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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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]
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).
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
People rely on this for safety as well as economic activity like agriculture etc.. As bad as the site redesign is, we even more don’t want a crappy vibe-coded site when incorrect weather warnings could kill a lot of people or cause economic damage!
- 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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...
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).
Where did you get 11 members from?
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.
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.
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.
Usually there are hard limits around doing 51% of the work yourself, so you can only sub out half of it.
> "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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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
It has data-drupal attributes in the source. Not sure where the Perl and Java things would have come from.
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.
Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.
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.
This is pretty standard for Accenture and Deloitte.
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.
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.)
> 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?
In the UK, the Met Office is part of the military, for historical reasons.
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.)
Should've made it a nice round billion and sprinkle the necessity of AI to usher in the new era of meteorology
Absolutely crazy. I'll negotiate on your behalf next time; just give me 10% of what I save you.
Yes, but what special relations do you have with the purchasers?
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.
People rely on this for safety as well as economic activity like agriculture etc.. As bad as the site redesign is, we even more don’t want a crappy vibe-coded site when incorrect weather warnings could kill a lot of people or cause economic damage!
The Australian government eagerly awaits your expert advice.
They're too busy jailing people for social media posts and posing for photos with this week's 100k new Indians.
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.