“There
absolutely needs to be a royal commission into what happened at
Lismore. I saw grad mets barely off course in charge of things they
would never have been in charge of up until that point. Lismore
happened right in the short-staffing period. We go into that event,
everyone is already fatigued and working long hours.” [The
Saturday Paper,
22 October
2022]
The
Saturday Paper,
22 October 2022:
The
workplace culture at the Bureau of Meteorology is so toxic that a man
was hospitalised twice for psychiatric care, another had a heart
attack while working extreme overtime, and was asked to come back
earlier than a doctor advised, and at least five more staff took
stress leave because of panic attacks and anxiety regarding
management oversight.
More
than 20 staff have left the media and communications division at the
BoM in the past 18 months. The entire marketing team at the agency
was “bloodlet” and removed during a restructure and rebranding
effort that consumed the time and resources of the weather office
during a period of intensifying calamity relating to climate change
and natural disasters. Senior meteorologists have also left.
Since
June last year, the bureau has spent more than $260,000 with Elm
Communications Canberra Pty Ltd, just trying to plug gaps in its
public affairs workforce.
Although
many of the concerns relate to the media division, meteorologists and
other staff have complained of “the severe dysfunction” in this
area infecting other parts of the service. Gag orders have been
issued to prevent forecasters from speaking to journalists unless
their comments are pre-approved. Media managers have explicitly
banned the mention of climate change in connection with severe
weather events.
In
one case during major New South Wales flooding in March last year, an
edict was issued that BoM forecasters and other specialists were not
to speak to any media after a meteorologist was accused of “fluffing”
his lines on climate change.
A
spokesperson for the BoM denies this.
In
addition to the above concerns, The Saturday Paper can reveal the
Commonwealth agency admitted some months ago to staff that it has not
been paying overtime correctly and has so far failed to reimburse
employees. Indeed, it stopped communicating with them in August about
the issue.
The
bureau says, in a response to The Saturday Paper, that a
“discrepancy” was identified and “an audit of overtime payments
is currently under way and all payments made dating from 1 June 2021
are being reviewed”.
The
Saturday Paper has spoken with 20 current and former staff members at
the bureau to establish a distressing and farcial account of a
government agency’s response to a changing climate.
Details
in this account that do not appear within quotation marks have
nevertheless been provided by individuals who spoke on the condition
of anonymity, fearing reprisals…..
“There
is so much focus on rebranding efforts like this and all of this
window dressing and, in the meantime, the staff are really struggling
to get the work done. We have lost so many people due to the [public
service] transition to national production.”
Under
these reforms, which began after the appointment of Andrew Johnson as
director of the BoM, regional forecasting centres in every state and
territory have been shuttered. State managers have been sacked and a
national desk has been created instead. Johnson has pushed the
project with fervour. The new branding, complete with public
insistence that the Bureau of Meteorology be referred to respectfully
as the Bureau, was, according to sources at the BoM, “completely
driven by him”……
The
Saturday Paper can reveal that the planned name change and new
“corporate presence” began more than three years ago and cost far
more than has been reported. In December 2018, the BoM paid almost
$90,000 to brand specialists The Contenders for work on the new
“positioning project” between then and April 2019. When a new
general manager of communications – Emma Liepa – took over in
April 2020, she “canned the project” and restarted it using her
preferred contractor, The C Word Communications Agency Pty Ltd, owned
and operated by Jack Walden. The BoM has characterised this contract
as a “preliminary analysis” of perceptions about the agency and
its “position in the marketplace” and not part of the “Brand
project”.
Walden’s
The C Word agency won a $70,000 contract in September last year in a
“limited tender” to progress this project. Walden is now a senior
manager of communications delivery at the BoM, having started in
late November last year.
The
Saturday Paper understands that Walden was hired as an EL2 “upper”,
the same pay band as his boss Liepa, and is an ongoing public service
employee. Walden also worked with Liepa in her previous role at the
Victorian Healthcare Association. The Saturday Paper is not
suggesting there is anything inappropriate in his employment.
“In
this case, a conflict of interest was advised,” a BoM spokesperson
said.
“There
was no overlap between the work as a consultant and work when he
[Walden] commenced as an employee with the Bureau.”
Internally,
the rebranding has been prosecuted with fervour by Liepa and her
colleagues but resisted and mocked by more junior staff. This is at
odds with a BoM statement that says the sentiment, and feedback, from
employees has been “overwhelmingly positive”.
