Right to Ask vs. Right to Refuse: What "Remote-Friendly" Actually Means in Australia and the Netherlands

🇦🇺 Australia · 🇳🇱 Netherlands

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Both countries will tell you, in the interview, that they are "very flexible." Neither is lying, exactly. But flexibility in Australia currently means a coin flip weighted by your salary bracket, and flexibility in the Netherlands means a legally defined negotiation you are entitled to lose. Anyone moving for a remote-friendly job should read the fine print before they read the skyline.

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Do's & Don'ts

🇦🇺 Australia

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Australia: Flexible, If You Can Afford It

Remote work in Australia has settled rather than receded. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 36.2% of employed Australians usually worked from home as of August 2025 — down from the pandemic peak but still above the pre-pandemic 32.1% recorded in 2019, and the ABS notes this was the last survey of its kind before a redesigned methodology takes over in late 2026. Among managers and professionals, the figure climbs to roughly 60%, according to Great Place to Work Australia.

The catch is who gets to participate. Workers earning $100,000–$125,000 are 5.2 times more likely to have flexible arrangements than those earning under $60,000, and only 4% of jobs paying $30,000–$60,000 offer work-from-home at all. Australia's National Employment Standards do include a statutory right to request flexible work, but it's narrowly scoped — parents of school-age children, carers, employees over 55, and people with disability, not the general workforce. Everyone else is negotiating on vibes and market leverage, and several high-profile Australian employers, including major resources and financial firms, have used 2025–2026 to walk hybrid policies back toward the office, sometimes abruptly.

Netherlands: Legally Structured, Not Legally Guaranteed

The Netherlands has a reputation as Europe's remote-work capital, and the underlying numbers support it — more than half the Dutch workforce works from home at least part of the time, according to iamExpat and CMS's cross-country legal guide. What surprises newcomers is that this culture runs on employer goodwill and a formal request process, not a guaranteed entitlement. The Wet flexibel werken (Flexible Working Act, 2016) lets employees request a change in work location after six months of employment, with two months' notice — but the employer can refuse, provided they explain the refusal in writing. A 2022 bill that would have made home-working an enforceable right, the Wet werken waar je wilt, was rejected by the Dutch Senate in 2023.

What the law does formalise is money: many employers pay a tax-free thuiswerkvergoeding, a home-working allowance worth roughly €2.15 a day, per Dutch tax guidance cited by Justworks and iamExpat. Combined with Hofstede Insights data showing the Netherlands scoring low on Masculinity (a consensus-oriented, quality-of-life-driven culture) against Australia's comparatively higher score, the Dutch approach reads less like flexibility-as-perk and more like flexibility-as-negotiated-infrastructure.

The Reckoning

Here is the inversion that catches people out: Australia sounds less regulated and is, for most workers, less protected — remote access depends heavily on your pay grade and your employer's current mood about return-to-office. The Netherlands sounds bureaucratic and is, in practice, more predictable, because the process, the notice period, and even the allowance are written down. An Australian professional in a $150,000 role might have more day-to-day remote freedom than a Dutch employee bound by a fixed hybrid schedule — but the Dutch employee has a documented process to fall back on if that freedom disappears, and the Australian typically does not.

The other divergence is what "logging off" signals. In Australia, working late or staying reachable after hours still reads, in many corporate settings, as visible commitment. In the Netherlands, a colleague closing their laptop at the stroke of 5pm is not a flight risk — it's simply Tuesday.

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The Part the Brochure Left Out

r/expats — Someone who relocated from Sydney to Amsterdam for a fintech role described being caught off guard that their new employer could legally refuse a work-from-home request even after they'd cleared the six-month mark — the request had to be justified in writing, but so did the rejection, and the company chose the latter.

Quora — A respondent describing Australian office culture noted that job titles carry less weight day to day than in comparable markets, and that managers are generally expected to be reachable and involve the team in decisions — which made the sudden reappearance of strict office mandates at a few large employers feel like a genuine culture shift rather than a return to normal.

teamblind.com — An employee at a large Amsterdam-based tech company wrote that the Netherlands' remote-friendly reputation didn't prepare them for how precisely hybrid days were scheduled internally — Tuesdays and Thursdays in-office, no exceptions, tracked more like a rota than a guideline.

InterNations Netherlands — A member new to Amsterdam said the biggest practical surprise was administrative: confirming the thuiswerkvergoeding was actually written into the contract, since it isn't automatic, and several new arrivals had simply assumed it was a given.

r/australia — Workers discussing a mining executive's public decision to end informal remote perks (including office coffee runs) as a symbol of a broader return-to-office push said the reaction from staff was less about the specific perk and more about how little warning accompanied the policy change.

Conclusion

If predictability matters more to you than day-to-day freedom, the Netherlands' formalised, if refusable, process will likely serve you better than Australia's looser but more volatile arrangement. If you're early or mid-career and not yet earning into Australia's flexible-work income bracket, go in assuming an office desk is part of the deal regardless of what the careers page says. Either way: read the actual policy document, not the recruiter's summary of it. As I'd tell a friend over a drink — the Dutch will make you fill out a form to work from home, and the Australians will just quietly decide, sometime around your second year, that they'd rather you didn't.