Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01868:reg:4:p42
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01868
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 4 (pt 42/63)
Character Range: 460470–463317

p. 4.
    40      Souter, Acts of Parliament, p. 230
    41      Emerton, 'Report by the Secretary of the Joint House Department', 7 September 1956, p. 8; Souter, Acts of Parliament, pp. 230– 31.
    42      Letter, HVC Thorby to Prime Minister, 13 December 1934, CRS A458/1, item W120/7; whole file, CRS A461/7, item N7/1/1.
  facto home for the executive. With nowhere else convenient to perform their departmental work, Ministers and departmental officers steadily moved in and took over what space they could find in the House. The issue eventually boiled over into the public domain in June 1937 when Senator JS Collings and other MPs made complaints in Parliament about the appropriation by the executive of space in the building at the expense of the legislature. 'On account of various devices and subterfuges,' he charged, 'the members of this legislature are gradually being deprived of accommodation in the building and, as a consequence, are unable properly to do their work.' Placing the blame for this situation squarely on the government for its failure to develop Canberra, Collings expressed his regret that 'Parliament House [was] becoming a huge secretariat' and he demanded that the government reserve the House strictly for the workings of Parliament.43

  The pressure for additional accommodation was further accentuated by a change that had been taking place in working culture. In the original form of the building, no individual offices had been provided for private members and senators; they were expected to conduct their private parliamentary business in their respective party rooms. At the time that Provisional Parliament House was erected, this arrangement was accepted, albeit barely, as a fact of MPs' working life. But as Murdoch had foreseen, members and senators would sooner or later want their own offices to carry out their electorate duties and other work in privacy and away from the distractions and interruptions of a party room. Again in 1937, Collings complained that, because 'the congestion in every part of this building [was] becoming more and more intense', senators and presumably members as well were 'often unable to secure a room in which to write letters or converse in privacy.'44 Though many decades were to elapse before most senators and members would in fact secure their own private offices, the change in working culture evident in Collings's expressed views signified that much additional office accommodation would eventually have to be provided for MPs.

  The complaints strongly voiced by Collings and others in the Parliament quickly evoked a response from the government. As the trend towards accommodating the executive in Parliament House was now so far advanced as to be all but irreversible, there was little chance that the government would act on Collings's demand that