In the weeks before the Bureau of Meteorology launched its new website – three years overdue, $46.6 million over budget and downsized from its original scope – the testing scores for the product began to plunge.
Despite these scores dropping below tolerance for release, the new site went live in a period of extreme weather. The decision recalled the failed million-dollar “rebrand” of the organisation, which was announced in 2022 during a flood crisis.
Then, as now, the efforts of the national forecaster were met with resounding criticism. The website is the last major legacy of long-serving BoM director and chief executive Dr Andrew Johnson, who finished his final term at the agency early, in September, and has now taken up a role as the chief executive of Gladstone Ports Corporation.
Johnson’s right-hand man, Dr Peter Stone, has been acting chief executive in the intervening period, and the website was pushed live under his watch, just under three weeks before the newly announced BoM chief, Dr Stuart Minchin, is due to start work.
“A decision was made to release the website despite the acceptance scores falling well below the minimum acceptable for release,” a source familiar with the testing tells The Saturday Paper.
“Staff have surmised that a decision was made to release the site despite the below-acceptable satisfaction scores so it could be out in public after the old CEO left and before the new CEO could arrive and block it.”
A spokesperson for the BoM said this was “incorrect both in fact and implication”.
However, The Saturday Paper has obtained images of the website’s internal monitoring dashboard which show user satisfaction crashing. Although testing scores were running about 74 per cent in the months before launch, when fewer people were looking at the beta website, the satisfaction levels plunged to just 52.3 per cent when the BoM flagged the website would soon go live, which drove more people to try it out. This was, according to sources, below the score at which the launch should have been postponed.
On Wednesday, Dr Stone issued an apology of sorts.
“We didn’t make the change lightly and we appreciate that it will take time for some to adjust. I sincerely apologise for the challenges the change has caused,” he said in a media statement.
“It’s clear we need to do more to help people through the change, both by making adjustments to the website and by helping users to understand its new features.”
The saga of the new website – work on which started in 2019 with a proposed 2022 delivery date – has become an emblem of questionable management decisions at the agency over the past decade, a period during which extreme weather events have increased in frequency and intensity.
Plans for the new site began after a serious cybersecurity incident in late 2015 and took shape once the Bureau of Meteorology secured three tranches of funding from the then Coalition government over several years in a massive transformation project known as ROBUST.
That program of work – which included security upgrades, a new supercomputer and a suite of other system upgrades – ran a year over schedule and formally ended in July last year, despite the website and other core deliverables not being finished.
When asked by media outlets last week how much the new site cost to design, the BoM cited a total of $4.1 million. This figure covers only the user experience design work, which was contracted to Deloitte on March 4, 2019, for $3.5 million, plus another $600,000 in costs related to this work.
This is not the full cost of the work.
“This project has chewed up tremendous resources, arrived late and still isn’t finished … It has cost us all a lot of money, yes, but the damage is more structural than the public knows. The website is just what they can see.”
The contract to build the website, as opposed to its design, was originally signed to Accenture in August 2019 for $31.4 million and within two years the blowouts had begun, even as the original scope of the work shrank.
Accenture’s contract to deliver the website has been amended 10 times, most recently last month, and the full cost of the build has more than doubled to $78 million.
“I’d also note that the original design of the new website had everything on the old BoM site redesigned, but the final release included mostly redesigns of high-level pages,” the BoM source tells The Saturday Paper.
“Many of the actual information pages have stayed much the same. So, for instance, the radar pages have been completely redesigned but water information pages have not been.
“Hence not only has the project been late and massively over budget, it also has been descoped several times in a frantic attempt to deliver ‘something’ as opposed to delivering a genuine step up in weather/water/climate services, as the original design by Deloitte called for.”
A critical rationale for the new BoM website was that the old version did not use the secure, encrypted “https” transfer protocol that became standard on the internet years ago. The unencrypted “http” set-up remains in place for many of the pages within the BoM site that were supposed to have been upgraded on full launch but which, as yet, have not been.
A former senior forecaster with the BoM told The Saturday Paper the new website was “practically unusable”. He had been using workarounds to the old site and old pages while he still could.
“I doubt this workaround will last for long, as many of the old pages aren’t secure,” he said.
A BoM spokesperson did not respond when asked if the new site was what the bureau had paid for and planned. Instead, the spokesperson provided a statement saying it will take time for people to become used to the new layout.
“The new website is part of a much larger program of work to make the Bureau of Meteorology more resilient and secure,” the statement said.
“As we saw with the relaunch of the BoM Weather app in 2020, a dip in customer satisfaction is expected as customers familiarise themselves with the new website. We expect satisfaction to increase as customers become accustomed to the new website and discover its benefits.
