Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
50 comments
·November 24, 2025TrackerFF
Hopefully they'll go through all billed invoices with a microscope. My guess is that this will reveal outright fraud from the consulting firm(s), in the form of overbilling in hours.
Even if they bill $500/hr, and they billed 24 hours a day, that would come out to $4.38m / year for each consultant. That's a 11 member team billing 24 hours a day, all year round, for two years straight.
And if they billed more realistic hours, said team would blow up by many multiples. But of course, billed hours is not the only thing consulting firms will charge.
EDIT: For comparison, the website www.yr.no/en, has I believe 10 - 12 devs working. Maybe they've grown since the past years.
aleph_minus_one
I doubt that the consulting firm seriously overbilled.
To my knowledge rather consulting firms are great at selling the necessity of lots of consultants or consultant days:
Just let the customer talk very openly about their wishes for the project, and you immediately get an insane scope explosion for the project, i.e. it "needs" an insane amount of consultants over many years to implement all these wishes.
To increase the bill, every highly qualified consultant that is necessary for the project "needs" a lot of support personnel (senior consultants) so that the senior consultant can 100 % concentrate on their work (otherwise the customer would pay insane hourly rates for highly qualified experts to do "grunt work" - no customer would "want" that). This way, you sell a huge number of senior consultants (this is rather some low rank) to the customer.
And, by the way: since of cause many consultants you sell to the customer shall be highly qualified experts in their discipline, and the project trivially consists of a lot of disciplines, the number of subject-matter experts that can be sold to the customer can be increased by a lot. In some ordinary software project, you would simply use a small team of good generalists (jacks of all trades, master of none) who can do most things in the project, but of cause, as a consulting company, you rather sell the customer "some of the greatest experts that money can buy" (without mentioning that these are insanely expensive and not really needed for the project).
That's how you do it; scamming or billing unrealistic hours is for amateurs.
TYPE_FASTER
> To my knowledge rather consulting firms are great at selling the necessity of lots of consultants consultant days: Just let the customer talk very openly about their wishes for the project, and you immediately get an insane scope explosion for the project, i.e. it "needs" an insane amount of consultants over many years to implement all these wishes.
"Oh yeah, we can do that!" Boom, there's a team...somewhere...working on it. It's a line on an on-site project manager's status report.
datadrivenangel
You just do it at enterprise scale with all the people needed to make it enterprise legible... and a couple of setbacks and change orders later and you're at 2.5x the original budget!
JSR_FDED
Yeah but in this case it was 23x over budget
datadrivenangel
AT $250 an hour and 8 hours per day / 2000 hours per year, that's almost ~50 people years, which likely means a team of 10-12 devs working on it over 18 months with another 1-3 design and product and project people in the way making things look good until the bill arrived. Accenture is good at that. [0]
0 - https://australiatimes.com/australia-s-bureau-of-meteorology...
mrtksn
See, usually you don't have 11 developers coding 24/7. What you usually have is project managers, account managers etc and then a few people who code every now and then. Then you have licenses and support costs.
You can't just code the website, zip the code and mail it to the client. They have many stakeholders like this person needs to be able to show this that persin needs to be able to access this etc because they are running a business or service with than many people. Then you will have requirements like blind people should be able to use that and someone should be able to monitor all that. For each complication you will use specialized tools and do integration, i.e. Adobe will sell you one thing Oracle will sell you another thing and you will have to have people overseeing all these integrations and requirements etc.
That's why you have thousands of employees in tech companies with seemingly a simple product that you can fully code in a week(at least the user facing part of it).
hn-acct
Sure but PMs are billed lower than devs from my experience. You might have 1-3 on this project.
delusional
Where did you get 11 members from?
