Federal Member for Farrer David Farley has criticised the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), saying its inaccurate predictions are jeopardising Australian agriculture.
Mr Farley says Australian farmers plan their seasons around predictions of the weather, with the aid of the public institution.
“When its outlooks miss, the cost flows through bank lending, water allocations, and planting decisions,” Mr Farley said.
“This year reveals how expensive that can be.”
According to Mr Farley, 2026 brought one of the strongest El Niño events on record and a dry-phase Indian Ocean, a combination historically linked to severe drought.
Yet, as a report by the ABC published on October 17 revealed, 2026 is on track to be Australia’s wettest El Niño year on record.
Winter was the wettest for an El Niño year in 35 years, and none of the 27 El Niño years since 1900 delivered above-average winter-spring rainfall.
Mr Farley said the Bureau’s drought-leaning framework missed it, and farmers and economy are paying.
“Lenders weigh seasonal risk when approving working capital, and a drought signal makes banks cautious,” he said.
“Growers who could have financed fertiliser, seed and livestock were instead told to batten down, missing some of the best soil moisture in decades.”
He said the Murray–Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) and the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder (CEWH) build their annual programs on Bureau outlooks.
“A drought signal drives cautious operating plans and environmental watering strategies designed to ration scarce water,” he said.
“When the rain arrives instead, irrigators hold back crops, water trades as if it were scarce, and releases are planned for a drought that never came.
“Yet Mother Nature has already done much of the CEWH’s environmental work this winter and spring, watering wetlands and floodplains at no cost.”
Drawing on his experience in the commercial agricultural industry, Mr Farley has been calling on state and federal environmental ministers to seize the opportunity and allocate more water to productive use.
He says it will boost regional commerce and employment.
“The cost of inaction does not stop at the farm gate,” Mr Farley said.
“Every hectare not planted is freight not hauled, inputs not sold, contractors not hired and crops not processed.”
Mr Farley says regional services and processors run below capacity, shrinking regional and national GDP and the taxation base.
“Agriculture knows how to manage weather risk,” he said.
“What it cannot manage is false confidence.
“This year, the Bureau has become a bigger operational risk variable than Mother Nature herself. This is the agency whose website revamp, first costed publicly at $4.1 million, ended up at $96.5 million,” Mr Farley said.
“If it cannot manage a website budget, how can it be trusted with forecasts that put hundreds of millions of dollars of production at stake?
“Until its outlooks earn the weight placed on them, every miss will keep landing on farm balance sheets, regional towns and the national accounts,”
