Agricultural workers and amateur meteorologists everywhere have been disappointed by controversial upgrades to their favourite rain-watching webpage this week.

Did the Bureau of Meteorology finally realise trouble was forecast? Why else would the government agency have put up a job listing for a new full-time media officer on Tuesday afternoon?

The contract lasts until June next year, and candidates are promised a role that will touch the lives of Australians across the country.

“We are proactive storytellers sharing the human story behind the weather, seeking to tell the stories of our staff, customers and the community,” the listing reads.

A spokesperson from the bureau reassured CBD that the job ad and website upgrades were unrelated.

But CBD can imagine there will be plenty of “proactive” crisis management on the horizon. For a start, it might be necessary to “reach out” to the handful of federal ministers who say the site has lost its social licence.

Indulge us for a moment. The new website design is trash. It’s unsightly, hard to navigate and everything is in the wrong place. And it cost $4.1 million? Yikes.

Combined with an embarrassing episode in 2022, when the agency issued the much-mocked insistence that media refer to it as “the bureau” rather than the “BOM” (before swiftly backtracking), it’s safe to say the agency has some major image issues.

Applications for the $75,000-$81,000 (plus super) media officer role close on November 4. We applaud those who are on BOM’s radar.

Sparking up

It was a big week for the skinny-chino set as the brightest lights of the local tech scene gathered in Sydney for Spark Festival, the 10th edition of the annual talkfest that describes itself as the country’s largest start-up event.

Among the throngs of lanyard-toting LinkedIn power-users was former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who delivered an innovative and agile keynote address on Monday.

He was briefly joined on stage by the festival’s chief executive and lead Harry Godber, briefly a junior staffer for Turnbull, and later his successor, Scott Morrison.

Godber was, until recently, head of policy and strategy at the Tech Council of Australia, before being stood down in May after facing domestic violence charges. He denies the assault charges, relating to two incidents involving a former partner being allegedly left with bruises, and is pleading not guilty. That matter has been adjourned until next year and Godber is represented by defamation silk Sue Chrysanthou, SC.

Turnbull declined to comment.

Godber was also pictured with state Liberal MP Jacqui Munro, who described him and Turnbull as “stalwart blokes” in an Instagram post.

She declined to comment on the charges against Godber, but told us she was at the conference on portfolio business.

“I attended the Spark Festival launch in my capacity as the shadow assistant minister for the arts, innovation, digital government and the 24-hour economy and to make an announcement about Liberal and Labor Party members working together to launch a Parliamentary Friendship Group for Innovation, Ventures, Entrepreneurs and Technology (INVENT),” she said.

Godber’s abrupt departure from the Tech Council in May came during a turbulent year for the influential industry body, which is chaired by billionaire Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar, and counts Canva boss Cliff Obrecht and Robyn Denholm, chair at Elon Musk’s Tesla, as board members.

Last week, the council’s chief executive Damian Kassabgi announced his resignation after just 16 months in charge.

School spirit

We’re guessing Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, has little time for universities and probably views them as overrun with woke cultural Marxists with pink hair.

The billionaire mining magnate made some of those views apparent in a recent message to year 12s starting their final exams, published in The West Australian, where she pointed out all the brilliant people who didn’t go to uni.

“For many people, university will not be a suitable pathway – you can be very well read like Charlie Kirk was and not attend university,” she wrote.

“Many Australians too didn’t attend uni, including the great ones like Sir Sidney Kidman, James Nicholas of Cobb & Co, and my dad, Lang Hancock.

Even Australia’s great writer Henry Lawson and great poet Banjo Paterson didn’t go to university. And our former governor-general Sir Peter Cosgrove went to Duntroon – not a university.

You see, kids! Who needs higher education?

But Rinehart stepped out of her comfort zone this week, delivering a speech at UNSW for a conference hosted by Echo, a student-run not-for-profit committed to getting young people interested in economics.

Quite a coup for the young-uns, who also heard from Australian Competition and Consumer Commission boss Gina Cass-Gottlieb.

Of course, there is a university Rinehart likes. She’s a donor at Campion, the small Catholic college in western Sydney with a couple of alleged white nationalist-sympathisers on staff, and a library named in the billionaire’s honour.