MoAD’s Chris Grebert on protecting, serving and interpreting an iconic building

It is never lost on Chris Grebert that he is the head of facilities, security, and heritage and collections at a building that inspired the development of a city. “Canberra was pretty much built around the Old Parliament House,” he says. “The city grew because of the building.”

Old Parliament House (home to the Museum of Australian Democracy or ‘MoAD’) – which will mark its 100th birthday in 2027 with year-long celebrations – is a building etched in national consciousness. The majority of Australians have a memory or association with it, whether established on Year 10 camp, a school excursion or when tuning into a televised address and noting the iconic architecture as a backdrop.

The front steps and lawn encasing the building have played host to momentous occasions in Australia’s history. These include Gough Whitlam’s characteristically irreverent ‘Nothing will save the Governor-General’ speech following his contentious dismissal in 1975,  Dame Enid Lyons and Dame Dorothy Tangney walking through the doors in 1943 as the first women to be elected to Australian Parliament and the ongoing stationing of the Tent Embassy, which renders the Old Parliament House the site of the longest continuous protest for Indigenous land rights, sovereignty and self-determination in the world.

Old Parliament House holds particular significance to Grebert’s family, as his father, who sadly passed away last year, worked for the facilities team in the building when it still housed parliament. 

He was the building’s maintenance supervisor within the Department of Administrative Services until the day Parliament moved up the hill. Grebert’s father was even at the raucous closing party in 1988 – those unfamiliar with the occasion can revel in scenes of  1980s-nostalgia-drenched mirth and mayhem below. 

Grebert has worked at MoAD for 16 years and emphasises the importance of teamwork and camaraderie in the management of the building, and that he is no island.

“The people I work with, you can’t do anything without them, and they’re so committed to the task,” he says. “We’ve achieved some pretty great things. We all dive in together to get the best outcome.”

Facility management at the ‘People’s Place’

Grebert has a long and diverse career as a facility management professional. He has observed a major evolution across both private and public sector facility management and the increased sophistication of the discipline.

“There’s a lot more focus on facility management now,” he says. 

“When I started, there was less guidance, but now there’s the Facility Management Association (FMA) community and we’ve got cultural facility manager working groups that I’m a member of and we collaborate.”

“I think time has actually helped us facility managers and given us a lot more guidance.”

Grebert had an industry start as an apprentice electrician in 1988 working in many government buildings across Canberra and more than 10 years later he moved to a facilities supervisor role at the National Convention Center and Park Royal Hotel. Grebert says this move allowed him to foray into delivering building services.

In 2001, he moved to Canberra Girls Grammar School and led facilities, cleaning, security and grounds maintenance, a nine-year stint that Grebert cites as a major “learning curve”, due to the large volume of students and staff using the multi-purpose space. 

Grebert’s role as head of facilities, security, and heritage and collections at MoAD marks his first public sector role. He started as an assistant manager in 2009 and ascended to his current title two years later. 

Grebert relishes the shared commitment among his team to attract people to MoAD Old Parliament House and safeguard a bright and prosperous future for the museum. “We are trying to ensure the building is maintained, enhanced and conserved for future generations,” he says.

Dubbed the ‘People’s Place’, MoAD is a unique cultural institution, Grebert says – a place of learning, education and national reminiscence seven days a week, 364 days a year. 

“We manage the leases and liaise with all the seven tenant stakeholders,” he says. “We’ve got a catering contractor on site and we manage the health approvals, all the events and the utilities.”

“We want to make it accessible and welcoming,” he says. 

Grebert oversees the delivery of the usual facility management suspects including pest control, security, cleaning and maintenance, however, his role also encompasses heritage management. “I’m head of heritage, so my team manages the heritage governance within the building,” he says. 

Pursuing ongoing improvement at a heritage-listed building 

During the first few weeks of March, Grebert’s days are occupied by the rollout of Enlighten, a beloved Canberra festival that sees light illuminations and illustrations splashed across Old Parliament House. This year, artwork by Claudia Chinyere Akole lit up Old Parliament House in celebration of the museum’s Date with Democracy event.

Grebert’s team busies themselves delivering a safe and accessible experience for Enlighten patrons. 

“We had 5000 people turn up in three-and-a-half hours on the first Saturday of the festival,” he says. “We manage their access and safety and make sure they are enjoying themselves.”

He speaks of the juggling act all-too-familiar to facilities managers: managing assets and ensuring safety and accessibility, while navigating an occasionally cumbersome hierarchy of priorities. 

“We’ve got to make the building accessible and be able to let people see and use it, but we have to also care for it,” Grebert says. 

The facilities team at MoAD is committed to improving the building’s energy efficiency and engagement with sustainability through an environmental action plan. “We’re currently working on an environmental sustainability action plan and hopefully in the next few months we’ll start seeing the fruits of our labor,” he says. 

