{"id":315445,"date":"2025-11-29T01:14:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T01:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/315445\/"},"modified":"2025-11-29T01:14:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T01:14:11","slug":"inside-the-bureau-of-meteorologys-96m-website-fiasco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/315445\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Bureau of Meteorology\u2019s $96m website fiasco"},"content":{"rendered":"

A $96 million rebuild of the Bureau of Meteorology\u2019s website, delivered years overdue and costing almost triple the original budget, has been described by IT experts as a \u201cmafia\u201d operation that attempted to \u201cstrip mine\u201d the near-broke weather agency.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 24\u00a0times less than the actual cost.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d Minchin said in a statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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\u2019s vital we get it right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stone avoided disciplinary action in February last year after a Federal Circuit Court judge found he \u201cmade up\u201d an answer in his evidence in a \u201cdeliberate attempt to mislead the court\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the BoM has got some explaining to do about that,\u201d he told the ABC\u2019s Radio National Breakfast on Monday morning.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve met with him since \u2013 so twice in his first fortnight \u2013 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are like the mafia. Their business model is to come sniffing for work and hook the client before they realise it\u2019s too late to change course when things start going wrong. And they always go\u00a0wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

The remake of the bureau\u2019s 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 \u201csupporting\u201d systems were worth $31\u00a0million but have since been amended 10\u00a0times, stacking on an additional $47\u00a0million in costs, to be worth almost $80 million.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a reason they are called Accidenture in the industry,\u201d an IT consultant and project manager tells The Saturday Paper.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike many consulting firms, Accenture are masters of \u2018land and expand\u2019. You start with a small project and once you\u2019re in with the customer, it\u2019s much easier for them to buy more of you.<\/p>\n

\u201cSmall businesses in Australia are really grumpy because it\u2019s hard to get on a [procurement] panel, and even if you get on one, the government often does \u2018no bid\u2019 contracts or targeted or preferred supplier arrangements. It\u2019s quicker, sure, but partly it is\u00a0just government not being very organised.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several IT sources, who did not wish to speak on the record because of past or existing relationships with Accenture and Deloitte, the\u00a0latter of which handled the $4\u00a0million design work for the BoM website, told The Saturday Paper the Bureau of Meteorology work was a perfect storm of agency incompetence and consultants\u2019 predatory billing practices.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are like the mafia. Their business model is to come sniffing for work and hook the client before they realise it\u2019s too late to change course when things start going wrong. And they always go wrong,\u201d one project manager says. \u201cBut in this case, they found the perfect mark.\u201d<\/p>\n

This view is echoed by others.<\/p>\n

\u201cAccenture has been strip mining the BoM for a long time,\u201d another IT boss says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard to know at the moment who is worse in Commonwealth capers \u2013 Accenture or Capgemini \u2013 but whichever it is, the sale works because they\u2019ve learnt or adapted to be the career coaches of the SES [the public service\u2019s senior executive service] that sign the cheques and have very solid lobbyist cover to keep the ministers sweet.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Bureau of Meteorology has one of the most complex web outputs in the country, a labyrinth of data that was poorly guarded.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, given that the BoM had terrible cybersecurity, we can pretty much guarantee that their asset inventories were garbage,\u201d an\u00a0IT consultant says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt accumulates over time. If it\u2019s not very well maintained, and if you\u2019re constantly cutting budgets and forcing efficiency dividends, there\u2019s no money for maintenance, there\u2019s only money for new projects. So new stuff keeps getting thrown into it, and the maintenance is ignored because it\u2019s boring and no one gets it until it explodes.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt 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\u00a0million for what was nothing more than another Labor disaster,\u201d Littleproud said in a\u00a0statement last Sunday.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe seriousness of this cannot be understated. This isn\u2019t just about a clunky website, the changes actually put lives and safety at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The ANAO found that despite $225.6\u00a0million in additional funding being made available over three years, from 2021\/22, and $143.7 million each year after that to \u201cmaintain a proactive asset maintenance schedule consistent with industry best practice\u201d, executives at the BoM raided this budget to boost core operational funds.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bureau is, like every other aspect of Australian society, whether it\u2019s 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\u00a0to 24 months,\u201d Johnson said at the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a very, very significant challenge. I\u2019m not going to sugar-coat it and I know we\u2019ve 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\u2019re stewards of Australian community money, and we\u2019re in a challenging environment and I don\u2019t see that challenge diminishing over time.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cunenforceable under contract law\u201d. It could have triggered built-in contract remedies but did not do so under any of the Robust contracts because \u201cthe performance of vendors has been consistent with their commitments under each respective contract\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sector experts queried whether this was actually the case and hoped a review would seriously examine the oversight of the contracts.<\/p>\n

An IT consultant and project manager told The Saturday Paper\u00a0 a \u201creal investigation and not a political cover-up\u201d would likely reveal some boring but critical answers about the way the public service handles large projects.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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\u2019s have a look at the trajectory of these projects.\u00a0 Sure, there is a political angle to it \u2013 who knew what and when \u2013 but when did the wheels start to come off, and was it made clear? Because often in these things, bad news gets buried.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis 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 \u2013 status reports tend to be green until they go red.<\/p>\n

\u201cI expect that we will see things like, we\u2019ll see some re-scoping. Things will either be taken out of scope because they\u2019re not going to get delivered in time, or things that the company said were going great, turns out, yeah, they meant they were going \u2018interesting\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cI also suspect this was poorly specced at the outset. Accenture won the work based on a vague scope where they said, \u2018Sure, we\u2019ll figure it out as we go\u2019, knowing full well that if this is an important system, once they\u2019ve won the deal, the BoM is not going to suddenly cancel it and start again, because they\u2019re locked in.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, as long as they\u2019re not completely egregious \u2013 which, for consultancies, what they would think of as egregious is quite different to what the public might think \u2013 they know that they\u2019ll be able to get at least 100 per cent of the budget, because most IT projects go over budget by 100 per cent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Accenture\u2019s payday was 2.5 times the initial work order.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the BoM said Accenture was \u201ccontracted to build and support a component of the Bureau\u2019s new technology ecosystem, including the Content Management System (CMS)\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bureau reviews all contracts in line with government Value for Money principles.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n November 29, 2025 as “Inside BoM\u2019s $96m fiasco”.<\/p>\n

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