Chief executive Stuart Minchin grilled over $96m website
Updated ,first published
The Bureau of Meteorology has been accused of being the victim of “land and expansion” tactics by a consultancy firm; The agency’s new chief defends the $96 million cost of the much-hated website during a contentious Senate estimates hearing.
Less than a month into a new job, bureau chief Stuart Minchin took part in a highly anticipated debate with Environment Minister Murray Watt at a late-night session in Canberra on Monday night.
The bureau’s new website has been widely criticized by farmers, site designers and politicians for changes that make it difficult to navigate, with radar maps making place names difficult to read.
The redesign attracted national attention when it was revealed that the bureau’s initial price tag of $4.1 million was actually $96 million, including design work from private consultancy Accenture Australia.
The website upgrade was a component of the nearly decade-long Robust program, an $866 million security and technology overhaul that included forecasting and security upgrades to protect sensitive data from hacking, following a serious cybersecurity breach in 2015.
At the hearing, Minchin said the costs of the Robust program had increased by 15 percent. Greens senator Barbara Pocock, who has campaigned against dodgy contracting firms, said the initiative was “a case study of how not to do something really important”.
“There is a huge feed into the public sector from large consulting firms,” Pocock said.
“This project has been a nightmarish case study in contract failure, management of contracts, failure of leadership and the completely unacceptable and unethical behavior of major consultants who have fallen through the BoM.”
Pocock cited the example of a large contractor for his website Accenture; where the cost of a tranche of work increased from $33 million to $77 million after 10 contract changes.
This contract was issued in 2019 and has increased in value after a series of changes. Extra costs were incurred on top of the $77 million contract for security testing, site launch, and extra features, bringing the total cost to $96 million.
People only view the website platform, but the BoM’s forecasting system includes a supercomputer and weather models as well as 10,000 instruments in the field that feed operational systems, Minchin said.
“Our meteorologists put these models together and create the forecast and then put it on the website,” he said.
“It wasn’t just the front end that actually cost $96 million, it was the end-to-end chain.”
Pocock said the bureau erred in issuing open-ended contracts that allowed for explosions and criticized relying on existing staff to manage new programs.
“This is a company famous for its land and expansion,” he said.
“Instead of asking the BoM to manage the project with its existing resources, it might have been wise to spend some money to hire public servants at the BoM who could actually manage this project.”
Minchin acknowledged that the bureau should have been more transparent and publicly acknowledged mistakes.
But he rejected Pocock’s accusations of mismanagement: “To some extent I resent the fact that I don’t think these contracts were as poorly managed as you think.”
Minchin said the 15 percent explosion in the cost of the Robust program was due in part to unforeseen COVID-19 contingencies and is within the normal range for large technology programs that typically start with a 20 percent chance for cost increases.
Robust had been subject to external government reviews, including eight assessments by the Department of Finance.
“The latest one was completed last week and the program received the green light from the external gateway review,” Minchin said.
Watt said the Albanian government is working to reduce dependence on external consultants.
“This [website] It could be a contract that demonstrates the need for more oversight, consultants and greater use of public sector capacity,” Watt said.
Pocock responded by accusing Watt and Minchin of ignoring the bureau’s guilt.
“I don’t hear either of you saying leadership has failed, because I think it has,” he said.
Watt acknowledged that the management of the Robust program needed further scrutiny, emphasizing that the program was introduced under the former Coalition government.
“There are some questions about how this project was managed… many of which predate the arrival of Dr Minchin, his team and the government,” he said.
“Please be under no illusions about how seriously I and other ministers take these issues.”
In 2015, the bureau’s site was infiltrated by malware associated with state-sponsored cyber agents.
The incident raised fears that foreign actors could disrupt key weather forecasts and compromise military operations or infrastructure such as airports.
The bureau has built a new supercomputer and the website now runs on a more secure platform, replacing the old unencrypted version of HTTP that was too easy to hack.
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Mike Foley is the climate and energy correspondent for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
