Parliament House is urgently looking at whether to introduce paid parking as it tries to lift its visitor numbers back over the one million a year mark.
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The presiding officers – Speaker Anna Burke and Senate President John Hogg – are considering their options, particularly for the public car park, a parliamentary committee was told on Monday.
Department of Parliamentary Services secretary Carol Mills said institutions in the parliamentary zone were all experiencing problems with their car parks.
“In the dialogue I've had with cultural institutions over the past several months there has been a concern from their point of view that visitor numbers are impacted by the fact that the streets surrounding the institutions are fully occupied by workers in the area," she told a Senate Estimates hearing.
"The critical thing for us is to ensure that visitors are able to come to the building.
“We certainly wouldn't want to have a level of paid parking that prohibited them being able to afford to do that, nor would we want to be in a situation where we became the place where other people parked because it was a cheaper option, so it's a complicated issue."
Along with Parliament House, the four independent national institutions that control their own car parks - the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, High Court and War Memorial - face a dilemma.
They are wrestling with imposing paid parking on their staff and volunteers, or risk having free parks swamped with public servants.
Ms Mill said parking at Parliament House was adequate when Parliament was not sitting.
“One of the issues we will be looking at in paid parking is obviously on sitting days, a number of staff or visitors to the building do use Federation Mall and other areas that are presently not charged for, and clearly in our discussions with the NCA, that's something we'll be having a look at," she said.
Government departments with insufficient parking for staff are using various models to solve the problem, she said.
"Some are doing it on a first-served basis, some are doing it on a rotational almost a raffle basis, others are introducing paid parking on a fee-for-service basis," she said.
“So there are several options for us to explore, if we want to go down that path."
Ms Mills said more than a million visitors a year were recorded when Parliament first opened but it had fallen to about 850,000 in recent years. This included 125,000 school students on a subsidised program.
“We are really exploring this year ways of increasing our numbers back to that over a million that was here for so many years and I think that is about refreshing our experience," she said.
“A lot of the people I speak to say they've been to Parliament House and they've sort of ticked the box rather than seeing it as a place that you come to regularly."
Meanwhile, a parliamentary committee will investigate the lack of shops in the parliamentary zone for the thousands of people who work there.
The inquiry will examine the demand for a minimart and other services, as workers in the zone face being slugged $2600 a year for parking from July next year, as announced in the budget.
Committee chair Senator Louise Pratt said on Monday the deadline for submissions for the inquiry had been set at next Monday, June 3.
Politicians from the federal Labor and Liberal parties have refused to support the plan for paid parking in the triangle unless better services are provided for public servants who work there.
They argue that public servants who work in the precinct do not have access to the same level of amenity as workers in areas such as Civic, and are forced to drive to work in order to access services, including supermarkets and dry cleaners, elsewhere during the working day.
