Brisbane has long been touted as the lifestyle capital of Australia, where people move for a sunny, slower-paced life, away from the chaos and gridlock of the bigger southern capitals.
But is that the reality?
Full-time workers in Brisbane are putting in an extra half-an-hour each week on average compared to their counterparts in Sydney and Melbourne.
Across Brisbane, full-time workers are spending an average of 43 hours and 12 minutes on the job each week.
By comparison, full-time workers in Greater Sydney spend an average of 42 hours and 42 minutes on the job per week, while in Greater Melbourne it’s 42 hours and 40 minutes.
Mortgage broker Rebecca Le Cornu knows the costs of working 12- to 14-hour days.
Brisbane mortgage broker Rebecca Le Cornu and her children.
“You get very, very tired. I have often dreamt of career changes in my low moments,” she said.
“You get certain flexibility when you work for yourself … but it means that at night you catch up on all the big tasks that you didn’t get to during the day.”
Le Cornu has found a better work-life balance since parting ways with her business partner and hiring an assistant, but she often looks longingly at the life her stay-at-home mother, who worked sporadically as a relief teacher, led.
“We lived very frugally, but comfortably,” she said. “That would not be feasible for families these days.
“Now, no one is living as frugally. But then, are you happier overall? Is the net result actually better? I’m not so sure.”
Those working the longest hours in Brisbane can be found in the city’s exclusive semi-rural enclaves, where sprawling properties on expansive blocks sell for more than $9 million.
The residents of Pullenvale, about 15 kilometres west of Brisbane’s CBD, top the list of the city’s longest workers.
Pullenvale is the only suburb in Greater Brisbane where people employed full-time work more than 46 hours a week on average – averaging 46 hours and 13 minutes on the job.
Members of the city’s business elite have long been drawn to Pullenvale’s country-style estates with space for horse stables, tennis courts and pools.
The suburb’s residents have included billionaire mining heir Tyson Flannery, the late motoring magnate Gordon Edward Scifleet, and Nadia Palaszczuk, the sister of the former Queensland premier.
Next on the list is Chandler (45 hours and 29 minutes), another semi-rural area dominated by multi-million dollar sprawling estates, and then Brookfield (45 hours and 22 minutes) and Fig Tree Pocket (also 45 hours and 22 minutes).
Residents working the shortest full-time hours on average (41 hours and 18 minutes) can be found in the suburb of Ellen Grove, in Brisbane’s south-west.
The figures are based on the 2021 census, when Australians were asked to report how many hours they had worked in the last week.
Census director Caroline Deans said people tended to be quite good at “guesstimating” how many hours they worked the previous week.
While the national standard working week changed from 40 hours to 38 hours in 1983, Dr Tim Ballard, from the University of Queensland’s Centre for Business and Organisational Psychology, acknowledged many people felt like they were working longer.
But the data tells a different story, he said.
The latest data from the HILDA survey (the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey) shows the average working hours of Australians are in decline.
The percentage of people working extreme hours of 50 to 60 hours per week has dropped from 9.5 per cent in 2001 to 5.5 per cent.
But “the way that we work is changing”, Ballard said. “Certainly more, much more than in 2001, even in 2010, we’re taking our work home with us,” he said.
Australians are indeed doing more unpaid work. Research by Eliza Littleton, a senior economist at the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work, found in 2022 that Australian workers put in four hours and 20 minutes of unpaid overtime a week – or about six weeks of unpaid overtime a year. For full-time workers, it was closer to five hours a week.
Self-employed Brisbane builder Austin Tarter works more than 50 hours a week.
Austin Tarter, a self-employed builder from Mackenzie on Brisbane’s southside, works in excess of 50 hours a week. Like most tradies, he starts work at 6.30am and downs tools about 3.30pm.
“But then I might go and check out some potential projects in the evenings and meet with clients,” the 37-year-old said.
“Once I’m home, I have dinner with my beautiful wife and then I go and log on for an hour and a half, dealing with payroll and quotes.
“If you’re self-employed, there’s kind of an understanding that that’s how it is … but I do try to keep the weekends sacred.”
Australia ranks relatively poorly on work-life balance, according to the OECD, trailing most other Western countries.
Life demands may also be making people feel more burnt out, Ballard said.
The hours women are working are trending up, a group that traditionally bears the brunt of domestic duties. These duties come with their own mental load, Ballard said.
Even when these responsibilities are shared, “there’s a communication load which wasn’t there before”, he said.
“That certainly alleviates some challenges by sharing the load, but also introduces some new challenges as well.”
According to Dr Stacey Parker, an organisational psychologist and associate professor at the University of Queensland, the quality of time off from work – not just the amount of time – is key to protecting people from burnout.
“A vacation once or twice a year doesn’t help protect you from burnout. Disconnecting from work when you’re not clocked on is imperative,” she said.
“There’s one big prospective study that found people who don’t feel like they actually get a chance to recover over the weekend … they have a higher mortality rate from cardiovascular disease.
“So it’s serious that people have that right to disconnect and that downtime from work.”
Parker is currently running a study on the weekend recovery process and said one takeaway so far was that everyone’s needs were different.
Her advice to people thinking about how they can recover from work is to “think about what suits them best in their routines”.
“For some of the working parents in the study we ran, they said that they used the commute … to have some ‘me time’ to read something, or relax, or listen to a podcast, or they went to the gym on the way home.
“There’s lots of different ways people fit it in, [but for some] people at some stages of life … it might be very difficult to try to achieve it every evening.”
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