Murray Watt orders CEO to account for redesign cost
“The BOM website is hugely important. I use it regularly to see what’s going on in the surf and where the good waves are going to be,” Thistlethwaite told Sky on Monday. “But more importantly, farmers use it to run their businesses on a daily basis. So it’s an important part of government infrastructure and this cost explosion is ridiculous and completely unacceptable.”
Minister of Social Services Tanya Plibersek, who held the environment portfolio in the last term of the government, told Seven’s: sunrise On Monday he said: “I don’t think the new website is a good exercise for the Bureau of Meteorology. When we came into government there was a rebranding exercise going on where the BoM was asking people to call it the Bureau rather than the BoM. I said at the time that we should focus on the weather, not the rebranding.”
Alongside Plibersek was Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, who harshly criticized the redesign for failing farmers who relied heavily on the website.
Member for New England Barnaby Joyce joined the chorus criticizing the cost of the redesign. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“They called us 4.1 [million]. More than 20 times that. More than 20 times… which was outrageous anyway, because the website worked and now we spent $96 million to put a B at the end of the BoM site.”
“This infuriated a lot of farmers… because we really liked the old area, [it] It was one of the most visited sites, or I guess it was the most visited site. Now we’re faced with this debacle and we found out it costs us $96 million to fill something completely,” Joyce said.
Liberal senator Maria Kovacic said: “It’s extraordinary that the cost has gone up to almost $100 million and it’s something that this government needs to explain as to how this happened… another hallmark of this government is overspending, something that takes too long and costs much more than it should.”
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National Leader David Littleproud said the BoM’s business model was to “fail and ask taxpayers for more money”.
“The old one was probably the only part of the Bureau website you could really trust,” Littleproud told Nine’s. Weekend Today Sunday.
“The bureau needs to get back to some common sense. And unfortunately I think the government needs to step in… If they did this in the corporate world, you’d lose your job. I think it’s time for some cultural changes in the bureau.”
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