TrackerFF
Just a hypothetical. If you have a team of 11 devs billing $500 / hour, every hour of the day, all year round, that comes out to a hair over $48 million a year. Do that for two years, and you have the $96.5m bill. Not necessarily rooted in reality.
pu_pe
Ok, here is another realistic hypothetical: a team of 10 devs billing $500/hour, plus extra "package" fees for subject matter expert review, machine learning experts advice, senior partner reviews, focus group experiments, A/B test monitoring, regulatory compliance lawyers, all coming at extra cost. You will find that they can milk that cow legally in much more imaginative ways than your calculation.
fergie
> "It is unbelievable a private consultancy was paid $78 million to redesign the website," Mr Littleproud said.
This is the crux of the issue. If you have outsourced software engineering competency, yet one of your core missions is maintaining a large pile of software, then this is the inevitable result.
stephen_g
Of course one really ‘unbelievable’ thing is that this infrastructure upgrade contract (including the website) was actually initiated and approved by the previous Government (since voted out to opposition) that Littleproud was part of back in 2017…
jihadjihad
The private consultancy likely outsourced pieces of the work to (far) lesser-paid subcontractors, too.
I would imagine the margins on that project to be astronomical.
trollbridge
My primary competition is guys who are good at marketing, sell expensive packages, and then have someone in the Phillipines or Vietnam do the actual work for a tiny fraction of what is paid.
My primary source of business is customers who paid a lot for they and didn’t get what they asked for and then the vendor blames it all on their subcontractor, or expects more money at astronomical rates. For example $200 an hour for basic WordPress customisation.
OuterVale
The new site post re-development: https://www.bom.gov.au
The old site provided with HTTPS: https://reg.bom.gov.au
oliwarner
It's extraordinary how far departments (even large companies) will go to avoid in-sourcing work. $AU96M is a small team of developers hired, paid and pensioned for decades.
Anyone rubber-stamping that sort of invoice deserves jail time.
aunty_helen
Ok great, in-source the project but we’ve been promised a yearly headcount increase of exactly 0. Any hires above that require the minister to sign off.
In your team you have, 3 data scientists that have never worked on a software project, an intern who likes computer games and a PM that used to work in the tax department.
This is a 12 month project, everyone needs to also do their own job and if it’s late, they’re coming for all of us in next years budget.
What would you do? The correct answer is to pay an external consultancy to take the heat and an external team to get the right people needed to get it done.
falcor84
> promised a yearly headcount increase of exactly 0
That's the silly thing that seems to cause so much trouble. The conversation should be about budget rather than headcount, and the department heads given flexibility on how to manage their budget. There probably is some reasonable amount of budget to bring consultants in for advice on industry practices, but as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, projects like these should generally be managed in-house, and used to build up organisational knowledge, which will be crucial for effective long-term maintenance.
On that note, one of the best uses I've seen of consulting companies, is to have them help define the hiring plan for implementing the project, and sit in on interview panels, to help put in-house leaders in the right mindset of how to assess the competencies that they themselves are lacking.
oliwarner
I'm not defending the ridiculous politicking about government hiring. I agree, it's a blocker to rational thought.
But there is a third option: don't build the bloody website.
aunty_helen
I’m trying to make the point that it is rational thought that leads to these situations. But the constraints put in place, often never having known of or considered that projects like this need to be done, cause decisions to be made that from the outside just look batshit insane.
I’ve been through this myself as the software developer who’s contract ends on Tuesday but with a company wide hiring freeze causing the general manager to have to call the global dept manager, someone in charge of 25k people, to personally sign off on extending the summer intern into a full timer.
As for not building the website, that’s fine but it will be more expensive tomorrow.
sys_64738
This is the type of thing that requires everybody who signed off on this and their bosses to be jailed for fraud. Also, the billing company names involved in the billing should be jailed for fraud too. Jail them for five years each by setting them as an example.
evolve2k
Analysis using BuiltWith shows that the site is coded with PHP, Perl and Java. Smells like real enterprise decisions right there. I’m no expert but I’d be guessing that the Perl is likley the remains coming from the old code base. That’d be fair yeah? Haven’t heard of many people coding websites with Perl in 2025.
mb2100
It has data-drupal attributes in the source. Not sure where the Perl and Java things would have come from.
m4tthumphrey
I cannot fathom this. What an egregious waste of (assumed) public money.
