By Terry Ryder, March 2026

The federal government has done it again: rewarded failure, dressed it up as “due diligence”, and sent taxpayers the bill.

Accenture Australia has landed a fresh $16 million government contract to build a new climate data platform, despite being the same firm behind the Bureau of Meteorology website disaster that blew out from an estimated $4.1 million to roughly $96.5 million. That is not a rounding error. That is a case study in bureaucratic thinking, consultant culture, and the kind of public spending waste that keeps happening because nobody in Canberra ever seems to pay a price for getting it wrong.

The new deal is for what is being called the Climate Risk Hub, a platform service for the Australian Climate Service, which brings together the BOM, CSIRO, Geoscience Australia and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The contract runs for three years, with options to extend it out to 2033. In typical public-sector language, the agency says Accenture won after a “comprehensive and competitive procurement process” and that “strong due diligence” showed it offered the best value for money. That phrase alone should set off alarms. Governments love saying “value for money” right before they waste a mountain of it.

This is the real problem. In the private sector, a contractor presides over a blowout from $4 million to nearly $100 million and produces a product that gets slammed by users, and there are consequences. In government, the same contractor gets another multi-million-dollar cheque and a fresh runway out to the next decade. That is the bureaucratic mindset in one neat package: process over performance, jargon over judgment, and zero commercial accountability.

The BOM website overhaul was not just expensive. It was heavily criticised for poor design and poor usability. Farmers and everyday users complained about difficult navigation, confusing radar maps and missing rainfall information. Senate estimates heard it described as a “nightmare” example of contract failure. Greens senator Barbara Pocock accused Accenture of a “land and expand” strategy, where contracts start modestly and then balloon through extensions. In this case, the contract reportedly started at $31 million and expanded across nine extensions. Again, this is not an outlier. It is how bloated government procurement too often works.

And now taxpayers are expected to believe this latest $16 million spend is different.

The timing makes it worse. Scientists have raised concerns that money is being poured into another expensive digital platform while climate and environmental research capacity is under pressure. CSIRO is facing cuts, including in environmental research, and yet governments are still finding millions to hand to major consulting firms. That tells you everything about the priority structure. The machine will always find money for consultants, frameworks, portals and strategy documents. It somehow never finds enough for the scientists, researchers and in-house capability that actually produce the knowledge these platforms are supposed to showcase.

That is why this matters beyond one contract. It goes to the heart of how government now thinks. Build another hub. Launch another portal. Commission another review. Outsource the work. Write a glossy justification. Call it reform. But underneath it all, the pattern is the same: more layers, more contractors, more spending, less accountability.

None of this is an argument against better climate information or better public-facing tools. Of course Australia needs accessible, usable climate-risk data. The issue is whether this is the smartest use of scarce public money, and whether the government has learned anything from the BOM debacle. On the evidence so far, the answer looks like no.

When a government keeps rewarding the same players after high-profile failures, it is not showing discipline. It is showing institutional laziness. And when it spends millions on platforms while core scientific capability is being squeezed, it is not future-focused. It is confused.

This is what bureaucratic thinking looks like in the wild: fail big, explain bigger, and spend even more next time. Taxpayers are entitled to ask a very simple question — at what point does failure stop being funded?