



The rise of contract and casual work means a shorter working week and universal basic income should become serious policy options, the Green Institute says.

The institute’s report Can Less Work be More Fair? said the loss of permanent full-time jobs in areas as diverse as cleaning services and academia was making work highly precarious and increasing the divide between those who were overworked and those who were underemployed.

Tim Hollo, the Green Institute’s executive director, said he hoped the paper expanded the acceptable boundary of conversation for left-of-centre politics, as the Institute of Public Affairs and Sky’s Andrew Bolt did for free-market and right-wing politics.

He said the Green Institute “unambiguously” supported reducing working hours with no reduction in working conditions by exploiting technology to share work more evenly and reduce inequality.

“The Keynesian ideal of a 15-hour working week used to be uncontroversially positive. It should be again,” the paper says. “We need to reclaim the idea that, while work is important, while we should all contribute our abilities, ideas and skills, a prosperous society should not force the majority of its people to work immensely long hours in order to scrape by.”

The institute said it remained agnostic on whether universal basic income (UBI) – which would provide every resident with a regular and unconditional subsistence wage – would be appropriate in Australia.

“However, we believe a conversation on the idea, in the context of the need to grapple with the inevitability of less and less paid work in an ever more unstable world, is vital to our politics,” he said.

The paper’s contributors include left-of-centre economists and academics Jon Altman, Eva Cox, Elise Klein, Greg Marston, Godfrey Moase, Clare Ozich, Frank Stilwell, Louise Tarrant and Chris Twomey.

Klein, from the University of Melbourne, wrote that the idea of a universal basic income stretched back to Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516, and was carried by thinkers such as Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell.

Ben Spies-Butcher, from Macquarie University, said it could be part of a broader drive for social change, even though working for more affordable housing and better provision of universal health and education might be more important.

Frank Stilwell, emeritus professor from the political economy department at Sydney University, argued UBI would need to be examined in greater detail before being considered for introduction in Australia.

Hollo wrote: “We hope that this paper can contribute in its own small way to an open, honest conversation in our politics, media and society about how to make a future with less paid work a more fair, more connected, more caring future.”

The Green Institute is the Greens’ equivalent of the Liberal party’s Menzies Research Centre and Labor’s Chifley Institute. It receives federal funding, but its work is published independently of the Greens party hierarchy.

According to the 2016-17 budget, the Green Institute received $84,000 in funding this year, rising to $92,000 by 2019-20.

By comparison, the Menzies Research Centre and Chifley Research Centre each received $228,000 in 2016-17.