11 ms·

Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

124 points by OuterVale 11mo ago

m4tthumphrey 11mo ago
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.
- alcasa 11mo ago
  Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.
  - hyperpape 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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.)
      - brokenmachine 11mo ago
        >It was slightly weird that the old website didn't support https It always did if you linked to https://reg.bom.gov.au https://reg.bom.gov.au , eg https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDN60801/IDN60801.94768.shtml https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDN60801/IDN60801.94768.shtm... https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDR711.loop.shtml https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDR711.loop.shtml
        jiggawatts 11mo ago
        Ironically it had HTTPS enabled and set up on the 'www' site as well, but it obnoxiously redirected you back to HTTP if you tried to change the URL. I've never seen that anywhere else, ever.
  - chrisrickard 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      This is pretty standard for Accenture and Deloitte.
  - blitzar 11mo ago
    > 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.
    - moron4hire 11mo ago
      Hahahaha, right. I wish. No developer in consulting is getting paid $500k. Jesus, people hear one tidbit about prestige staff engineer positions at Microsoft, Meta, and Google, and then assume we're all getting those numbers.
- aunty_helen 11mo ago
  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.
TrackerFF 11mo ago
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.
- delusional 11mo ago
  Where did you get 11 members from?
  - TrackerFF 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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.
      - gk1 11mo ago
        Exactly this. At least in the US, consultancies that contract with the gov’t can keep a small full time staff in order to qualify for small-business preference and keep their overhead low, and then depend on an army of subcontractors for large projects.
evolve2k 11mo ago
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. https://builtwith.com/bom.gov.au https://builtwith.com/bom.gov.au
- mb2100 11mo ago
  It has data-drupal attributes in the source. Not sure where the Perl and Java things would have come from.
lunias 11mo ago
Absolutely crazy. I'll negotiate on your behalf next time; just give me 10% of what I save you.
- flag_fagger 11mo ago
  Yes, but what special relations do you have with the purchasers?
eviks 11mo ago
Should've made it a nice round billion and sprinkle the necessity of AI to usher in the new era of meteorology
fergie 11mo ago
> "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.
- jihadjihad 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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.
- stephen_g 11mo ago
  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…
aurareturn 11mo ago
Honestly, with an LLM, I can do it by myself for $96,000 - maybe less. I had a brief look at the website. Downvote me if you want. But I just built a small business website for a relative in about 5 minutes using Vercel's v0. All I did was upload the logo design, gave it some details about the business and it spit out a fantastic professional looking website in about 1 minute. Made some changes to it and pressed a button to publish with a custom domain and it went live. The entire process took 5 minutes. I'm sure I can make a weather website with a map for $96k.
- cracki 11mo ago
  Fixed price? Shake on it LOL - That "weather website" has to serve all of Australia. - It's got to be usable on big screen desktops, tablets, smartphones. - It has to have an uptime of what I estimate to be 99.99%. As the article says, farmers will pitchfork you if you can't tell them when rain will hit their fields. - It has to be slinging dynamic image data to (about) every visitor. - The data comes from somewhere. You're lucky if they have that under control already. Probably not. I came up with these aspects, not knowing anything about what the "Bureau of Meteorology" actually needs in a website. It's just common sense speculation.
  - javier123454321 11mo ago
    This seems like a classic case of the whole "once we have all the data building this is easy". Yeah that's the easy part, that's why building a weather dashboard is one of the classic beginner projects. The issue is aggregating the data. Same for supermarket systems, transport and logistics, and other systems tied to external data that requires physical interaction.
- Lalabadie 11mo ago
  The Australian government eagerly awaits your expert advice.
  - gritten 11mo ago
    [flagged]
tantalor 11mo ago
> 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?
- justincormack 11mo ago
  In the UK, the Met Office is part of the military, for historical reasons.
  - mxuribe 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
    It looks like it was part of the MoD but it's now part of DSIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met_Office
- angry_octet 11mo ago
  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.
sys_64738 11mo ago
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.
asdefghyk 11mo ago
My recollection was ( could be wrong) - It was said in media that "security testing" was 12 million AU dollars
- OuterVale 11mo ago
  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.
OuterVale 11mo ago
