“The BoM website is pretty important. I use it regularly to see what’s going on with the surf and where the good swells are going to be. But more importantly, farmers use it on a, on a daily basis to run their businesses. So, it is an important piece of government infrastructure, and that cost blowout is ridiculous and simply unacceptable,” Thistlethwaite told Sky on Monday.
Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek – who held the environment portfolio in the last term of government – told Seven’s Sunrise on Monday: “I don’t think the new website has been a good exercise for the Bureau of Meteorology. When we came to government, there was a rebranding exercise going on where the BoM was asking people to call it the bureau instead of the BoM. I said at the time, we needed to focus on weather, not rebranding.”
Appearing alongside Plibersek was Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, who came down hard on the redesign for its failure of farmers who heavily rely on the website.
Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce joined a chorus of voices slamming the redesign’s cost. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“They told us $4.1 [million]. It’s more than 20 times that. More than 20 times … which was outrageous in any case, because the website worked, and now we spent $96 million to put a B at the end of the BoM site.”
“It infuriated so many farmers … because we really liked the old site, [it] was one of the most visited sites, or the most visited site, I think. Now we’ve got this fiasco, and we find out it’s cost us $96 million to stuff something up completely,” Joyce said.
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Liberal senator Maria Kovacic said: “For the cost to blow out to almost $100 million is extraordinary and something that this government needs to explain as to how this has happened … another trademark of this government, excessive spending, something that’s taken too long and cost a lot more than it should have.”
Nationals Leader David Littleproud said the BoM’s business model “is to fail and ask the taxpayer for more money”.
“The old one was probably the only part of the Bureau website you actually did have trust in,” Littleproud told Nine’s Weekend Today on Sunday.
“The bureau needs to get back to some common sense. And unfortunately, I think the government’s going to have to step in … If they did this in the corporate world, you’d lose your job. I think it’s time for some cultural change at the bureau.”
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