Inside the Bureau of Meteorology’s $96m website fiasco

A $96 million rebuild of the Bureau of Meteorology’s website, delivered years overdue and costing almost triple the original budget, has been described by IT experts as a “mafia” operation that attempted to “strip mine” the near-broke weather agency.

The website rebuild is now the subject of a review, which experts say should focus on the relationship with global IT firm Accenture and the management of its contract at the agency.

Despite The Saturday Paper first revealing the full cost of the work order to build the maligned website in September last year, the agency continued to push a misleading line that attempted to pass off the new website as a $4 million redesign – 24 times less than the actual cost.

That ended on Sunday, when Stuart Minchin replaced acting chief executive Peter Stone and issued a statement on the real costs. Stone is a long-time bureau executive and was consigliere to former chief executive Andrew Johnson, under whom a series of massive infrastructure transformations began.

“The total cost of the website is approximately $96.5 million. This includes the previously stated $4.1 million required to redesign the front-end of the website,” Minchin said in a statement.

“The remaining cost reflects the significant investment required to fully rebuild and test the systems and technology that underpin the website, making sure it is secure and stable and can draw in the huge amounts of data gathered from our observing network and weather models. Given this investment, it’s vital we get it right.”

Stone avoided disciplinary action in February last year after a Federal Circuit Court judge found he “made up” an answer in his evidence in a “deliberate attempt to mislead the court” about an unfair dismissal case that the agency eventually settled. Johnson is now the chief executive of Gladstone Ports Corporation, having left the BoM in September.

The changing of the guard at the agency follows almost a decade of cultural issues and comes as Environment Minister Murray Watt demands a review of what happened with the new website.

“I think the BoM has got some explaining to do about that,” he told the ABC’s Radio National Breakfast on Monday morning.

“We do have a new CEO of the BoM who only started two weeks ago after this all occurred. I met with him on his very first day.

“I’ve met with him since – so twice in his first fortnight – and made very clear to him that I want him to get on top of the issues around the website. Not just continue making changes to make it more usable, but get on top of how we got to this situation in the first place.”

At the heart of this issue is the management of an almost $900 million infrastructure overhaul triggered by a 2015 cybersecurity attack on Australian government entities, which revealed critical weaknesses at the weather agency and allowed foreign spyware to be installed on its computer network. This overhaul program was named Robust.

“They are like the mafia. Their business model is to come sniffing for work and hook the client before they realise it’s too late to change course when things start going wrong. And they always go wrong.”

The remake of the bureau’s website was part of this three-stage package and was supposed to be delivered three years ago. Contracts to Accenture originally inked in 2019 for the build of the digital channels and related “supporting” systems were worth $31 million but have since been amended 10 times, stacking on an additional $47 million in costs, to be worth almost $80 million.

“There is a reason they are called Accidenture in the industry,” an IT consultant and project manager tells The Saturday Paper.

“Like many consulting firms, Accenture are masters of ‘land and expand’. You start with a small project and once you’re in with the customer, it’s much easier for them to buy more of you.

“Small businesses in Australia are really grumpy because it’s hard to get on a [procurement] panel, and even if you get on one, the government often does ‘no bid’ contracts or targeted or preferred supplier arrangements. It’s quicker, sure, but partly it is just government not being very organised.”

Several IT sources, who did not wish to speak on the record because of past or existing relationships with Accenture and Deloitte, the latter of which handled the $4 million design work for the BoM website, told The Saturday Paper the Bureau of Meteorology work was a perfect storm of agency incompetence and consultants’ predatory billing practices.

“They are like the mafia. Their business model is to come sniffing for work and hook the client before they realise it’s too late to change course when things start going wrong. And they always go wrong,” one project manager says. “But in this case, they found the perfect mark.”

This view is echoed by others.

“Accenture has been strip mining the BoM for a long time,” another IT boss says.

“It’s hard to know at the moment who is worse in Commonwealth capers – Accenture or Capgemini – but whichever it is, the sale works because they’ve learnt or adapted to be the career coaches of the SES [the public service’s senior executive service] that sign the cheques and have very solid lobbyist cover to keep the ministers sweet.”

The Bureau of Meteorology has one of the most complex web outputs in the country, a labyrinth of data that was poorly guarded.

“So, given that the BoM had terrible cybersecurity, we can pretty much guarantee that their asset inventories were garbage,” an IT consultant says.