Grebert says the rollout of sustainability initiatives and full compliance to them can be made difficult by the age of the building. Although it is exciting and wondrous to work at a heritage marvel, it does throw challenges the team’s way. 

“This building is very inefficient, being built in 1927, so we’re working hard on making it more efficient,” Grebert says. “Updating and improving infrastructure and services to this building is challenging, as we’ve got to maintain and enhance the heritage values at the same time,” he says. 

Any amendments to the building must comply with the General Environment Protection Policy and filter through an internal approval process. Grebert says the team also regularly submits applications to request changes to the heritage fabric. 

The maintenance team relies on alternate solution methodologies and interdisciplinary collaboration to ensure safety and untampered heritage in projects. 

“In nearly every project, we have to work closely with architects and engineers to come up with a way to achieve compliance, but also minimise the damage to any heritage fabric,” Grebert explains.

Using the history of the building to inform the present 

In 2013, Grebert and his team embarked on a project to update the boilers in the building. Inserting new boilers into an 1927 brick chimney, while adhering to compliance, involved collaboration with engineers, manufacturers and heritage architects. 

Grebert says the project was an exciting and immersive trip back in time. The team tracked down the original plans and used history as an information source for the present.

“It’s interesting to see how it was designed for the provisional parliament, and obviously we’re a museum now, so we have a different operation, but we used the history of the building to help guide our new decisions,” he says. 

“The engineers had to design around the actual historical infrastructure, and that was achieved, and we won an ACT Heritage Award for an outstanding project.”

Uplifting behind-the-scenes work 

Grebert says the award-winning project debunks the myth that facilities management exclusively concerns the duties of a handyman. The complex moving parts and rigorous planning of the profession are often overlooked. 

“The industry is advanced and deep, and we ensure the basic maintenance requirements are addressed, but there’s a lot of planning that goes into it,” he says. “We’ve got asset management programs for thousands of assets at Old Parliament House.”

Managing large procurements unseen to the naked eye is a challenge, Grebert says, alongside overseeing a facility’s Work Health and Safety (WHS), security, and heritage and collection processes and governance.

“I know people might think facility management is a maintenance job, but there’s a lot to it in the background,” he says. 

Grebert says programs such as preventative maintenance, lifecycle cost planning and capital replacement programs ensure the team remains proactive instead of reactive. 

“We’re not running to fail, we’re programming replacement,” he says. 

Technological innovation at Old Parliament House

In his 16 year tenure, Grebert has seen the museum expand and offer more interactive experiences to visitors – storage under the chambers was transformed into exhibition spaces and the accessibility and inclusivity of the museum was bolstered by the addition of hearing loops, lifts and viewing spots in the chamber. 

He says future projects include inserting LED lighting, data control and efficient plant equipment into “the bones of a very old building”. 

According to Grebert, the building’s engagement with technology has come in “leaps and bounds”. An automated building management system now operates the software and hardware, electronic access systems make entry and exit easy for staff and phone applications allow the team to remotely monitor maintenance requests. 

“I can look in on the app and see if it’s a major fault where we need to call in after-hours technology support, or we can live with it until the next day,” Grebert says. 

But he notes one minor downfall of automated systems, in comparison to plant equipment.

“Everything is really reliant now on that IT service, so if there is a fault, it’s not like the old plant equipment back in the day where we could rekick the boiler,” Grebert says. “It’s technological issues or a software upgrade that has caused a problem.”

The Crowdstrike outage last July caused the team to momentarily revert to repairing equipment manually and inspired the implementation of processes to combat a future outage. “We had to run around and manually turn off things,” he says. 

Grebert cites efficient responsiveness and preparation as the unofficial ethos and raison d’etre for facility management. 

“These things happen, and hopefully you have plans for most of it,” he says. “That’s just facility management.”

Future-proof facility management  

The comfort and safety of future generations visiting MoAD remains a constant source of motivation for Grebert. He says he is merely one custodian of a building that has a long history and a hopefully longer future. 

“It’s just a stewardship for me,” he says. “I’m here to look after it, but it’s going to be here for another however many years – what we’re doing is bettering [it for] future visitors.”

“I’ve always said my responsibility as head of facilities, security and heritage is to leave Old Parliament House in a better condition – more accessible and more environmentally sustainable than when I arrived,” he says.

He conjures a future image of driving past the building when he is retired and swelling with pride and satisfaction at a facility management job well done.

The Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House decisively contributes to the social and cultural fabric of Canberra and Australia, as a place of learning and engagement and a homage to democratic history. 

“Our role at MoAD is to share the stories of this nation’s significant heritage building,” he says. 

“We protect, we serve and interpret the iconic building that is Old Parliament House.”

 Photography supplied by MoAD unless otherwise stated. 

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