Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01869:reg:4:p62
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01869
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 4 (pt 62/63)
Character Range: 512223–514983

been when the building opened in 1927. In 1984, in what looks like a last-ditch effort to squeeze some extra office space out of the building, the two verandahs at the front were closed in. At about this time, too, a temporary annexe was erected in the House of Representatives Gardens to provide some overflow office accommodation. Further pressure was placed on the building at this time by a major increase in the numbers of parliamentarians to 224, consisting of 148 members and 76 senators. Conditions became so cramped that it began to seriously hinder work in Provisional Parliament House. According to Senator John Button, trying

    80      Souter, Acts of Parliament, pp. 520–21.
  81 Sparke, Canberra 1954–1980, pp. 310, 315, 317, 322, 325.
  to get work done in the place was 'like trying to get hydro-electric power out of a garden hose'.82 Describing the working conditions in Parliament House some years earlier, Button had told how:

     members work in small crowded rooms painted in Education Department cream and furnished with uniform carpets, railway station furniture, a tramways clock, and an elaborately complex system of division bells designed one suspects by Thomas Edison … Apart from cramped physical conditions a member is constantly subject to the hazards of air and noise pollution – the former from a ferocious central heating system which dries the throat and saps the energy (one suspects a hidden malevolent hand), and the latter from the ubiquitous division bells. In my own case relief from the central heating is provided only by a heavy shower of rain, which pours through the roof of my office, necessitating the removal of books and papers and their replacement by buckets.83

  In 1988, parliamentarians and Parliamentary staff vacated the provisional building after 61 years' occupation and moved to their new home on Capital Hill. The old place left its mark on the new structure, however, as from the outset – and despite its name – the 1988 building was designed as a home for both Parliament and the executive. While it had at one time been under serious threat of demolition, the argument for retaining Provisional Parliament House had been taken up the Australian Heritage Commission and other organisations and individuals in the mid to late 1970s. This argument had prevailed and the heritage significance of the building had achieved national recognition when it was entered in the Register of the National Estate. Though safe from demolition, there was a large question over what to do with it after the departure of Commonwealth Parliament and the parliamentarians. In the past, suggestions had been floated that it could be used as a conference centre or even a casino. But, following the departure