The $17.2m Canberra conservatory project running almost a decade late

Detailed summary

How a broken pipe and $17.2m blowout left staff totally overworked.

The Ian Potter National Conservatory at the Australian National Botanic Gardens, first announced in 2016 and expected to be ready by the end of 2017, was a grand and inspiring vision intended to complement one of the brightest jewels in the ACT's crown.

Partly underwritten by a generous act of philanthropy by the Potter Foundation, which provided a $1.9 million grant, the conservatory was intended - once completed - to house Australia's biggest collection of tropical and subtropical plants in a climate-controlled environment.

The expectation was that visitors would be able to escape from the harshest rigours of a Canberra winter into the welcoming embrace of a tropical rainforest just by crossing the threshold.

Unfortunately, as seems to be too often the case with public projects, there has been many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip. A decade on the budget has tripled with $17.2 million already spent and the conservatory's completion date keeps being pushed back.

It has become a mini-Snowy 2.0 in Canberra's front garden. The difference between this and Snowy 2.0, which has blown out to 12 times the original cost estimate and is running years behind schedule, is that no mountains had to be moved to build the conservatory. While some of the delays were the result of factors beyond Parks Australia's control, such as COVID-19 and bad weather, that does not explain why a build that was expected to take a year to complete has already taken 10 times that long. Nor does the fact that a contracted builder went into administration with the result that a new contractor had to be appointed in 2024-25.

The apparent failure to foresee that possibility, along with the decision to press ahead with the acquisition of plants on what appears to have been a large scale when the completion date was years away, raises questions about Parks Australia's ability to manage what started life as a comparatively minor $6 million project.

Claims by gardens staff that the demands being imposed by…

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Opening of the article, excerpted from The Canberra Times. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.