Robert Menzies was always cheerful, if somewhat bombastic, in his writings.
This week, however, I found the re-reading of a chapter in his political reminiscences, The Measure of the Years, quite depressing.
The chapter was Canberra _ the Making of a City.
The charm of the chapter is Menzies’ description of how whenever he turned his back (usually to go to England for cricket and state business) the bureaucrats in the Department of the Interior and Treasury would frustrate his plans for the city.
I was drawn to the chapter after what I think was the shabby treatment dealt to his widow, Dame Pattie, this week by the bureaucrats and politicians (of both sides locally and federally) who have inherited but have not carried forward the Menzies vision for Canberra.
On Monday an office block in Dickson was named Dame Pattie Menzies House. Very nice, you might think.
But let’s think again.
When Menzies came to Canberra (population 9000) in 1934 he did not like it, “”but I soon began to realise that the decision had been taken, that Canberra was and would continue to be the capital of the nation, and it was therefore imperative to make it a worthy capital; something that the Australian people would come to admire and respect; something that would be a focal point for national pride and sentiment”.
In 1957 Menzies cut through the two departments that had power over Canberra’s development and which were passing the buck between each other. He proposed the National Capital Development Commission as an over-riding autonomous body witha separate. While he was away, the bureaucrats subjugated the NCDC to departmental control in the draft law. Menzies had it redrafted.
Note how since the demise of the NCDC in 1989 virtually every minister and top bureaucrat federally and locally, Liberal or Labor has conspired to undermine the Menzies model for planning authorities to have strength, probity, resources and independence.
Then Menzies pushed ahead with the lake with a Budget estimate of a million pounds for initial work. But once again, while he was away, “”the Treasury struck out this item of one million”. On his return he was appalled that Treasury had cowed his Ministers and told Cabinet: “”Well, can I take it that by unanimous consent of ministers the item is now struck in?”Later, Interior Minister Gordon Freeth suggested it be called Lake Menzies, but Menzies insisted on Burley Griffin. And while ever Dame Pattie was alive she saw to it that Menzies’ request that no public element be named after him was adhered to. Hence there is no suburb Menzies, like most other dead Prime ministers.
With this background, then, it is insult enough that Dame Pattie gets such a low-grade monument. The building may well be competently designed and built to the brief and value for money as an office block. But in my lay view it is little more than two glass boxes showing virtually no imagination. Moreover, it is not in the central national area.
But the insult gets worse.
The processes leading up to the construction of the building were roundly condemned by Justice Paul Stein in his inquiry report brought down in 1996.
Stein said the building (to house 300 public servants) should have been built in Gungahlin as part of general decentralisation policies. He said, “” . . . a major planning decision was made in direct contradiction to government policies and political direction at the highest level.”He was “”dismayed that such an outcome is possible”.
“”There appears to have been no public explanation offered by the officers involved in justifying the advertisement (seeking tenders) or the decision that the offices be built at Dickson. The loss of such a vital development to the Gungahlin Town Centre deprived it of an early opportunity to be established, to provide employment opportunities and generate income for local businesses.”Obviously, some people with businesses established at Dickson would benefit at the expense of those in Gungahlin.
The insult here is that the decentralisation town-centres program to reduce the peak-hour snarls of other cities was an integral part of the NCDC policy and a part of the Menzies legacy.
Let’s not concern ourselves with the further point that the building has been thought of as a candidate for lease-back, so it is flogged to the private sector and leased back to the Government. That means the building to honour Dame Pattie is little more than an item of commerce and could even be subject to private-sector naming rights.
Further there is the underhand trick of circumventing the planning limit of 4000 sq metre buildings in mid-tier centres like Dickson by linking two 4000 sq m buildings with a covered bridge to create what is a single 8000 sq m building in defiance of those guidelines. If it really were two buildings they should have been called Dame Pattie Menzies’ Houses (plural). It is not the way Sir Robert would have played the game.
As for nudging the Queen to send a telegram of good wishes on the opening of the building, I wonder what splendid building on what magnificent site the Queen imagined she was sending her good wishes to. She would have been horrified if she had but passed by to see a glass box in the suburbs, I’ll wager.
Dame Pattie’s name should come off the building and be put in a more honoured place. The authorities were fortunate that Dame Pattie’s daughter, Heather Henderson, acted with such good grace through the whole event.
Perhaps, the Dickson building should be named Colonel David Miller House. Miller, Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs and Administrator of the Federal Capital Territory from 1912-17, spent most of his time undermining the Griffin plan and almost succeeded in having a departmental concoction approved by Parliament in its place.
It is sad to think that when Menzies published The Measure of the Years in 1970 he thought his dream had been realised: “”When I remember how every penny spent on Canberra used to be grudged and how many arguments I had to engage in when travelling from state to state, I am delighted in my old age to think that Australia’s capital has now become an object of pride and pleasure.”Pity his successor does not live here and the party he founded has so contemptuously undermined his legacy.