BOM spends $98m on labour-hire contracts amid cost blowouts
The Bureau of Meteorology has paid recruitment firm Hays almost $98m since 2020 for contractor staff, including $1.28m for a single program manager role. See the figures.
The Bureau of Meteorology has paid recruitment firm Hays $97.6m since 2020 to bring specialist staff on board to fill roles its 1722 permanent staff could not fulfill.
As recently as November 19, the federal government’s AusTender listings showed the BOM locked in a contract worth $1.28m for a single BOM program manager to work from November 1 to the end of 2027, or at a cost to taxpayers of $596,440 per year.
Another contractor described as an “observations stream lead”, just finished a three-year contract on June 30 this year, worth $1.694m or $564,666 a year.
The AusTender website provides few details on why contractors are needed, with a 12-month role worth $421,614 listed as a “solution architect”, $433,571 for a “business support officer” and a 21-month, $765,869 contract to employ a “test architect”.
A contract was even awarded for a two-year contract to supply a basic administration officer for $273,350 or the equivalent of $136,675 a year.
The contracts are just a handful of the 298 the BOM awarded to Hays over the past six years, averaging $327,521 each. Another $15m in contracts was awarded to four other labor-hire contractors.
The use of high-paid contractors comes amid the BoM’s decade-long struggle to implement an$866m revamp of its computer and observation systems, which included a deeply unpopular website redesign, called project ROBUST.
A BOM spokesman said the labour-hire contracts gave it “access to specialised capability that the Bureau does not already have and which it will not require on an ongoing basis”.
Yet at the same time, the BOM has increased its permanent workforce from 1399 in 2020 to 1722 as of June 30 this year.
Across the entire federal government, employee numbers surged 5.6 per cent in 2024-25 to reach 385,900 at a cost of $40.9bn, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Labor hire contractors have added to that cost, with recruitment agencies Hays, Ranstad, Adecco, Michael Page, Robert Walters, Hudson and Chandler Macleod awarded $5.5bn in contracts since January 2020.
A Hays spokeswoman said “we do not comment on specific contractual arrangements or commercial details”.
Victorian Farmers Federation president Brett Hosking said the amount being spent across government and by the BOM felt “like an obscene amount of money.
“I think farmers, who are struggling with the impacts of the new (BOM) website, look at the contracts that are being paid and struggle to align the two.”