“It accumulates over time. If it’s not very well maintained, and if you’re constantly cutting budgets and forcing efficiency dividends, there’s no money for maintenance, there’s only money for new projects. So new stuff keeps getting thrown into it, and the maintenance is ignored because it’s boring and no one gets it until it explodes.”

Nationals leader David Littleproud was incensed by the figures finally publicly admitted to by the BoM, but attempted, incorrectly in this instance, to pin the blame on Labor.

“It is unbelievable a private consultancy was paid $78 million to redesign the website, but then security and system testing meant that Australian taxpayers actually paid $96 million for what was nothing more than another Labor disaster,” Littleproud said in a statement last Sunday.

“The seriousness of this cannot be understated. This isn’t just about a clunky website, the changes actually put lives and safety at risk.”

It is a matter of public record that this design work began in 2019 and, according to an Australian National Audit Office report from January, the broader maintenance of the billion-dollar weather observing system and its 15,000 assets has been a debacle stretching over many years.

The top executive at the agency during this entire period was a Coalition appointee, Andrew Johnson, who was installed as chief executive and director of meteorology by then environment minister Josh Frydenberg. Johnson then hired Stone, with whom he had worked closely at the CSIRO.

The ANAO found that despite $225.6 million in additional funding being made available over three years, from 2021/22, and $143.7 million each year after that to “maintain a proactive asset maintenance schedule consistent with industry best practice”, executives at the BoM raided this budget to boost core operational funds.

In September last year The Saturday Paper received a leaked tape of a speech delivered by Johnson, in which he said the agency was essentially broke.

“The bureau is, like every other aspect of Australian society, whether it’s at home, all of us feeling this at home, or businesses or government, our revenues are essentially flat, our appropriation resources are flat but our costs are increasing, and some of those costs have increased very significantly in the last 12 to 24 months,” Johnson said at the time.

“It is a very, very significant challenge. I’m not going to sugar-coat it and I know we’ve all experienced some belt-tightening just this last year that I know has impacted on many of you, but I take our fiscal fidelity very, very seriously. We’re stewards of Australian community money, and we’re in a challenging environment and I don’t see that challenge diminishing over time.”

Last year, the BoM told Senate estimates that it had never included penalty clauses in any of the voluminous contracts associated with the $900 million Robust transformation, including for the new website, because these are “unenforceable under contract law”. It could have triggered built-in contract remedies but did not do so under any of the Robust contracts because “the performance of vendors has been consistent with their commitments under each respective contract”.

Sector experts queried whether this was actually the case and hoped a review would seriously examine the oversight of the contracts.

An IT consultant and project manager told The Saturday Paper  a “real investigation and not a political cover-up” would likely reveal some boring but critical answers about the way the public service handles large projects.

“I expect a great deal of rug sweeping, if they can find enough space under there, but if we were to have a real investigation [into] it, let’s have a look at the trajectory of these projects.  Sure, there is a political angle to it – who knew what and when – but when did the wheels start to come off, and was it made clear? Because often in these things, bad news gets buried.

“This is for structural reasons because no one wants to be the person who brings you the bad news. So, this is widely known throughout all IT projects – status reports tend to be green until they go red.

“I expect that we will see things like, we’ll see some re-scoping. Things will either be taken out of scope because they’re not going to get delivered in time, or things that the company said were going great, turns out, yeah, they meant they were going ‘interesting’.

“I also suspect this was poorly specced at the outset. Accenture won the work based on a vague scope where they said, ‘Sure, we’ll figure it out as we go’, knowing full well that if this is an important system, once they’ve won the deal, the BoM is not going to suddenly cancel it and start again, because they’re locked in.

“You know, as long as they’re not completely egregious – which, for consultancies, what they would think of as egregious is quite different to what the public might think – they know that they’ll be able to get at least 100 per cent of the budget, because most IT projects go over budget by 100 per cent.”

Accenture’s payday was 2.5 times the initial work order.

The firm, which has 779,000 employees across the globe and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a current market capitalisation of US$155 billion, declined to comment on its general business practices or its work specifically on the BoM project.

A spokesperson for the BoM said Accenture was “contracted to build and support a component of the Bureau’s new technology ecosystem, including the Content Management System (CMS)”.

“The change in Accenture contract value reflects the take up of multiple extension options built into the initial contract, as well as delays encountered from COVID-19, technology dependencies [and] the complexity of the solution which were unknown at the time of executing the initial agreement.

“The Bureau reviews all contracts in line with government Value for Money principles.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
November 29, 2025 as “Inside BoM’s $96m fiasco”.

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