Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01868:reg:4:p30
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01868
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 4 (pt 30/63)
Character Range: 429692–432585

May 1927, the figures for members of the House of Representatives and senators were 73 and 36 respectively, a total of only 109. In his design for the two legislative Chambers, therefore, Murdoch allowed sufficient space to cater for an expansion of the membership of each house by a factor of just over 50 per cent. As for the internal layout of each Chamber, Murdoch had originally designed the seating arrangement to mirror that of the House of Commons in England, but this was altered after the Minister for Home and Territories, Senator George Pearce, warmly commended to the Standing Committee on Public Works the horseshoe or semicircular pattern of seating used in the French Chamber of Deputies. This arrangement, which Pearce had seen for himself in Paris, impressed him as enabling all members to hear and see

    21      Owen, Murdoch and Sulman in evidence to PSCPW, 'Report … relating to the proposed Erection of Provisional Parliament House, Canberra', pp. 5, 24, 40, 119.
    22      Federal Capital Advisory Committee, 'First Annual Report', p. 11.
    23      JS Murdoch, 'A short talk on the buildings at Canberra', Royal Victorian Institute of Architects Journal and Proceedings, vol. 22, no. 5, November 1924, p. 161; PSCPW, 'Report … relating to the proposed Erection of Provisional Parliament House, Canberra', pp. xi, 6; Building, 12 January 1926, p. 58.
    24      Griffin, 'The Federal Capital. Report Explanatory of the Preliminary General Plan', October 1913, p. 6; Griffin, Building, 12 January 1914, p. 66.
  proceedings clearly, while at the same time allowing each of them to be clearly audible and visible themselves. The Standing Committee did not, however, recommend the adoption of the French system of having members address the Chamber from a rostrum mounted at the front.25

  Aside from the space required in the legislative Chambers, Provisional Parliament House also had to provide office accommodation for 12 ministers when Parliament was in session. In accordance with the building's legislative function, these offices were not meant to serve as the Ministers' departmental offices; these were to be located in separate departmental buildings or in one of the proposed secretariat buildings, East or West Block. Similarly, the provisional structure was to include a back-up cabinet room for use during parliamentary sessions, with the main cabinet room to be housed in West Block. The building also had to provide offices for various parliamentary officials connected with the House of Representatives and the Senate, together with the staffs of three other parliamentary departments: the Joint House Department which was established in 1922, the Parliamentary Reporting Service which recorded proceedings and produced Hansard, and the Parliamentary Library. A complicating factor with the space needed for the Library was that it also included