The Bureau of Meteorology has been using hundreds of millions of dollars granted specifically for “proactive” maintenance of its ageing weather observing system to prop up the agency’s deteriorating financial position and cover cost overruns on major technology rollouts. According to a scathing audit report, it has also failed to account for this money.

The blistering assessment from the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has revealed an agency with missing plans or inexplicable broken promises. It is only meeting between 52 and 79 per cent of its own preventive maintenance targets and there are unresolved work orders on its live dashboards that are four years old.

This is despite $225.6 million in additional funding being made available over three years from 2021-22, and $143.7 million each year after that, explicitly “to maintain a proactive asset maintenance schedule consistent with industry best practice”.

Four years after receiving the significant new funding, the ANAO audit found, the weather bureau has not bothered to monitor or report on whether the money provided for maintenance is actually being spent on keeping its billion-dollar asset base in working order.

“The Bureau advised the ANAO in July 2024 that ‘no progress update/reporting has been undertaken nor is regular reporting expected’ on the 2020-21 Federal Budget funding as ‘sustainability funding increases the Bureau’s overall base funding levels for capital and operating on an ongoing basis – it is not a discrete program of work’,” the audit says.

“Without translating the maintenance schedule and other assumptions of the cost model into a plan or monitoring and reporting whether funding is being utilised for its proposed purpose, the Bureau does not have assurance that the proposed improvements to the observation network will be delivered.”

Elsewhere, the audit report found the risk of radar outages last year was still rated “extreme”. Bureau executives failed to analyse if severe weather had led to increased outages in equipment between October 2023 and January 2024.

In 2019-20, the bureau modelled what it would cost to maintain and then replace every asset in its inventory over the coming decades and used this work to attract more government funding. The bureau then ignored the modelling and failed to convert it into an operational plan for asset replacement or maintenance.

The report found the weather agency developed a draft inventory management plan for replacement parts of its observing system in November 2022 but left it in draft form for the next two years, leading to both critical undersupply and costly overruns of inventory.

The BoM failed to achieve 10 per cent of planned maintenance last year. Its solar measurement instruments have returned no data to stakeholders for almost five years.

Where instrument or asset failures did occur, 43.3 per cent of these incidents did not meet the agency targets for “mean time to restore” service.

“I think it’s well past time for the government to take a look behind the veil of secrecy that the bureau has been operating under since Andrew Johnson came to the helm.”

According to the report, bureau management has repeatedly failed to track progress on maintenance and asset management. It promised to deliver reviews and responses to internal audits that went nowhere for years and did not report on the progress of key initiatives, “including the initiative to regularly review progress”.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said she had requested an “urgent briefing” with the bureau, led by chief executive Andrew Johnson.

“Australians need to be confident in the Bureau of Meteorology. The ANAO report shows there needs to be better systems and processes in the organisation,” she told The Saturday Paper in response to written questions. “I have requested an urgent briefing with the bureau to discuss these matters. Australians rely on the Bureau of Meteorology to provide timely, accurate and reliable advice. It is a vital resource for communities, emergency workers, and essential services.”

The government audit did not cover the BoM’s most controversial project – the $788 million ROBUST data, infrastructure and security transformation, a computer upgrade beset by delays and that had cost $866 million by July last year despite remaining unfinished. By Dr Andrew Johnson’s estimate, there is still about “10 per cent” of work to be done this financial year, at additional cost.

That final figure also does not take into account the additional “run costs” of the new technology and data platforms – including a new website, currently in beta, that is almost three years behind schedule – which were either not factored into the original budgets or, as internal sources tell The Saturday Paper, deliberately separated to mask significant overspending.

To pay for those blowouts, Johnson concedes the national weather agency had to raid the “sustainment” funding provided in 2020-21, further diminishing the pool available for the upkeep of “almost 15,000 individual assets distributed across Australia and its territories”.

What financial buffers remain have been eaten away.

The Bureau of Meteorology recorded a comprehensive loss of $152 million in the past financial year – or an operating deficit of $41.5 million, with depreciation expenses removed. This is its worst result since the depths of the Covid-19 crisis in 2020-21.

Greens Senator Barbara Pocock, who has pressed Johnson and his executives relentlessly for information about the BoM’s contracting practices, tells The Saturday Paper the ANAO report is the “last straw”.

“What we’ve seen at the BoM is a litany of management failures that have put at risk the effective ongoing operation of critical systems at our weather bureau,” she says.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated to ensure the maintenance of BoM assets, yet the ANAO has found maintenance spending has fallen behind and that the risk of failure for some of its equipment is extreme.

“I think it’s well past time for the government to take a look behind the veil of secrecy that the bureau has been operating under since Andrew Johnson came to the helm … The new report from ANAO points to serious financial questions about one of our most important agencies in the face of climate change threats.”

The audit referred to an internal document at the BoM, called the Strategic Asset Management Plan (SAMP), which was first prepared in 2018 and revised in 2020. The SAMP describes maintenance spending being “heavily skewed towards reactive responses rather than preventative, planned maintenance”.

