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26 June 2009 

Local industry has played a huge part in the development of the Melbourne Convention Centre which officially opened its doors for business earlier this week.

A main feature of the Melbourne Convention Centre is its Plenary, an amazing space that can either stand alone as a 5000 seat auditorium or, by activating three 16.8m high operable walls, be reconfigured into three self-contained, acoustically-separate auditoriums, one with the capacity for 2500 guests and two for 1500 each.

Inside the Plenary there are two tiers of fixed seating and a lower section of 42 independent reconfigurable seating rows, with approximately 1600 seats arranged in an arc shape around the central stage area.

These rows can be raised, within a mere 10 minutes, to be tiered in line with the rest of the seating or lowered with the seats stowing directly underneath the floor, transforming the auditorium into an extraordinary flat-floor space for cabarets, banquets, sporting events or trade exhibitions.

While it was originally proposed that the retractable seating system would be imported from Canada , Industry Capability Network (ICN) was engaged to locate local companies capable of manufacturing and installing the unique seating system.

ICN’s primary mission is to reduce imports and retain Australian wealth and job opportunities that may otherwise go off-shore. 

The result: local Victorian company Metaltec Precision Engineering, based in Cheltenham , supplied the structural and mechanical elements of the gala seating system and integrated the patented lifting jacks into the design which are unique to the lift-and-tilt mechanism of the seating system.

Camatic Seating based in Wantirna South supplied the actual seating; and Control IT based in Williamstown supplied the electrical and electronic control systems.

MCEC’s chief executive Leigh Harry said: ‘The Melbourne Convention Centre is the first venue in Australia to install a gala seating system. The fact that Victoria has local companies capable of creating projects like this is truly inspiring and a real boost for the Victorian economy.

‘The Plenary is the centrepiece of the Melbourne Convention Centre giving us the flexibility of holding three totally separate major conventions at the one time, each one with its own section of gala seating,’ Leigh said.

With the opening of the convention centre, Melbourne has cemented itself as home to the most advanced exhibition and convention space in the Southern Hemisphere and one of most impressive architectural and environmental buildings in the nation.

Fifty major international conventions and a predicted 190 national conventions, meetings and large seminars have already been won for the centre between 2009 and 2015, bringing more than 270,000 delegates to Melbourne and injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into the Victorian economy.