The temporary arrangement for the Prime Minister’s accommodation should come to an end.
Eighty years is far too long for the head of government to be shacked up in a temporary residence.
This week we had some uncertainty as to whether the Rudds would move into the Lodge fuelled by an unfortunate phrase by the Prime Minister-elect’s wife, Therese Rein, who said she was in the capital to investigate possible schools for their son Marcus “if” they were to move to Canberra.
It was later clarified by her husband who said that the family would definitely be moving to Canberra, as is Labor policy.
From the very earliest days in Canberra the Federal Capital Commission recognised that the city would have a modest start but it planned for greater things.
In the mid-1920s it knew it could not build something as grand as the Palace of Westminster or the US Congress building to house the new national parliament. But it had to build something, and fairly quickly, because of political sensitivities. NSW would not put up with having Melbourne as the seat of Parliament and the Government for too long.
So it pushed ahead with a provisional Parliament House. Once Parliament came to Canberra, the Prime Minister would have to come, too. The Prime Minister would need a residence, so the commission ordered the construction of a “cottage”.
It was to be a temporary arrangement to be occupied only “until such time as a permanent monumental Prime Minister’s residence is constructed, and thereafter to be used for other official purposes”.
Prime Minister Stanley Bruce (the only other Prime Minister to lose his seat) and his wife Ethel objected to the name “cottage”. So it was not called that. Still it was not called the Prime Minister’s Residence, but the Lodge. The name was first recorded in a letter sent from the head of the Federal Capital Commission to the architects on 19 April 1927, when the building was all but complete.
Maybe the commission saw the need to keep that temporariness about the arrangement – being an artful bureaucracy intent on long-term survival and more things to do in the future. The term Lodge has a distinct ring of temporariness about it. You stay in a Lodge for a short time and then you go home.
Canberra got off to a pretty good start in the 1920s, but then the Depression hit followed by the war. It was only in the 1950s that Prime Minister Robert Menzies pushed the development of Canberra.
Even after Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser commissioned the competition for the New and Permanent Parliament House, the Lodge languished.
The Governor-General was all right. He had the spacious and gracious Government House at Yarralumla which was never seen as a temporary arrangement.
While ever we have the Prime Minister in a “Lodge” as if he is on a fishing trip somewhere, the National Capital will be lacking. The Prime Minister’s Lodge may well be elegant and manorial in style, but it is still suburban – suitable for a Treasurer or some other public function.
Sure, a new Prime Minister’s residence would be politically difficult. Voters would see it as an act of self-aggrandisement and a selfish waste of taxpayers’ money. But it need not be seen that way. For a start, the initiating Prime Minister might never live in it. Prime Minister’s terms average less than four years. It would take that long to plan and build it. The Lodge, by the way, was knocked up in 15 months.
Better still the whole project could be done as part of climate-change strategy. The challenge would be to construct a carbon-neutral building – a showcase to the world. It could be built on Stirling Ridge in Yarralumla facing north with views over the lake.
And maybe the old Lodge could be used as a international example of how to environmentally retro-fit an old building to the demands of climatically threatened world.
The thing could be de-politicised by handing it over to a joint parliamentary committee chaired by the Opposition.
Comments by social researcher Hugh Mackay might be apposite here. He pointed out that Australia is coming out of a slumber, a sleeping time. Australians thought there was too much change in the world and the world was too uncertain. The reaction was to withdraw from the world and to withdraw from politics. We concentrated on McMansions, renovations and our home turf.
Now we aspire to more than the things money can buy: health and education are higher priorities. Symbolic things are now seen to be more important.
Maybe Australia’s role in the world is part of that: holding our head high as a world citizen.
In which case, the residence of the head of our government in our national capital should be something of which we can be proud – a brilliantly designed, carbon neutral, technologically cutting edge building for others to emulate.
The cost? Something much less than the defeated government blew in failed propaganda on its failed policies.