“Most of the Bureau’s assets in the observing network are nearing or are beyond the end of their useful life, which is on average 15 years,” the document says.

“Most maintenance and operations processes are inconsistent across states and territories and lack a formal review, planning and scheduling element. Processes are also not suitably supported by an asset management system.”

The ANAO noted the document recommended a “comprehensive review … in 2021”. This never happened, as the report notes: “As of July 2024, a review of the SAMP has not occurred.”

Examples such as these are littered throughout the audit report, which had access to internal policies and data not published by the weather bureau and not available to the public.

The same strategy document, for instance, declared that a “financial model with a 20-year outlook has been developed to support [asset management plans] and will feed into the Enterprise Asset Financial Overview and the Bureau’s budget cycle”.

In fact, there is no 20-year financial outlook. The BoM advised the audit office that the “Enterprise Asset Financial Overview document was not created in the way it was anticipated” and said the “best reference document” would instead be the capital portfolio budget statements from 2023-24.

That document was issued in September 2023 and advised it would be updated twice-yearly “in line with the Bureau’s budget cycle”.

More than 13 months later, in December last year, no such updates had been delivered. In any case, it does not include the 20-year financial horizon promised by the SAMP in 2018. In September 2024, the bureau told the audit office “there is not likely to be a single document-driven approach for the capital program”.

A spokesperson for the Bureau of Meteorology told The Saturday Paperthe ANAO audit related to “planning and documentation matters, not the practical in-the-field management of assets”.

This isn’t true.

The review features eye-popping details about the fieldwork capability of the agency since Andrew Johnson came to the bureau in 2016, “de-staffing” and automating some 24 field stations. Those who were able to remain with the agency – only 45 per cent of all field station employees stayed, 35 per cent were made redundant and 20 per cent left the bureau or retired – were relocated to eight capital city “observing hubs”.

These staff would have first line of sight over the maintenance requirements – both preventive and reactive – of the observing system assets they had left behind in the field. Dashboards at these hubs feature default displays that show work for execution, work in progress or work completed on tasks triaged for priority.

“As of 15 July 2024, this reporting included 2196 work orders which are within the remit of the hubs and have remained at one of these three statuses for more than 14 days, the 15 oldest of which were last updated in 2021,” the ANAO says.

“The NOO [National Observing Operations] Work Management Process instructs that work orders are to be marked as unachieved when there is a lack of resources to complete the work order, and that this is to be done when a preventative maintenance order will not be achieved before the next iteration of the same maintenance activity.

“In 2022–23, 521 (11 per cent) preventative maintenance work orders were marked as unachieved, and 662 (10 per cent) in 2023–24.”

Over those two financial years, 17 per cent of completed preventive maintenance work orders were started more than six months after the “target start date”. More than 4 per cent didn’t begin until a full year later.

A completion target of 100 per cent has not been met for years running.

In 2022-23, between 23 and 69 per cent of preventive maintenance work was completed across seven asset sub-networks, including flood, infrastructure, marine, radar, sea-level, upper-air and surface observation.

These finalisations improved last financial year, to between 52 and 79 per cent, but remain well below the industry best practice that the agency was funded to deliver half a decade ago.

For “corrective” matters – where an instrument has failed or an asset has been broken and needs repair sooner rather than later – just 38 per cent of the top priority work orders had a start date made the same day the issue was reported.

“In 14 per cent of cases the reported date was after the actual start date, reflecting concerns with the completeness and accuracy of data,” the ANAO found.

While auditors are not known for especially energetic language, the details in the ANAO assessment are damning and add considerable texture to a series of reports in The Saturday Paper about the internal culture at the BoM, which was first raised when Johnson forced through a multimillion-dollar “rebrand” – including a new logo during a flood crisis in 2022.

Since then, Johnson’s right-hand man and chief customer officer, Dr Peter Stone, was found to have “deliberately” misled a Federal Court in a manner that reflected poorly on his boss because of the “close and detailed management style” of Johnson and the fact the two men had worked tightly together at two agencies over the past 15 years.

Dozens of sources, including 10 meteorologists and forecasters, have subsequently revealed to this newspaper that the agency-wide restructure implemented at the same time as the mammoth ROBUST transformation had crippled the BoM during some of the worst weather seasons on record.

Even on a day-to-day basis, sources said, the forecast quality was “knowingly” wrong because numerical prediction models spat out figures automatically for geographically and atmospherically unique areas that meteorologists would previously have been able to correct but that under management decree were now unable to fix.

On a clear day, the thinking goes, it matters less if the predicted maximum temperature in the model is 30ºC but forecasters know it is likely going to be 33ºC. Their time is better spent elsewhere, the executive has said in memos and at Senate estimates.

Since the restructure, resources are only becoming scarcer.

In August last year, hosting an all-hands meeting to mark the “end” of the unfinished and over-budget ROBUST program, Johnson was forced to detail the state of the agency’s books. His remarks were recorded and leaked to The Saturday Paper.

