The Bureau of Meteorology’s new CEO has been ordered to account for the $96 million blowout of its unpopular website redesign, as Environment Minister Murray Watt revealed the bureau did not tell him the scale of the expense when he was first briefed.

Revelations of the massive cost blowout were first reported in this masthead on Sunday, with new weather bureau chief Dr Stuart Minchin saying he would usher in greater transparency and admit to mistakes the agency has made.

“I’m not happy about this,” Watt told the ABC on Monday morning, “and you will recall that when the issues first surfaced with the changes to the BoM website recently, I called in the acting CEO of the BoM for an explanation, and I made clear that it wasn’t meeting the public’s expectations, and we’ve now learned that the cost increase has been higher than what was originally known.

“I’ve asked the new [chief executive] of the BoM to get on top of what happened here. If there are lessons … we need to know what they are.”

The website received a refreshed look on October 22 – the first change to the service’s design in 12 years – but was widely criticised for its new radar layout, which farmers, fishers and meteorologists found unusable as storms ravaged the country’s south-east.

At the time, the bureau claimed the bill for the website redesign was $4.1 million, however, Minchin conceded to this masthead that the total cost of the project was closer to $96 million when security testing was added to the $78 million design contract for private consultancy Accenture Australia.

“I’m looking forward to a bit of a change in the culture and the approach of the BoM, and I want to make very clear that it’s an institution and has staff that I very much support. They perform a really important role for the Australian public. We need a high-quality BoM delivering high-quality information, and that can manage its budgets properly. So I’m expecting the new CEO to be able to take charge of that,” Watt said.

Assistant Immigration Minister Matt Thistlethwaite said Watt had “launched an investigation to try and find out how this has occurred”, labelling the cost of the project as “ridiculous”.

“The BoM website is pretty important. I use it regularly to see what’s going on with the surf and where the good swells are going to be. But more importantly, farmers use it on a, on a daily basis to run their businesses. So, it is an important piece of government infrastructure, and that cost blowout is ridiculous and simply unacceptable,” Thistlethwaite told Sky on Monday.

Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek – who held the environment portfolio in the last term of government – told Seven’s Sunrise on Monday: “I don’t think the new website has been a good exercise for the Bureau of Meteorology. When we came to government, there was a rebranding exercise going on where the BoM was asking people to call it the bureau instead of the BoM. I said at the time, we needed to focus on weather, not rebranding.”

Appearing alongside Plibersek was Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, who came down hard on the redesign for its failure of farmers who heavily rely on the website.

“They told us $4.1 [million]. It’s more than 20 times that. More than 20 times … which was outrageous in any case, because the website worked, and now we spent $96 million to put a B at the end of the BoM site.”

“It infuriated so many farmers … because we really liked the old site, [it] was one of the most visited sites, or the most visited site, I think. Now we’ve got this fiasco, and we find out it’s cost us $96 million to stuff something up completely,” Joyce said.

Liberal senator Maria Kovacic said: “For the cost to blow out to almost $100 million is extraordinary and something that this government needs to explain as to how this has happened ... another trademark of this government, excessive spending, something that’s taken too long and cost a lot more than it should have.”

Nationals Leader David Littleproud said the BoM’s business model “is to fail and ask the taxpayer for more money”.

“The old one was probably the only part of the Bureau website you actually did have trust in,” Littleproud told Nine’s Weekend Today on Sunday.

“The bureau needs to get back to some common sense. And unfortunately, I think the government’s going to have to step in ... If they did this in the corporate world, you’d lose your job. I think it’s time for some cultural change at the bureau.”

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