Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt has asked the weather agency's new boss to examine how the website's cost and redesign went so wrong.
The Bureau of Meteorology's (BOM) flawed and expensive redesigned website will come under renewed scrutiny, with the federal environment minister asking the agency's new boss to closely examine how it all went so wrong, and report back to him.
It comes amid revelations that the new website cost more than $96 million to design — a far cry from the $4 million figure it originally claimed had been spent.
The national weather agency was flooded with complaints by the public after the website was launched a month ago.
Users found it difficult to navigate, and also criticised the changes to the radar map, which made place names hard to read.
BOM users, farmers in particular, were critical of the changes made to the radar map. (ABC Rural: Justine Longmore)
Farmers were scathing, as they were unable to locate rainfall data.
The federal government was forced to intervene, ordering the agency to fix the website.
The site has since reverted to the old version of the radar map and other tweaks have been made to the site, with further changes to be rolled out.
In a statement provided to the ABC, the BOM admitted "the total cost of the website is approximately $96.5 million".
'Complete rebuild necessary'
It said the cost breakdown included $4.1 million for the redesign, $79.8 million for the website build, and the site's launch and security testing cost $12.6 million.
"A complete rebuild was necessary to ensure the website meets modern security, usability and accessibility requirements for the millions of Australians who reply on it every day," a spokesperson said.
The spokesperson also said it had "continued to listen to and analyse community feedback" since the launch of the new website on October 22.
The BOM says it continues to listen to and analyse community feedback. (ABC News: Greg Bigelow)
Nine days after the launch it changed the radar map back to what it had previously been.
"This brought back the visual style that the community said they found intuitive and reliable for interpreting weather conditions,"a spokesperson said.
"This option was already available on the new site but not as the default setting when visiting the page.
"On 7 November we implemented changes to help the community find important fire behaviour index information."
Future changes were also in the pipeline in response to community feedback, according to the spokesperson, but some updates had been paused due to Severe Tropical Cyclone Fina in northern Australia.
Minister's expectations 'have been made very clear'
Environment Minister Murray Watt said he had met twice in the past week with the new CEO Stuart Minchin to reiterate his concerns about the bungled process and the cost.
The environment minister says he has met twice with the BOM's new boss. (ABC News: Callum Flinn)
He has asked Mr Minchin to report back to him on the issue.
"I don't think it's secret that I haven't been happy with the way the BOM has handled the transition to the new website," he told reporters on Sunday.
"I met with him on his first day and during the week just gone, to outline again that I think the BOM hasn't met public expectations, both in terms of the performance of the website and the cost of the website.
"So I've asked him as his first priority to make sure that he can get on top of the issues with the website — the functionality — and I'm pleased to see they've made changes.
"But I've also asked him to get on top of how we got to this position with this cost, with the problems.
"He's only been in the job for a week but I think my expectations have been made very clear."
The minister has asked new BOM boss, Stuart Minchin, to prioritise the issues with the website. (Supplied: BOM)
However the minister stopped short of describing the website as a sheer waste of money, saying he would wait to hear back from Mr Minchin before commenting.
"Before leaping to judgement, I want to see what the new CEO of the BOM has been able to establish as to the reasons for those cost increases and I'll make my judgement at that point in time."
'Another Labor disaster'
Nationals leader David Littleproud said there should be "consequences" after the revelations about the true cost of the website.
"It is unbelievable a private consultancy was paid $78 million to redesign the website," Mr Littleproud said.
"But then security and system testing meant that Australian taxpayers actually paid $96 million for what was nothing more than another Labor disaster,.
"The seriousness of this cannot be understated. This isn't just about a clunky website, the changes actually put lives and safety at risk.
"The new platform did not allow people to enter GPS coordinates for their specific property locations, restricting searches to towns or postcodes.
"Families and farmers could not access vital, localised data such as river heights and rainfall information and this missing data created panic and fear across communities.
"But now, the fact the BOM has been hiding the true cost of its white elephant and initially lying about the total figure is deeply concerning, considering that the BOM should be all about trust."
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Comments
By asdefghyk 2025-11-2415:33 FROM https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-24/bom-website-approved-... "... "The $96.5 million that we're talking about was not just the front end of the website, the tip of the iceberg that the public sees, but the back end, which sees data flowing from tens of thousands of pieces of equipment in the field, to the supercomputer that does all the modelling, right through to systems that actually forecast the weather and put it through to the website," he said.
"So every bit of that chain had to be hardened and made secure to stop a future attack taking down the whole website."...."
Hopefully they'll go through all billed invoices with a microscope. My guess is that this will reveal outright fraud from the consulting firm(s), in the form of overbilling in hours.
Even if they bill $500/hr, and they billed 24 hours a day, that would come out to $4.38m / year for each consultant. That's a 11 member team billing 24 hours a day, all year round, for two years straight.
And if they billed more realistic hours, said team would blow up by many multiples. But of course, billed hours is not the only thing consulting firms will charge.
