MARANOA MP and Shadow Minister for Emergency Management David Littleproud has blasted the Bureau of Meteorology over their forecasts.
Speaking about various issues on Nine’s Today show, the former Nationals Leader did not hold back with his assessment of the Federally-funded BoM.
“For far too long, the Bureau’s business model has been to fail and to ask the taxpayer for more for more money,” says Mr Littleproud, who had just completed his latest tour of Outback Queensland including visits to Charleville and Cunnamulla before heading back to Canberra for Parliament’s spring sitting.
“The reality is, they’ve been out in in a lot of their predictions. Even when cyclones have hit, forgot about the rain depressions that have come before, after it, and before it. And they’ve also scared the bejesus out of many primary producers less than two years ago, telling them that we’re going to the biggest El Nino, biggest drought we’ll have since 2019, and everyone panicked, sold their cattle, crashed the market, and a whole lot of cockies lost a whole lot of money.
“And what’s happening now is they’re voting with their wallets. They’re actually paying for forecasts from foreign forecasters from Norway, Canada, and the United States, rather than the Bureau of Meteorology. The last piece of information that was useful that came out of the Bureau was their radar, and then they changed it without actually asking anyone about whether it worked or not…..they charged you $96 million to do that for a radar that doesn’t work.”
Mr Littleproud believes the Bureau’s credibility has effectively gone up in smoke. “This is just a real life episode of utopia unfolding before our eyes, and this is where we need to actually step up and get faith back in our institutions. And the Bureau has lost it,” he says.
The MP’s stinging criticism came after News Corp reported the BoM got it wrong more than 650 times in Queensland alone over the past two years.
In some instances, their predictions in relation to rainfall were off by more than 200 millimeters.
PHOTO: Maranoa MP David Littleproud on one of his trips to Outback Queensland.
POSTED: Monday, August 10, 2026