“Recently
Andrew Johnson launched the new 2022-2027 strategy and rounded off
the presentation by telling us all that we had to print off the
strategy, read it and he would be testing us if he bumped into us in
the office,” a staff member says. “He was dead serious.”
A
forecaster who cannot be identified because they still work with the
BoM said the “reaction around me on shift over the last few weeks
to the new branding announcements has been somewhere between
exasperated laughter and anger”.
They
continue, “That this is prioritised by management, over severe
long-term understaffing of mets [meteorologists] – seemingly not of
management and consultants – combined with a huge top-to-bottom
restructure of the public service hitting the really hairy stages.
“All
of this at the tail end of three La Niñas in a row with the
potential for most of the east coast to flood so easily.
Meteorologists are tired and overworked. The public reaction today
was honestly wonderful and heartwarming. I’m so happy the public
saw the bullshit instantly.”
Neither
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, whose portfolio includes the
BoM, nor her office, was aware the agency was about to launch its
controversial edict and new look publicly in the middle of a flooding
crisis across Victoria. When she demanded an urgent briefing, the
response from senior bureau managers was “cagey” and
“unsatisfactory”, according to people familiar with the exchange.
Internally, BoM staff were told that they were to move full steam
ahead and that the minister’s office was happy.
But
what the minister’s office did not know, because the BoM did not
tell them, was that the full cost of this rebranding was closer to
$750,000, with some of that cost completely unnecessary after the
banishing of The Contenders and early work done by that firm.
When
Plibersek’s people demanded a full list of contracts, this was not
mentioned. The Saturday Paper has confirmed this separately using
information provided by concerned employees. Bizarrely, the BoM hired
EY Sweeney on a $93,000 contract in March to conduct market research
regarding the rebrand. What the consultants found was that just 15
per cent of people recognised the Bureau of Meteorology as “the
Bureau” – the preferred name for brand recognition in the
now-failed repositioning. More than 60 per cent, however, associated
“BoM” with the agency.
What
matters, according to every staff member who spoke for this piece, is
that this side quest isn’t just a bad look. While these dramatic
restructures and fiddly public relations exercises unfolded, some of
the worst flooding in Australian history happened in northern NSW.
Residents
in Lismore in particular were trapped after catastrophic flooding
appeared to catch officials off guard. While the SES, itself
struggling with a new centralisation plan, is responsible for issuing
evacuation orders, they rely on information from the national
meteorologists and hydrologists at the bureau.
“The
BoM went into this PST [Public Sector Transformation] understaffed,
and only lost countless more staff during PST, not realising that not
everyone wants to uproot their lives and move to Melbourne or
Brisbane,” a meteorologist said.
“There
absolutely needs to be a royal commission into what happened at
Lismore. I saw grad mets barely off course in charge of things they
would never have been in charge of up until that point. Lismore
happened right in the short-staffing period. We go into that event,
everyone is already fatigued and working long hours.”
At
this time – when a meteorologist was due to speak at a press
conference about the unfolding flooding emergency in NSW, next to
Premier Dominic Perrottet – there was a particular sensitivity
within the agency about the warnings provided to the public. This
forecaster was told they could speak only from pre-approved lines.
A
separate source, who is no longer with the BoM, told The Saturday
Paper that the organisation was “down 24 or 25” meteorologists
and there were “no meteorologists in management”. The source said
good people were slowly forced out, especially meteorologists: “There
is such a strangled culture there now.”
After
being appointed by the former Coalition government to head the BoM,
Johnson set about an aggressive reform program, parts of which former
employees concede were much needed. But it happened so fast it caused
serious issues across the business.
“The
rate of change, ineffective change, that has happened has been a huge
problem because there are so many conflicting priorities, that the
bureau basically just ground to a halt,” a source says.
“All
the money just got funnelled into [PST] and squandered through
massive use of contractors and people who didn’t have core
knowledge of the bureau, so it took lots of time to ramp up to speed
and the like.
“Really
important projects like ours just got buried and not funded because
all the money just got funnelled off into these other areas.”
One
of the projects that was delayed and underfunded was the upgrade of
the bureau’s warning systems – a multi-part program with many
moving parts – which was left in disarray.
As
science was censored or relegated to the sideline and messages became
more tightly controlled, the culture at the BoM deteriorated even
further. In July and August this year, tens of thousands of dollars
were paid to the conflict resolution firm Momentum, which promised to
mediate workplace disputes and teach staff how to get along…….
The
full article can read here.
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