SYDNEY — Australia's newest and most expensive museum opens its doors on Saturday under the cloud of an unresolved misconduct investigation that has sidelined the two executives most responsible for building it.
Powerhouse Parramatta, a roughly AU$915 million (about US$600 million) riverside museum in Western Sydney designed by the Paris-based firm Moreau Kusunoki with Sydney's Genton, opens to the public on Nov. 7 after nearly a decade of planning and construction. Inaugural commissions from the artist Ayoung Kim and the light artist James Turrell are meant to announce the 30,000-square-metre building as a genuine rival to the original Powerhouse Museum across the harbor in Ultimo, which stays open through its own renovation.
A museum without its builder
The opening proceeds without Lisa Havilah, the chief executive who has run the Powerhouse Museum network since 2017 and was the public face of the Parramatta project through years of construction. Havilah stepped aside in late August, roughly ten weeks before the scheduled opening, after a whistleblower complaint triggered a review of governance and procurement practices at the institution. The museum's chief operating officer, Mark Wilsdon, was stood down at the same time; both remain on leave on full pay while the inquiry continues.
Neither the New South Wales government nor the state agency overseeing the review has detailed the specific allegations. At a parliamentary estimates hearing, Arts Minister John Graham told lawmakers only that a range of claims had been raised against several Powerhouse executives, declining to go further and citing the confidentiality owed to whistleblowers under the state's public-interest disclosure law.
A range of allegations were put to a number of Powerhouse executives.
Arts Minister John Graham, NSW parliamentary estimates hearing
In Havilah's absence, the NSW Government Architect, Abbie Galvin, has been installed as interim chief executive to carry the museum through its launch — an unusual arrangement for an institution opening to international press and dignitaries within days.
Pressing ahead regardless
Graham has insisted the project itself was delivered on budget and on schedule, and the Powerhouse Trust's president has said publicly that the opening will go ahead as planned. The complaint that triggered the review surfaced in March 2025; it escalated into a formal misconduct investigation by December, with the state's anti-corruption watchdog also notified, according to reporting on the inquiry's timeline. No findings have been made public.
The controversy lands at an awkward moment for a project that has already drawn criticism on other grounds — chiefly that building an entirely new museum in Parramatta diverted money and attention from the aging Ultimo campus, whose own overhaul has been repeatedly delayed. Supporters counter that Western Sydney, home to more than two million people, has long been underserved by the state's flagship cultural institutions, and that Parramatta's riverside site is designed to anchor a broader cultural precinct the state government has been promoting ahead of next year's election.
For now, the investigation and the opening are running on separate tracks. Visitors arriving this weekend will see finished galleries, a Turrell light installation and a new Kim commission; what they will not see is any public account of what, exactly, prompted two of the people who built the place to leave before it opened. Graham has said he cannot say when — or whether — Havilah will return until the inquiry concludes.