Surely someone can request to see where this went? Even the original figure of $4.1m is insane.
aunty_helen
5 person team, 5 overheads (dealing with the government no less), 200k/yr each that’s 2m a year + 50% margin would easily get you a 4m burn rate.
alcasa
Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.
blitzar
> Given the salary of devs
Devs are shocked to hear that their 500k salary makes the project cost more than a 50k they think it is worth.
chrisrickard
Because the ridiculous scope creep perhaps? And spending $96M of government money on an website (still with large faults that were backed out)
This was Accenture and Deloitte - not some backyard dev shop.
radicalbyte
This is pretty standard for Accenture and Deloitte.
hyperpape
I'm of two minds about this comment. A glance at the website suggests it has a lot of content and a full overhaul for 4.1m AUD (2.6m USD) might not be that that high of a price.
But the problem is with the assumption that the website needs a full overhaul. So often a full overhaul is where projects go to balloon in cost by 20x. An outside agency sells the leadership on a big picture full of fluff about "modernization" without any connection to real improvements.
A better approach would be to determine the most important weaknesses of the existing website, and incrementally improve them. But big organizations struggle with this. Government agencies are probably even worse than big corporations, but big corporations are terrible too.
retsibsi
Agreed. I'm a regular user of the BoM website, and from my perspective the old version was absolutely fine. I wasn't one of the people instantly panning the redesign, but after using it for a while I haven't found positives to outweigh the minor annoyance of the change, let alone justify the expenditure. I can totally believe there were some accessibility issues that I was oblivious to, but it's hard to imagine they couldn't have been fixed in a much narrower, cheaper way.
(It was slightly weird that the old website didn't support https -- but on the other hand, I can't really think of a realistic case where that mattered. And I reckon they could have sorted it out for closer to $0m than $100m.)
asdefghyk
My recollection was ( could be wrong) - It was said in media that "security testing" was 12 million AU dollars
OuterVale
From the linked article:
> It said the cost breakdown included $4.1 million for the redesign, $79.8 million for the website build, and the site's launch and security testing cost $12.6 million.
lunias
Absolutely crazy. I'll negotiate on your behalf next time; just give me 10% of what I save you.
flag_fagger
Yes, but what special relations do you have with the purchasers?
eviks
Should've made it a nice round billion and sprinkle the necessity of AI to usher in the new era of meteorology
tantalor
> complete rebuild was necessary to ensure the website meets modern security... requirements
> launch and security testing cost $12.6 million
What are the challenging security concerns for a weather website? And why would testing alone cost $10+ million?
angry_octet
There were none. There is a separate sub-site for military consumers. It has its own challenges, but they are not primarily related to security.
justincormack
In the UK, the Met Office is part of the military, for historical reasons.
mxuribe
I didn't know that about the UK...and my instinct immediately was to think that the UK meteorologists are some awesome badasses walking around with military uniforms and some cool weather patch on their shoulder! :-)
Half-seriously, it does kinda send a signal that such a function for government (meteorology) is so essential, that it stayed lumped in with another important function of government (military/defense). I think its not a bad idea! I admit to not knowing any details at all for how its actually run in the UK...but i contrast that with the severe gutting of budgets of essential agencies in the U.S....and yet again, feel envious of other countries. (Well, maybe not envious of whomever approved the contracts for the AU BOM website, but still envious in other areas.)
arethuza
It looks like it was part of the MoD but it's now part of DSIT:
FROM https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-24/bom-website-approved-... "... "The $96.5 million that we're talking about was not just the front end of the website, the tip of the iceberg that the public sees, but the back end, which sees data flowing from tens of thousands of pieces of equipment in the field, to the supercomputer that does all the modelling, right through to systems that actually forecast the weather and put it through to the website," he said.
"So every bit of that chain had to be hardened and made secure to stop a future attack taking down the whole website."...."