The new site post re-development: https://www.bom.gov.au https://www.bom.gov.au The old site provided with HTTPS: https://reg.bom.gov.au https://reg.bom.gov.au
- SpaghettiCthulu 11mo ago
  > "A complete rebuild was necessary to ensure the website meets modern security, usability and accessibility requirements for the millions of Australians who reply on it every day," a spokesperson said. I guess those "usability and accessibility requirements" don't include being usable without JavaScript.
oliwarner 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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.
  - oliwarner 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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.
  - falcor84 11mo ago
asdefghyk 11mo ago
FROM https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-24/bom-website-approved-by-coalition-ceo-says/106047518 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."...."
- intrasight 11mo ago
  And so clearly was not only for design
- asdefghyk 11mo ago
  I guess some of the endpoints could be supplying critical data . Interference via hackers to these endpoints data could have serious consequences. I have no specific idea actually, but with experience as electronics engineer / embedded programmer .... there probably be some such scenarios .... hence endpoints would need security upgrades .... But I really have NO IDEA about any specifics ...
BigJono 11mo ago
There's a few comments speculating about fraud, but they're way off on the timeframe. I was approached about this project like 7-8 years ago. It's probably been in development the whole time. 1k * 250 * 8 * a team size of 20 is about 40 mil in salary for engineering, could be low, add on their $12M testing, $4.1M just for the design (vintage Deloitte), some cloud cost blowouts and a bunch of dickhead managers and scrumlords, plus the putrid enterprise-grade 3rd party map/data system they've gone with, I bet that wasn't cheap. All up it's in the right ballpark for a typical well-intentioned trainwreck consulting project. Wouldn't be the first project to blow out because of a bunch of enterprise Typescript, Java and C# devs that can't deliver anything. Welcome to the Aussie tech industry.
mistrial9 11mo ago
how much money did corner petrol stations make in profits around the country in one day ? How about the refineries and distributors of Oil and Gas ? Regarding the entire project -- you cant change what you don't measure? media poking fingers at the expenses of anti-climate pollution projects seems to be a political move these days
knowitnone3 11mo ago
They really messed up cause I would have done it for $95.99M
sandorscribbles 11mo ago
when will someone find the $300M bill to update the FAAs NOTAMs website which consists of a giant database with some simple web pages on top? google pso + cgi federal overloaded the migration with 300+ people and 4 layers of subcontractors to deliver a sub-par infra stack in order to make some media splash before DOGE (rip) could derail it - yes that is why they shifted the db choice last minute to ship quicker versus ship best practices. NOTAMs is the most important tool used daily by airlines, pilots, airports, the military, and every other industrialized nation in the world. and its now a rube goldberg hodgepodge to avoid an audit from a team that just got canned.... disclosure - i am a pilot who also worked on the migration before being canned for vocally pushing back against the infra architecture decisions that will result in hackable, or offline NOTAMs, halting air traffic worldwide.
GianFabien 11mo ago
Is the consulting company actually named somewhere? If you are a government procurement manager, you certainly would want to know where the biggest kickbacks come from.
Garlef 11mo ago
I remember that a, few years back the phrase "They have not yet realized that they're a software company now." was used to describe the necessary change in perspective for many companies. I guess while some companies have caught up, most nation states still have to make this realization.
WheelsAtLarge 11mo ago
I’ve worked on major website redesigns, and there’s so much more to it than just refreshing a few screens. A big redesign is kind of like making a 90min film that costs over $100 million. What you see on the surface is only a small part of the effort. Behind every large website there are teams of experts and consultants. $96 million sounds like a lot, but so is the amount of work required to build or rebuild a site at that scale. It’s easy for people who aren’t familiar with the process to guess what it "should" cost, but without understanding the complexity, those guesses are usually way off. And of course, technology and tech workers are expensive. Sometimes even the initial consulting can run close to a million+ dollars. Every now and then, we see a post on HN where someone claims they've recreated a well-known website in a short time. But they really haven’t. What they’ve done is copy a handful of screens and maybe a couple of data flows that work for a few test users with no fault tolerance, security, or scalability. Building or updating a hardened, website is far more difficult and far more expensive than anything a small team can spin up quickly. It's expensive and time consuming. Was there some small waste? Yes, I almost guarantee it. But fraud? $96m is a lot of money but without understanding the work that's gone into it, there's no way to know if there was fraud in the cost.
more_corn 11mo ago
No need for a meteorologist, I can tell you $96M bill is sus.

