Federal environment minister Murray Watt has flagged increased insourcing of management of major government contracts in response to public outrage over the Bureau of Meteorology’s handling of its website overhaul.
At $96.5 million, the final bill for the website was well over original estimates after the contract for its overall build was amended ten times between March 2021 and October 2025.
The bureau estimated the value of the contract $31 million in August 2019 when it first published the tender for the work.
The bureau’s new chief executive Stuart Minchin and Senator Watt last night acknowledged widespread public outrage in response to the website overhaul before a late-night senate estimates hearing.
However, responding to strong questioning by South Australian Greens Senator Barbara Pocock over the handling of the contract which was awarded to Accenture, Watt sheeted most of the blame for the budget overrun back to the previous governments’ policies of increasing outsourcing to the private sector and limiting the role of public servants.
“It sounds curious to me that the then government did not budget for any contingency on a large IT project that was going to cost in the order of $800 million,” Watt said.
The larger figure is a reference to the bureau’s broader technology transformation, which was codenamed ‘ROBUST’.
“The other point that … is relevant here was that no public servants were appointed or employed in order to manage this project additional to what the BoM’s existing staff were.
“The former government had a policy of outsourcing [work] to consulting firms, whether it be designer websites or anything, but with no public servants appointed specifically to manage the project.
“To the extent that there have been cost overruns or other problems with this project, I would suggest that it might have been wise to spend a little bit of money employing some public servants in the BoM, who could actually manage this project rather than requiring the bond to manage it with their existing resources and then outsource everything to consultants.”
Watt said that the Labor government had “expressed a lot of concern about that” was “trying to turn it around”.
“This may well be a contract that demonstrates the need for greater oversight and greater use of public sector capacity wherever possible,” Watt added.
Cost breakdown on ROBUST transformation
BoM CEO Stuart Michin used his opening statement to reveal the BoM’s view that the true total cost blowout for the ROBUST program that underpinned the website overhaul was around 15 percent and well within defined tolerances for major government technology transformation projects.
“There was no contingency funding provided, and the bureau had to manage the program in line with the strict (Average Staffing Level) caps that were in place at the time, which meant the delivery of the program relied on vendors and contractors,” Minchin said.
Minchin also provided one of the most cogent cost breakdowns for the ROBUST program and the website that the bureau has delivered to date.
He said that the funding for the ROBUST program was divided into three main tranches delivered in three federal budgets, starting with $91.5 million from the 2017-18 budget.
That was followed by a further $346.9 million from the 2018-19 budget and then a third allocation of $350 million from the 2020-21 budget.
Minchin said that the total cost for the contract, which ended of June 2023, came in at $788 million, having been impacted by increased labour costs and beyond forecast inflation attributed to Covid. Minchin added that the inflationary impact was more pronounced for technology spending.
The ROBUST program “ultimately ended” in July 2024, having met 90 percent of outcomes, and bringing the total cost to $866 million, he said.
“The $78 million difference between the original budget and the final amount was funded out of departmental funding and in line with budget process [and] operational rules,” Minchin said.
The BoM then created the “ROBUST transition program” at a cost of $47 million to deliver “a number of remaining uncompleted items”.
The BoM calculated the final cost of the online portal’s overhaul to be $96.5 million.
The $96.5 million budget for the overhaul has widely-been reported as broken roughly into three parts: $4.1 million was devoted to re-designing its frontend, $79.8 million to its primary channels platform implementation and $12.6 million to security and testing.
Contract extensions requested by BoM
Still Senator Pocock, who accused Accenture of having a reputation for “land and expand” when it came to contract strategy, persisted in questioning the 10 amendments to the original contract.
For the first time, the BoM publicly admitted that these were not cost overruns.
The BoM’s chief information and technology officer Nichole Brinsmead that the extensions were for work that the agency requested.
She said that the agency requested the extra work after initial discovery phases of the project uncovered complexities in the legacy systems that the BoM hadn’t initially counted on.
“The full complexity of the program was not understood in the early days. It definitely took us some time to really understand the complexity and how what we can, what it was going to take to unpick a lot of the old legacy bureau systems,” Brinsmead said.
“I do take umbrage to some degree. I don’t think these contracts were as badly managed as you (Senator Pocock) make out.
“We did have quite strong governance over the projects. They had contract managers, there were steering committees, there were meetings with the vendors,” Brinsmead said.
Minchin also used the hearing as an opportunity to address criticisms from both media and the public, explaining that the site was only a small piece of a “huge investment in technology the likes which have not been seen you know, in in the country before.”
Earlier in the hearing Minchin had read off a list of the project’s achievements, including the establishment of two new supercomputers providing mutual redundancies, two new geographically separated data centres, and redesigned integration and data platforms.
The aim, said Minchin, was to improve security of information data across BoM networks.
“The security of bureau software applications has been improved including quarantining them from malicious attack (and) more than 20 legacy software applications have been decommissioned.
“We needed to make sure (the site) is secure and stable and can draw in the huge amounts of data gathered from our observing network and weather models as we handle millions of visits each day.
“However, the response to the launch of the new BoM website shows that we didn’t get it right for some sectors of the community,” Minchin said.