More and more Australians are now giving emphasis on their work-life balance as more than 50 percent of the country's full-time workers would have preferred logging in less work hours, according to a latest survey by The Australia Institute.

The independent think tank group polled a total of 1700 employees across the nation and it found that 80 percent of Australian workers prefer not to work overtime, with some 60 percent of those working overtime saying that the extra work hours take away precious moments that could have been spent with their families.

Health has also become a growing concern for Australian workers as 58 percent of respondents to the survey blamed long working hours as the reason for them to miss out on exercising and an additional 35 percent claiming that extra hours of work prevent them from getting balance meals.

Institute executive director Richard Denniss said that the new survey belied claims that Australian workers enjoy one of the most flexible hours in the world since it reflected the emerging notion that hordes of the country's workers were becomingly dissatisfied with their long working hours.

Dr Denniss is alarmed that the extra hours of work have spawned stressful family lives, unproductive work lives and higher unemployment rates in Australia as he called on the federal government to introduce caps on work hours.

The Australian Institute suggested that a maximum of 35 working hours should be ideal enough to create a better work-life balance for the country's workers and could result to the generation of up to 400,000 more full-time jobs that the unemployed and under-employed could avail of.

At present, the institute said that its research showed that Australians have chalked up some two billion hours of extra work, amounting to an estimated $72 billion extra income for business owners.

Also, in related Working Times report by Bankwest, it turned out that Australian farmers work an average of 60 hours per week, which is the longest across the Australian workforce, while government employees enjoy the most ideal work situation for their relatively lesser working hours.