124 points by OuterVale 11mo ago

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.

alcasa 11mo ago
Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.
- hyperpape 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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.)
    - brokenmachine 11mo ago
      >It was slightly weird that the old website didn't support https It always did if you linked to https://reg.bom.gov.au https://reg.bom.gov.au , eg https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDN60801/IDN60801.94768.shtml https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDN60801/IDN60801.94768.shtm... https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDR711.loop.shtml https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDR711.loop.shtml
      - jiggawatts 11mo ago
        Ironically it had HTTPS enabled and set up on the 'www' site as well, but it obnoxiously redirected you back to HTTP if you tried to change the URL. I've never seen that anywhere else, ever.
- chrisrickard 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    This is pretty standard for Accenture and Deloitte.
- blitzar 11mo ago
  > 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.
  - moron4hire 11mo ago
    Hahahaha, right. I wish. No developer in consulting is getting paid $500k. Jesus, people hear one tidbit about prestige staff engineer positions at Microsoft, Meta, and Google, and then assume we're all getting those numbers.
aunty_helen 11mo ago
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.

TrackerFF 11mo ago

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.

delusional 11mo ago
Where did you get 11 members from?
- TrackerFF 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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.
    - gk1 11mo ago
      Exactly this. At least in the US, consultancies that contract with the gov’t can keep a small full time staff in order to qualify for small-business preference and keep their overhead low, and then depend on an army of subcontractors for large projects.

evolve2k 11mo ago

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. https://builtwith.com/bom.gov.au https://builtwith.com/bom.gov.au

mb2100 11mo ago
It has data-drupal attributes in the source. Not sure where the Perl and Java things would have come from.

lunias 11mo ago

Absolutely crazy. I'll negotiate on your behalf next time; just give me 10% of what I save you.

flag_fagger 11mo ago
Yes, but what special relations do you have with the purchasers?

eviks 11mo ago

Should've made it a nice round billion and sprinkle the necessity of AI to usher in the new era of meteorology

fergie 11mo ago

> "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.

jihadjihad 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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.
stephen_g 11mo ago
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…

aurareturn 11mo ago

Honestly, with an LLM, I can do it by myself for $96,000 - maybe less. I had a brief look at the website. Downvote me if you want. But I just built a small business website for a relative in about 5 minutes using Vercel's v0. All I did was upload the logo design, gave it some details about the business and it spit out a fantastic professional looking website in about 1 minute. Made some changes to it and pressed a button to publish with a custom domain and it went live. The entire process took 5 minutes. I'm sure I can make a weather website with a map for $96k.

cracki 11mo ago
Fixed price? Shake on it LOL - That "weather website" has to serve all of Australia. - It's got to be usable on big screen desktops, tablets, smartphones. - It has to have an uptime of what I estimate to be 99.99%. As the article says, farmers will pitchfork you if you can't tell them when rain will hit their fields. - It has to be slinging dynamic image data to (about) every visitor. - The data comes from somewhere. You're lucky if they have that under control already. Probably not. I came up with these aspects, not knowing anything about what the "Bureau of Meteorology" actually needs in a website. It's just common sense speculation.
- javier123454321 11mo ago
  This seems like a classic case of the whole "once we have all the data building this is easy". Yeah that's the easy part, that's why building a weather dashboard is one of the classic beginner projects. The issue is aggregating the data. Same for supermarket systems, transport and logistics, and other systems tied to external data that requires physical interaction.
Lalabadie 11mo ago
The Australian government eagerly awaits your expert advice.
- gritten 11mo ago
  [flagged]

tantalor 11mo ago

> 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?

justincormack 11mo ago
In the UK, the Met Office is part of the military, for historical reasons.
- mxuribe 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  It looks like it was part of the MoD but it's now part of DSIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met_Office
angry_octet 11mo ago
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.

sys_64738 11mo ago

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.

asdefghyk 11mo ago

My recollection was ( could be wrong) - It was said in media that "security testing" was 12 million AU dollars

OuterVale 11mo ago
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.