“Ahead of the launch, CSAT [customer satisfaction] scores continued to trend at an average of 74% across July, August and September, with scores being calculated at the end of each month.”
The new website launched in the middle of extreme weather nationally and just days after it went live, intense storms thrashed parts of Queensland, testing the claimed “accessibility” of the changes. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli said the redesign did not make sense and called the new pages “flawed”.
“Queenslanders always show their resilience in these events, but preparation is the key. That preparation depends on the information available to us, and the changes to the federally run Bureau of Meteorology website are not good enough,” he told state parliament on Monday.
“The changes to the website do not make sense. The website is flawed. Easy access to individual radars has been removed, the colour scheme we have become accustomed to has changed, and platitudes from Canberra will not cut it with Queenslanders.”
State treasurer David Janetzki wrote to federal environment minister Murray Watt and said the changes were at best “short-sighted” but potentially put lives at risk as dangerous storms hit the state last Sunday.
“This website contained critical flaws. Caboolture, a growing area of the south-east corner, has disappeared as a locator on the BoM map, while the strength and associated colour-coding of storms that Queenslanders relied on through thick and thin has significantly changed for the worse,” he told state parliament in an update.
“I urge the federal government to further consider the ongoing impact of the changes made to the website and options to improve accessibility of information at this critical time as Queensland enters summer.”
In his letter, Janetzki said “any updates to a website as vital and as widely relied upon as the BoM’s must be done with enough time for the public to become familiar with the changes, and [must] ensure that access to critical information is quick and easy. None of the changes made achieve either of these objectives.”
Watt issued his own statement about the changes, advising he had asked for an urgent briefing from the bureau and directed them to brief his state and territory counterparts.
“It’s clear that the new BoM website is not meeting many users’ expectations, with a significant range of feedback provided to the bureau in recent days,” he said on Tuesday.
“In the meeting, I made clear my expectations that the BoM needed to consider this feedback and, where appropriate, adjust the website’s settings as soon as possible.
“This includes urgent consideration of improvements to the website’s functionality and usability.”
Finding the money to keep plugging holes in the site, and other unfinished infrastructure projects supposed to have been completed under the ROBUST transformation, will be difficult. In its incoming ministerial brief to Watt, following the Albanese government’s re-election in May, the BoM wrote that it was running out of money.
“The frequency and severity of extreme weather events is increasing and the locations where these severe weather events are occurring is also changing. This is increasing community expectations and placing higher operational demands on the Bureau,” the brief, authored by then chief executive Andrew Johnson, said.
“Australia’s investments in the computing, observations infrastructure and scientific research that support increased demands for forecasting and warning services are not keeping pace with investments being made by peer international meteorological agencies.”
As previously reported by The Saturday Paper, the Bureau of Meteorology was excoriated by the Australian National Audit Office earlier this year for the shambolic state of the maintenance systems for its observing network. Money originally promised for consistent maintenance schedules was diverted into the general budget of the agency. Another $51 million of its capital budget was converted to operating expenditure, apparently with the blessing of the Department of Finance, to cover cost overruns in the ROBUST project in the past financial year alone.
The BoM wants this to happen again and again in coming years.
“The Bureau is currently assessing and determining any ongoing amount to be reclassified from departmental capital to departmental operating appropriation for future Budget years,” group executive and chief operating officer Astrid Heward told Watt in his incoming brief.
A forecaster at the agency told The Saturday Paper people will get used to the new website, and some of its flaws will “hopefully, finally, be fixed now they have become a public relations nightmare”.
“But that won’t change the fact that this project has chewed up tremendous resources, arrived late and still isn’t finished,” the forecaster said.
“The reasons for that are complicated and many of them can be linked back to decisions about priorities that were made during the ROBUST transformation, and lack of consultation with staff. It has cost us all a lot of money, yes, but the damage is more structural than the public knows. The website is just what they can see.”
In the past financial year, real-time radar data coverage at the BoM dropped to 95.6 per cent – its second lowest figure in the past five years – and lower still than the 96.4 per cent coverage a decade ago in 2016/17, the year Andrew Johnson became the chief executive.
The number of routine public forecasts have also hit a five-year low, at 674,219 in the year to June.
Acting chief executive Dr Peter Stone said on October 22, when the new website launched, this was “just the beginning of our journey to improve our online services”.
As one staff member mused: “This has got to be one of the longest beginnings I’ve seen.”
Dr Stuart Minchin, a scientist and manager of environmental science work in Australia and the Pacific, who also led the ocean-floor mapping team in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, starts as the new chief executive on November 10.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
November 1, 2025 as “‘Practically unusable’: Inside the BoM’s website shambles”.
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