So according to this article [1] the hundred million is for the renewal of the whole infrastructure including the supercomputer calculating the weather model. If this is true the supercomputer alone costs at least $10 - 20 million. This would make the cost a whole lot more reasonable.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-24/bom-website-approved-...

This shows the genius of Utopia's writers.

They have a whole episode that is exactly this.

In the UK the intelligence services spent £120M on an "information sharing platform" (email + intranet), before declaring after 3 years work that "technical challenges" made it impossible and the project was canned.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/mar/06/mi5-gchq-co...

Discussion from the other day:

Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign | 119 points, 80 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46033435

In South Australia an algal bloom started in ~mid-March of this year, it's a pretty big ecological disaster, probably the worst non-bushfire disaster in living memory. Probably 30% of SA's coastline is affected. It's a pretty big deal affecting many people's livelihoods.

The joint state and federal government relief and cleanup package is worth AUD $102.5 million dollars.

I hope the public receives that comparison at every opportunity.

The old website was frankly excellent, the only problem was it didn't have HTTPS support. I would have happily upgraded that part of the system for the cost of a cup of coffee if I'd had an opportunity to submit for the tender!

The new website is significantly more difficult to navigate (for me, a seasoned tech user). The primary thing Dad's everywhere use it for (the weather radar) now requires scrolling to the _bottom_ of the page, and zooming in from the 'map of Australia' to the region you live in. It used to be like, a click to go from home page -> state weather radar with all the info you needed.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology...

If you want to read our local news about it.

> [BOM] 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.

Absolutely stupid, even those numbers are outrageous. They say it's part of some 'larger upgrade package', prompted by a cyber attack in 2015.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-02/china-blamed-for-cybe...

But politicians over here love to blame cyber attacks when technical blunders happen. We had a census a couple years ago and the website fell over due to 'unprecedented load' or maybe it was a 'DDOS attack'? The news at the time couldn't decide who to blame!

Welp, I hope this gets as much world-wide attention as possible so they can be embarrassed and do better.

I think its a bit unfair. Its good that the government spent some money in good old cybersecurity. Maybe 96M is a bit much, but it includes a full rebuild of the system. There should be an audit on where all that money went. Having said that, its quite possible they limited certain query patterns to protect against DDoS attacks. No excuses for messing up a website though. The change should have been gradual with secruity holes being plugged first.

Reminds me a bit of this classic: https://www.satirewire.com/cubists-launch-unnavigable-web-si...

>It's the government IT project equivalent of ordering a renovation, discovering the contractor has made your house less functional, and then learning they charged you for a mansion.

Or rather, it's you and your neighbours deciding to fix your house because it's an eyesore, but then you build a huge unpractical mansion for yourself on their expense.

Not a user of this site but a lesson for all techies about changing something which is heavily in use. Don't expect people to take to it immediately and provide some way to allow people to gradually transition.

The site itself looks clean and loads fast but people are complaining that they can't easily find information they used to be able to.

Also, the price tag is eye watering!

The entire bill of the UK's Government Digital Services GDS team is about £100 million a year for comparison.

Australians will sit and watch their health system shredded, multinationals running off with trillions in resources and pay zero tax/royalties, our poor quality housing and gridlocked cities rank amoungst the most expensive in the world, but will not tolerate anybody fucking with BOM.

If they hired 3 full time devs at 100k salary each to develop and maintain their website, it would take over 300 years to spend that much money... also unrelated but kind of related - australia spent i think it was over 300 billion for some subs that we'll never get. hot news, if you want free money from people who have no clue, go get it from australia! we are indeed a nation of stupid