OuterVale 11mo ago

The new site post re-development: https://www.bom.gov.au https://www.bom.gov.au The old site provided with HTTPS: https://reg.bom.gov.au https://reg.bom.gov.au

SpaghettiCthulu 11mo ago
> "A complete rebuild was necessary to ensure the website meets modern security, usability and accessibility requirements for the millions of Australians who reply on it every day," a spokesperson said. I guess those "usability and accessibility requirements" don't include being usable without JavaScript.

oliwarner 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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.
- oliwarner 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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.
- falcor84 11mo ago

asdefghyk 11mo ago

FROM https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-24/bom-website-approved-by-coalition-ceo-says/106047518 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."...."

intrasight 11mo ago
And so clearly was not only for design
asdefghyk 11mo ago
I guess some of the endpoints could be supplying critical data . Interference via hackers to these endpoints data could have serious consequences. I have no specific idea actually, but with experience as electronics engineer / embedded programmer .... there probably be some such scenarios .... hence endpoints would need security upgrades .... But I really have NO IDEA about any specifics ...

BigJono 11mo ago

There's a few comments speculating about fraud, but they're way off on the timeframe. I was approached about this project like 7-8 years ago. It's probably been in development the whole time. 1k * 250 * 8 * a team size of 20 is about 40 mil in salary for engineering, could be low, add on their $12M testing, $4.1M just for the design (vintage Deloitte), some cloud cost blowouts and a bunch of dickhead managers and scrumlords, plus the putrid enterprise-grade 3rd party map/data system they've gone with, I bet that wasn't cheap. All up it's in the right ballpark for a typical well-intentioned trainwreck consulting project. Wouldn't be the first project to blow out because of a bunch of enterprise Typescript, Java and C# devs that can't deliver anything. Welcome to the Aussie tech industry.

mistrial9 11mo ago

how much money did corner petrol stations make in profits around the country in one day ? How about the refineries and distributors of Oil and Gas ? Regarding the entire project -- you cant change what you don't measure? media poking fingers at the expenses of anti-climate pollution projects seems to be a political move these days

knowitnone3 11mo ago

They really messed up cause I would have done it for $95.99M

sandorscribbles 11mo ago

when will someone find the $300M bill to update the FAAs NOTAMs website which consists of a giant database with some simple web pages on top? google pso + cgi federal overloaded the migration with 300+ people and 4 layers of subcontractors to deliver a sub-par infra stack in order to make some media splash before DOGE (rip) could derail it - yes that is why they shifted the db choice last minute to ship quicker versus ship best practices. NOTAMs is the most important tool used daily by airlines, pilots, airports, the military, and every other industrialized nation in the world. and its now a rube goldberg hodgepodge to avoid an audit from a team that just got canned.... disclosure - i am a pilot who also worked on the migration before being canned for vocally pushing back against the infra architecture decisions that will result in hackable, or offline NOTAMs, halting air traffic worldwide.

GianFabien 11mo ago

Is the consulting company actually named somewhere? If you are a government procurement manager, you certainly would want to know where the biggest kickbacks come from.

Garlef 11mo ago

I remember that a, few years back the phrase "They have not yet realized that they're a software company now." was used to describe the necessary change in perspective for many companies. I guess while some companies have caught up, most nation states still have to make this realization.

WheelsAtLarge 11mo ago

I’ve worked on major website redesigns, and there’s so much more to it than just refreshing a few screens. A big redesign is kind of like making a 90min film that costs over $100 million. What you see on the surface is only a small part of the effort. Behind every large website there are teams of experts and consultants. $96 million sounds like a lot, but so is the amount of work required to build or rebuild a site at that scale. It’s easy for people who aren’t familiar with the process to guess what it "should" cost, but without understanding the complexity, those guesses are usually way off. And of course, technology and tech workers are expensive. Sometimes even the initial consulting can run close to a million+ dollars. Every now and then, we see a post on HN where someone claims they've recreated a well-known website in a short time. But they really haven’t. What they’ve done is copy a handful of screens and maybe a couple of data flows that work for a few test users with no fault tolerance, security, or scalability. Building or updating a hardened, website is far more difficult and far more expensive than anything a small team can spin up quickly. It's expensive and time consuming. Was there some small waste? Yes, I almost guarantee it. But fraud? $96m is a lot of money but without understanding the work that's gone into it, there's no way to know if there was fraud in the cost.

more_corn 11mo ago

No need for a meteorologist, I can tell you $96M bill is sus.