Bureau of Meteorology website redesign under scrutiny in rushed senate estimates hearing
The new chief of the Bureau of Meteorology has faced tough questions over its widely panned new $96m website, with the consultants involved coming in for particularly harsh criticism.
The Bureau of Meteorology has defended its widely panned new $96 million website described as a “nightmare case study in contract failure” in a late-night showdown.
Just a month into his role, new chief executive Stuart Minchin, appeared before Senate estimates on Monday night, in a rushed hearing that left senators with just 30 minutes to grill officials.
Dr Minchin acknowledged the redesign had not met public’s expectations, after it was widely criticised by farmers, politicians and the wider public for being hard to navigate.
The new website went live as severe storms hammered South East Queensland, leading Premier David Crisafulli to accuse the bureau of “putting lives at risk”.
Dr Minchin confirmed the price tag of $96m, and said it was part of the nearly decade-long $866m Robust program which was a major security and technology overhaul to protect sensitive data from hacking after a serious cybersecurity breach in 2015.
The program had a 15 per cent blowout – partly because of Covid-19 – and Greens senator Barbara Pocock said it was a “case study of how not to do something really important”.
“This project has been a nightmare case study in contract failure, in management of contracts, failure of leadership and completely unacceptable and unethical behaviour by the big consultants who have been at the trough through the BoM,” she said.
In defending the website redesign, Dr Minchin said the BoM’s forecasting system included 10,000 instruments in the field that feed into a supercomputer and weather models, as well as operating systems.
“It was actually that end-to-end chain that cost the $96 million, not just the front end,” he said.
He conceded the bureau had work to do on transparency but rejected accusations of mismanagement.
Environment Minister Murray Watt, appearing alongside Mr Minchin, said the federal government was working to reduce reliance on external consultants.
“This (website) may well be a contract that demonstrates the need for greater oversight and of consultants and greater use of public sector capacity,” he said.
The BoM also confirmed that since the new website had gone live, there had been “three or four occurrences of either small interruptions of data flow or some delays associated with data flow”.
The said this was related to back end “load balancing against some servers”.
Officials said there hadn’t been any concerns raised with the bureau by NEMA or the SES about the reliability of the website during weather events in the last four months.
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