Speaker’s Observations — Debating Chamber—100th Anniversary

Members, on 24 October 1918 the House first sat in the Chamber of the new Parliament buildings. Hansard, Volume 183, page 3, reports that the then Prime Minister, the Rt Hon William Massey said, “Sir, in moving the adjournment I desire to take the opportunity of congratulating you, and also my fellow-members of the House, upon our being able to occupy the new parliamentary chamber this session. No doubt we shall have to put up with a certain amount of inconvenience, but the fact of our being here to-day is a promise of better things in the future, and I have no doubt that promise will be kept. It will, of course, be in the minds of honourable members that the chamber in which we have met this afternoon will in all probability be the principal legislative chamber of the Dominion for long after the present generation has passed away—perhaps for centuries to come—and I hope that within its walls legislation will be framed which will be for the good government of the Dominion, which will mete out just and equal treatment for and between different classes of the community, and which will encourage national sentiment and national ideas [that] will tend to make this country honoured and respected not only [with] the British Empire, but among the whole of the nations of the world. Sir, I move the adjournment of the House.”

I was sad for myself; I think it’s a real pity that they didn’t actually finish the job.