Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

It has been reported last weekend by the Saturday Paper that the Bureau of Meteorology has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on technological upgrades that should have been spent on recording the weather. This is absolutely breathtaking, and it just confirms everything that I've been saying for almost six years—that the Bureau of Meteorology is out of control. This squandering of hundreds of millions of dollars isn't my opinion; this is the opinion of the National Audit Office. The question has to be asked: why is it that the bureau cannot account for the money? The Auditor-General has actually recorded that they haven't been able to account for the hundreds of millions of dollars. The question is: why wasn't it used to record or report actual raw data observations?

Of course, the answer for that is that the bureau has created an entirely new way of recording the weather called homogenisation, which requires the use of a $40 million supercomputer that cannot be audited. It requires transactions, or 'iterations' as Peter Stone called it in Senate estimates, of up to 400 million iterations at one weather station, Marble Bar, for the maximum temperature and 250 million iterations for the minimum temperature at Marble Bar, to give just one example. This sort of behaviour and complex record keeping is completely fraudulent in my view, not just the financial side but the actual recording of the temperature. This homogenisation has actually increased the temperature by about half a degree in the last century, which is used to justify the billions of dollars being wasted on climate change.