EDIT: For comparison, the website www.yr.no/en, has I believe 10 - 12 devs working. Maybe they've grown since the past years.
By aleph_minus_one 2025-11-2413:552 reply I doubt that the consulting firm seriously overbilled.
To my knowledge rather consulting firms are great at selling the necessity of lots of consultants or consultant days:
Just let the customer talk very openly about their wishes for the project, and you immediately get an insane scope explosion for the project, i.e. it "needs" an insane amount of consultants over many years to implement all these wishes.
To increase the bill, every highly qualified consultant that is necessary for the project "needs" a lot of support personnel (senior consultants) so that the senior consultant can 100 % concentrate on their work (otherwise the customer would pay insane hourly rates for highly qualified experts to do "grunt work" - no customer would "want" that). This way, you sell a huge number of senior consultants (this is rather some low rank) to the customer.
And, by the way: since of cause many consultants you sell to the customer shall be highly qualified experts in their discipline, and the project trivially consists of a lot of disciplines, the number of subject-matter experts that can be sold to the customer can be increased by a lot. In some ordinary software project, you would simply use a small team of good generalists (jacks of all trades, master of none) who can do most things in the project, but of cause, as a consulting company, you rather sell the customer "some of the greatest experts that money can buy" (without mentioning that these are insanely expensive and not really needed for the project).
That's how you do it; scamming or billing unrealistic hours is for amateurs.
By TYPE_FASTER 2025-11-2414:29 > To my knowledge rather consulting firms are great at selling the necessity of lots of consultants consultant days: Just let the customer talk very openly about their wishes for the project, and you immediately get an insane scope explosion for the project, i.e. it "needs" an insane amount of consultants over many years to implement all these wishes.
"Oh yeah, we can do that!" Boom, there's a team...somewhere...working on it. It's a line on an on-site project manager's status report.
By datadrivenangel 2025-11-2414:511 reply You just do it at enterprise scale with all the people needed to make it enterprise legible... and a couple of setbacks and change orders later and you're at 2.5x the original budget!
By JSR_FDED 2025-11-2415:32 Yeah but in this case it was 23x over budget
By datadrivenangel 2025-11-2414:49 AT $250 an hour and 8 hours per day / 2000 hours per year, that's almost ~50 people years, which likely means a team of 10-12 devs working on it over 18 months with another 1-3 design and product and project people in the way making things look good until the bill arrived. Accenture is good at that. [0]
0 - https://australiatimes.com/australia-s-bureau-of-meteorology...
By mrtksn 2025-11-2414:08 See, usually you don't have 11 developers coding 24/7. What you usually have is project managers, account managers etc and then a few people who code every now and then. Then you have licenses and support costs.
You can't just code the website, zip the code and mail it to the client. They have many stakeholders like this person needs to be able to show this that persin needs to be able to access this etc because they are running a business or service with than many people. Then you will have requirements like blind people should be able to use that and someone should be able to monitor all that. For each complication you will use specialized tools and do integration, i.e. Adobe will sell you one thing Oracle will sell you another thing and you will have to have people overseeing all these integrations and requirements etc.
That's why you have thousands of employees in tech companies with seemingly a simple product that you can fully code in a week(at least the user facing part of it).
By delusional 2025-11-2413:151 reply Where did you get 11 members from?
Just a hypothetical. If you have a team of 11 devs billing $500 / hour, every hour of the day, all year round, that comes out to a hair over $48 million a year. Do that for two years, and you have the $96.5m bill. Not necessarily rooted in reality.
Ok, here is another realistic hypothetical: a team of 10 devs billing $500/hour, plus extra "package" fees for subject matter expert review, machine learning experts advice, senior partner reviews, focus group experiments, A/B test monitoring, regulatory compliance lawyers, all coming at extra cost. You will find that they can milk that cow legally in much more imaginative ways than your calculation.
> "It is unbelievable a private consultancy was paid $78 million to redesign the website," Mr Littleproud said.
This is the crux of the issue. If you have outsourced software engineering competency, yet one of your core missions is maintaining a large pile of software, then this is the inevitable result.
By stephen_g 2025-11-2414:14 Of course one really ‘unbelievable’ thing is that this infrastructure upgrade contract (including the website) was actually initiated and approved by the previous Government (since voted out to opposition) that Littleproud was part of back in 2017…
By jihadjihad 2025-11-2413:561 reply The private consultancy likely outsourced pieces of the work to (far) lesser-paid subcontractors, too.
I would imagine the margins on that project to be astronomical.
By trollbridge 2025-11-2415:13 My primary competition is guys who are good at marketing, sell expensive packages, and then have someone in the Phillipines or Vietnam do the actual work for a tiny fraction of what is paid.
My primary source of business is customers who paid a lot for they and didn’t get what they asked for and then the vendor blames it all on their subcontractor, or expects more money at astronomical rates. For example $200 an hour for basic WordPress customisation.
