Running costs soar to $500 million at the Bureau of Meteorology

The cost of running Australia’s meteorological agency has hit $500 million, with one water broker saying he did not “know anyone who uses the BoM for water data”.

Bureau of Meteorology director Andrew Johnson has been grilled by the Senate over budget blowouts at this month’s Environment and Communications Committee meeting.

The annual cost of running Australia’s meteorological agency has soared from $389 million to $515 million in just three years, as criticism mounts over its performance and massive budget overruns.

The Bureau of Meteorology is struggling to deliver a decade-long $866 million revamp of its computer and observation systems, called project ROBUST, the cost of which has already blown out by $78m.

Farmers have also borne the cost of the BoM’s mistakes, destocking on the back of its 2023-24 El Nino forecast that never came to fruition, while more recently east-coast residents were sent scurrying for higher ground on the back of the bureau’s false September 25 tsunami warning.

The BoM’s most recent cost blowout comes on top of another $450m that taxpayers pumped into the BOM from 2007 to 2017, to deliver a go-to water information site, which irrigators and brokers say they hardly use.

Australian Water Brokers Association president Andrew Martin said he did not “know anyone who uses the BoM for water data”, given the information they wanted was out of date.

The BoM’s water markets dashboard struggles to supply up-to-date reports on the number, volume and price of water sold across the Murray Darling Basin, given it relies on dragging information off the NSW, Victorian and South Australian water registers that are already accessible to the public.

As of last Friday, the BoM’s dashboard for Victoria Goulburn 1A allocation trade for the 2024-25 season to date, stated 2064 trades had occurred, totalling 606,014ML at an average price of $111.43/ML.

Yet the more up-to-date Victorian Water Register showed there had been 2210 trades, totalling 666,241ML at an average price of $105/ML.

The BoM even battles to deliver seasonal water market reports, the last of which is dated 2021-22.

In contrast private-sector consultants Ricardo, formerly Aither, publishes its water market reports within six weeks of June 30 each year.

Despite these shortfalls the Albanese Government is throwing another $32.7m of taxpayers’ funds at the BoM to deliver a real-time Water Data Hub that pulls together buy and sell orders lodged on five private-sector water exchanges.

Brokers say the BoM is underestimating the time, cost and feasibility of dragging data off five exchanges – the Water Exchange, H2OX, WaterFind, Waterpool and Murray Irrigation Limited, given their differing structure, software and reporting systems.

AWBA vice-president Craig Feuerherdt said “it’s all a cost that someone will have to bear”, which he said would ultimately be irrigators.

The other problem for the BoM is that 40 per cent of trade occurs outside the exchanges, via smaller brokerages.

Federal Opposition Water spokeswoman Perin Davey said “to date there has been no clarity how the BoM’s new Water Data Hub will address the key issue of integrating water registers that are owned and operated by different jurisdictions using different software and technology”.

“Private irrigation infrastructure operators have raised with me concerns about around the lack of any definitive information from the BoM on how companies will be required to reporting requirements, IT infrastructure and what support they will get for training and upgrades.”

“The minister needs to listen to these concerns and ask the BoM exactly how their project will deliver better information than currently available without adding to the costs for irrigators and other water managers.”

But the BoM responded by stating “the Australian Government is improving trust and transparency of water markets through significant investment in a suite of reforms, including the Bureau’s water data hub that will be in operation by 1 July 2026”.

As for project ROBUST the BoM said 90 per cent of the work had been done, with the delivery of “new and upgraded weather radars, flood gauges, automatic balloon launchers and equipment that observes the upper atmosphere”.

The BoM also said its services, information and insights contributed an estimated $410m in added economic value to Australia’s water sector in 2023–24, plus $154m to agriculture overall through its climate services and outlooks.

But Opposition environment spokesman John Duniam said “the BoM’s financial mismanagement is encapsulated by the costs of the ROBUST program that we found out at a special Senate Estimates hearing had ballooned out by $78 million and isn’t even finished yet”.

Mr Duniam said the Estimates hearing “also heard that it is routine for only four forecasters to be scheduled overnight nationwide for the production of public weather forecasts”.

“How can farmers have confidence about their morning forecasts when their areas may not have been focused on by a stretched workforce of only four people?” he said.

“The BoM need to be making the right investment decisions so that weather-dependent industries like agriculture have the assurance that their forecasts are as accurate as they possibly can be.”

Originally published as Running costs soar to $500 million at the Bureau of Meteorology