work. Sweat. Risk. Output. They don’t get “wellbeing leave.” They get pay slips, work rosters, and at best a weekday off if Union rules allow.
Yet in Canberra, the bureaucratic class has turned “stress” into an entitlement, and “wellbeing” into a perk.
Productivity: Pick A Target, Any Target
The timing of this little fringe benefit is particularly rich. Because at the same time the RBA is doling out wellbeing leave and raises, it is warning — loudly — about a collapse in national productivity. It has recently downgraded its forecast for growth in productivity to just 0.7 per cent per year, from 1 per cent.
Let me get this straight: the same organisation moaning about low productivity — the same economists telling farmers and miners to lift their game — is giving itself extra leave because “work is stressful”?
If you were running a private-sector business and introduced a new perk for staff every time productivity flagged, you’d soon find your firm bankrupt. But here, in the taxpayer-funded bubble, “wellbeing leave” is just another line item — a drop in the massive pool of public-sector largesse.
The Cost of A “Caring” State
Critics have already pointed out the absurdity of it all. Institute of Public Affairs senior fellow Adam Creighton notes that public-sector labour-productivity has dropped by some 9 per cent since 2022, even as sick-leave use remains well above private-sector norms.
And make no mistake: these “wellbeing days” don’t require a medical certificate, they don’t require a reasonable cause — they’re basically free leave days. That’s not welfare; that’s decadence.
All paid for by the wealth creators. The farmers waking at 4 am to drive tractors. The miners flying to the desert for 12-hour lines. The tradies working weekends. The small-business owners risking personal finance to keep the economy moving.
They, not Canberra’s cosy regulator class, are the ones actually producing value.
The Real Damage: Policies, Not Perks
Here’s the punchline. The RBA — and the broader public-service apparatus — isn’t just mismanaging its own entitlements. It’s using that cushioned existence to design and enforce wealth-destroying regulations, burden businesses, inflate compliance costs, and discourage production.
When you’re sitting in an air-conditioned office, sipping coffee and drafting memos on “climate compliance” or “corporate disclosures,” it’s easy to forget there’s a real economy out there. But there is — and every regulation, every delay, every extra approval process adds cost and uncertainty. Real costs. Real jobs lost. Real farmers shuttered. Real families struggling.
Yet the bureaucrats? They just hit “request leave,” tap “approved,” and keep churning out more rules.
Time to Benchmark the Bureaucracy
If the rest of Australia is supposed to work for their leave, output and taxes — it’s time the bureaucrats did too. Let their pay and benefits be benchmarked against the private sector: miners, farmers, construction workers, truck drivers. Let their output be measured in real economic value: growth, productivity, real wages, not number of pages in a policy document.
If productivity falls, their pay should stall. If they shut down a mine with red tape, their bonus should be revoked. If their wellbeing gets “stressed” by yet another committee meeting, maybe they should see what real stress looks like — a sunrise shift in 45-degree heat, or an empty silo after a dry harvest.
This isn’t about “caring for staff.” It’s about institutional self-indulgence.
Let the Real Workers Speak
So here’s a message from the salt-of-the-earth folks: enough. We built this country. We feed the cities. We dig the ore. We haul the grain. We sweat. We risk. We produce.
We’re not against fair wages or decent conditions. We’re against:
- A system where regulators pay themselves mining-sector wages for 7-hour workdays.
- A regime where “stress leave” is handed out like birthday cake, while real workers risk life and limb to earn those wages.
- A bureaucracy that drains the wealth created by the working nation — then turns around and lectures us about living within our means.
If Canberra really believed in “wellbeing,” it wouldn’t penalise a farmer for sowing a crop in a drought. It wouldn’t turn the water tap off and tell us to use less. It wouldn’t spend $billions on pointless committees about nothing.
It would backs its producers, not pamper its paper-pushers.
Because until they get that right, these wellbeing days aren’t about health — they’re about hubris.
