Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01868:reg:4:p40
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01868
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 4 (pt 40/63)
Character Range: 455223–458165

reversals on the Secretariat scheme and the Permanent Administrative Building resulted in a deficiency of office accommodation for the departmental or executive functions of government near Parliament House or in

    36      Memorandum, Butters to Minister for Home and Territories, 8 September 1927, CRS A1/15, item 30/1344; 'Canberra has the creeps', Sun (Sydney), 8 September 1927; Argus (Melbourne), 10 September 1927.
    37      See CRS A292/1, item C61.
    38      CS Daley, 'The growth of a city', in White (ed.), Canberra, A Nation's Capital, pp. 40–41; PWE Curtin, 'The seat of government', in same, pp. 69–70.
  Canberra in general. Increasingly, Parliament House itself, a building erected to house the legislature, came to be used for executive purposes.39

  Even aside from the government's failure to provide sufficient office accommodation in Canberra, it is debatable whether the executive or departmental functions could have been kept out of Parliament House. With the increasing demands of ministerial portfolios and the obligation to attend Parliamentary sittings, it was becoming less convenient and less practical for Ministers to try to rush from one building to another to fulfil their separate departmental and legislative duties. Even in Melbourne, where the executive accommodation in Parliament House had originally been limited to just one room – an office for the Prime Minister – the executive had started to infiltrate the building. During the period 1923–25, the Bruce–Page government had, for the sake of convenience, begun to hold Cabinet meetings in the building from time to time. In Canberra, the easy and obvious way for ministers to get around the difficulty of departmental accommodation that was either sadly lacking or located at some distance from Parliament House was for them to perform their executive functions in their ministerial offices in the House. From these offices, they could quickly and easily make their way to the legislative Chambers to attend sittings. One inevitable consequence of this trend was that ministers tended to drag departmental staff into Parliament House with them, leading to pressure to provide office space to accommodate the departmental officers.40

  One of the first and clearest manifestations of the trend for the executive to move permanently into Parliament House occurred as early as 1932. Building on the Bruce–Page government's practice of occasionally holding Cabinet meetings in Parliament House in Melbourne, Prime Minister Joseph Lyons and his Cabinet abandoned the Cabinet Room in West Block in 1932 in favour of what had hitherto been the back- up Cabinet Room in Parliament House. Though there were no immediate accommodation implications arising from this move, it marked a highly significant departure in the usage of the building, signifying that it was no longer the exclusive preserve of the legislature, but now served as a permanent