Luxury offices in one of Canberra's most prestigious buildings, leased by the Commonwealth for about $10 million-a-year, will sit almost half-vacant for another 12 months before finally being fully occupied again.
Much of the high-tech office space at New Acton's Nishi building has sat vacant since at least mid-2015 and will not be occupied until the end of 2017.
About 500 bureaucrats from the Department of Communication and the Arts are the lucky bureaucrats chosen to move to the Nishi precincts, with its restaurants, bars and shops from their present location at Barton, which has been criticised for its lack of "amenity".
The Communications and Arts workers will move across Lake Burley Griffin when the lease on their main office HQ, at 38 Sydney Avenue, Barton, expires at the end of 2017.
The public service's occupation of Nishi, which beat an international field in 2015 to take out the International Project of the Year at the 2015 Building Awards in London, has had a chequered history.
The building, which was leased by the government for $158 million in 2012 to accommodate 750 public servants but by mid-2015, there just 358 public servants working out of the swank central Canberra address but taxpayers were still footing the full $10 million annual rental bill.
When the six-star energy-rated office was leased to the now defunct Department of Climate Change, it was criticised by the Coalition, then in opposition, as one of the worst property deals for the Commonwealth in 20 years and as "an unbelievable reckless waste of Australian taxpayers' money".
Now, departments and agencies are being moved around Canberra and other capital cities as the Commonwealth government grapples with massive rental and maintenance costs for a real estate footprint that stood at the last official count at more than 34,000 empty desks spread across 500 plus buildings nation-wide.
Last year the government announced a strategic bid – dubbed Operation Tetris – to save taxpayers millions of dollars by condensing office space after years of redundancies and downsizing.
A spokesman for the Department of the Communication and the Arts confirmed that he and his colleagues were preparing to move north of the lake in late 2017.
"The Department's current lease at 38 Sydney Avenue expires in November 2017," the spokesman said.
"In line with property management guidelines, the department is unable to extend its current lease as the Commonwealth has unoccupied space at the Nishi building in New Acton.
"It is expected arrangements will be finalised in coming weeks for the Department to assume responsibility for the Nishi building lease from 1 July 2017.
"Staff have been advised that all Canberra-based staff (approximately 500) would re-locate to Nishi around September-November 2017."
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