“The bureau is, like every other aspect of Australian society … our revenues are essentially flat, our appropriation resources are flat, but our costs are increasing, and some of those costs have increased very significantly in the last 12 to 24 months,” he said. “It is a very, very significant challenge. I’m not going to sugar-coat it and I know we’ve all experienced some belt-tightening just this last year, that I know has impacted on many of you, but I take our fiscal fidelity very, very seriously.”

The ANAO audit found that in November last year, the staffing level at national observing operations hubs across the Bureau of Meteorology was at just 78 per cent of the target full-time equivalent level. In Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide, the staffing levels were at 64, 66 and 69 per cent of target, respectively.

“People who do the critical work at the BoM are overworked and under-resourced,” a source tells The Saturday Paper.

“It’s actually a dangerous situation but I think I can speak for most of us when we say what we care about most is the quality of the observations and data. That is where we have always had pride. That is now suffering.”

Take the network of 13 sites containing solar instruments that collect information on “sunlight, irradiance and the sun’s movements” – an important ground-truth verification for satellite readings.

According to the audit report, “no data has been made available to stakeholders since October 2020”.

These stakeholders include the solar energy sector.

The solar network asset management plan – drafted in 2019 alongside 11 other plans, which were supposed to be updated every year but which were not revised or endorsed by management at all until January last year – now reveals the true state of the system.

“Current CAPEX [capital expenditure] funding for FY23-24 is focussed on remediation of the solar servers which have gone many years without formal IT support, which has caused the [quality control] software to fail, leading to a length [sic] period with no data available to stakeholders,” the internal document says.

“The connection between the solar servers and the filestore failed in October 2020 and has not been restored. This means that the Bureau cannot currently perform manual quality control of the solar data. As a result, no data has been made available to stakeholders since October 2020.”

In addition, the plan confirms previous reporting by The Saturday Paper that showed the solar instrument sensors needed regular cleaning every day before sunrise and after weather events such as rain or dust storms.

“This was previously undertaken by on-site Bureau staff for all stations,” the plan says. “It is now being undertaken by contractors at some sites at ‘less than ideal frequency’.”

Such major failures in risk management – now actualised – have led to “reputational impact of reduced data quality”, according to the bureau’s delayed internal reporting through its asset management plans.

Across all 12 asset networks, on the measure of data availability performance by month in 2024, “five did not meet their target in any month”.

“Reporting also includes the average across all networks, with a target of 95 per cent,” the ANAO says. “Since August 2023, the data availability average across all networks has not met this target in any month.”

In other words, almost half of the bureau’s measurement networks did not meet their reliability targets last year and none achieved the target for average availability in any month.

Risk ratings prepared in 2022 noted that the potential for the “Bureau’s systems and assets becoming obsolete, unviable or not fit for purpose” was high and the risk of “technology, property and other system and asset outages and disruptions” was extreme.

“For these two risks, the risk levels have not changed since introduction,” the ANAO says.

In May last year, the “prolonged outage of legacy radars”, which form the backbone of the network, was rated as “extreme”. Real-time radar coverage was available for just 96.8 per cent of the year, the BoM’s second-worst result in the past five years.

Against this backdrop, Andrew Johnson’s public appearances at Senate estimates have been labelled as “arrogant” and “belligerent” by his own staff. In November, at a spillover Senate estimates hearing called because the BoM director failed to bring qualified staff with him to a previous hearing as required, Johnson apologised for the “frustration” he caused committee members.

Liberal Senator Jonathon Duniam said it was a “lack of willingness ... or ill-preparedness. I’m not sure which it was”.

“You do realise in your performance not just at the last estimates but ones previously you managed to unite every single member of this committee in fury at your unwillingness to answer questions,” Duniam said at the November 8 hearing.

Johnson, having brought a roster of executives to help him answer questions this time around, said: “I don’t think it was a lack of willingness.”

A Bureau of Meteorology spokesperson said the agency is “actively taking steps to manage its costs whilst ensuring the ongoing delivery of essential services to the Australian community”.

“Sustainment funding was provided to the Bureau to maintain the benefits of ROBUST – the security, stability and resilience of the Bureau’s most critical assets that support service delivery,” the spokesperson said. “Along with core Bureau appropriation, the sustainment funding assists with the maintenance of all Bureau asset types, including observation and IT assets.

“Like many other parts of government, business and households, the Bureau faces ongoing challenges in aligning increases in its cost base with available revenue.”

Senator Barbara Pocock, best known for her work skewering PwC over its tax leaks scandal, said she has lost patience with the BoM. “What really upsets not just me but the many Australians who contact me is the horde of consultants who keep extending their contracts at ever greater cost to the taxpayer, sending massive bills for work that never seems to be completed,” she said.

“The question I have is: how bad do things have to get at the BoM before the minister steps in?”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 1, 2025 as "Exclusive: BoM diverted hundreds of millions to cover cost blowouts".

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/environment/2025/02/01/exclusive-bom-diverted-hundreds-millions-cover-cost-blowouts#mtr

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