Fake News About Labor’s Powerhouse Ultimo Heritage Hoax  

By Kylie Winkworth 

In an era of rampant fake news, it’s a shock to see ABC News recycling spin and unexamined government propaganda. On Monday ABC News platforms carried news of the expanded heritage listing of the Powerhouse Museum Complex, ‘locking in the government’s $300 million revitalisation project’. Being the ABC News, many people celebrated the Powerhouse Museum was finally protected, even the journalists. Little of what followed was true.  

The heritage listing does not lock in the government’s $300 million revitalisation project. (More like $400 million plus, but the government has stopped counting the cost of the Powerhouse fiasco.)

In fact the Powerhouse Ultimo project is still open for public submissions until October 7. It hasn’t been approved or even assessed by the Department of Planning, although the ABC’s report made it sound like a done deal.   

Shroud Of Secrecy

The heritage listing, gazetted two months ago, does nothing to prevent the sale or commercial development of the Powerhouse Museum site as ABC News stated. It does not guarantee the ‘site must remain exclusively as a museum’, another tendril of ABC misinformation. In fact, the project is an adaptative reuse of the Powerhouse Museum, as the proponents told the Heritage Council. They just haven’t told the rest of us what they’re doing with the former museum.    

The SSD plans reveal the gutted shell of the PHM reduced to three ‘large volume presentation spaces’. The MAAS CEO’s ambitious ‘decluttering’ project reduces the museum’s exhibition space by 75%; demolishing all the medium and small-scale exhibition galleries that were purpose-designed for applied arts, design, history, science, technology, and international exhibitions.  Powerhouse Ultimo, minus the museum word, looks like a contemporary art, performance and venue hire facility.

But Labor’s shroud of secrecy around the project means no one knows exactly what the place will be. Despite repeated promises of transparency, the government has refused to release any of the documents that would normally be public in a genuine museum renewal project. There is no museum plan, no exhibition plan, no design brief, no master plan, and no business case to justify the gutting and demolition of a museum that is only 36 years old.  

Expanded Heritage Listing Does Not Protect The Museum

Instead of protecting and conserving the Powerhouse Museum, the hoax heritage listing greenlights the demolition of the museum that Labor promised to save.

Labor’s big promises are the same as the Liberal’s. Just three large objects will or may return the former museum that was purpose-designed to display the museum’s priceless power and transport collections in a heritage complex about power and transport.    

No part of the design and fabric of the 1988 Sulman award-winning Powerhouse Museum is protected by the expanded heritage listing. The Powerhouse Museum’s architecture, design, concept, fabric, exhibitions, and renowned collection installations are either ignored or assessed as having no heritage significance that is worth keeping.  

Buried in the fine print of the heritage listing, is an extensive set of site-specific exemptions that allow the removal of all the post-1980 fabric of the Powerhouse Museum. This includes the exhibitions, all traces of the museum’s award-winning design and fit-out, all the education and visitor facilities, three theatres, all the mezzanines and interiors, and all the post-1980 exteriors.  Which is everything really.  

Exemptions Drafted By Heritage Consultants

The exemptions were drafted by the government’s heritage consultants, in tandem with their work on the Powerhouse Ultimo development.

Far from protecting and conserving the Powerhouse Museum, the listing facilitates the museum’s demolition and redevelopment. Over the four years the heritage consultants worked on the Powerhouse Museum’s demolition and adaptative reuse, they failed to notice the relationship between the site’s history and the museum’s concept, architecture, design, spaces, and collections.

The internationally significant power and transport collections were not even worthy of mention in the heritage listing that treats the museum as an already decluttered empty box. In all the haste of four years finessing the museum’s erasure they didn’t find time to speak to the museum’s architect Lionel Glendenning.    

The recent state heritage listing of the Kwong War Chong Building in Dixon St Haymarket underlines the way the government gives its own development the inside running, free from heritage constraints, a privilege not given to private owners of heritage places.

The listing for this wonderfully atmospheric historic shop specifically mentions the interiors including partitions, doors, stairs, and hand-operated goods lift, as well as the historic ephemera of packing-crate furniture, washing machines, bathtubs, calendars, crockery, merchandise, and personal effects. There are no site-specific exemptions for the packing crates, crockery, merchandise and washing tubs, and interiors.

Submissions Ignored

It is bizarre that the NSW Heritage Council requires the protection of the packing crate furniture and ephemera in an old shop in Dixon Street, but overlooked the in situ working steam engines, the priceless 1785 Bouton and Watt engine, and No.1 Locomotive, tender, and three carriages, all in purpose designed settings in the conceptually resonant spaces of the Powerhouse Museum, but none even worthy of mention in the state heritage listing, let along in situ conservation. The Heritage Minister refused a request from the Powerhouse Museum Alliance for an Interim Heritage Order to enable the significance assessment of these renowned installations. It’s appalling this request was even needed, let alone refused.      

What is a museum but an institution in a building designed to display and share its most significant collections? This basic proposition seems to have escaped the heritage consultants and the museum’s management. They are bent on ‘undoing the institution’ and ‘breaking the museum’ so it is free to paddle in a self-referential embrace with artists exploring immersive events and ‘contemporary ideas and issues’.

How liberating to be free from the legacy of pesky collections and their troubling history of industrialisation and technological progress.  

All of this ignores the thousands of letters and submissions from the community and experts over the ten years of this saga; including two petitions, two parliamentary inquiries, two state-significant development proposals, and two governments promising the Powerhouse Museum is saved. Only it isn’t saved. In NSW the idea that a museum is a permanent institution held in trust for current and future generations counts for nothing.    

Helping the government get away with museum murder are failures across what should be institutional checks and balances: statutory agencies like the Heritage Council, ideally the Treasury, but also the media.

The art critic John McDonald, one of the most consistent critics of the government’s mismanagement of the Powerhouse Museum, has been terminated by the SMH after forty years of lucid criticism, speaking truth to art puffery, poor performance and cultural delusions.

This is not good for Sydney if it cares about culture. The ABC’s head office on Harris St is just down the road from the Powerhouse Museum. Still the organisation has barely noticed the attacks on one of the oldest cultural institutions in NSW. Even so, it’s a new low when ABC News regurgitates the government’s spin. It seems that when it comes to culture in Sydney applause is mandatory, not scepticism or fact-checking.