Malcolm Turnbull says taxpayers have been fully compensated for the multimillion dollar cost of the bungled 2016 census.
He said IBM had paid a “very substantial” but confidential settlement which “absolutely” covered the cost of the census debacle.
Last month, the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, David Kalisch, said the failure of the census website would cost taxpayers about $30m.
Speaking on radio 3AW on Friday, Turnbull said he planned to work through the recommendations from Alastair McGibbon’s review of the census failure, which was released on Thursday. The review was critical of how IBM and the ABS handled the census fiasco and aftermath.
It said the ABS had “steadfastly refused to own the issue and acknowledge responsibility for the factors leading to the events and shortcomings in the handling of events on the night”.
IBM “couldn’t handle a predictable problem”, a reference to the denial of service attacks that shut down the ABS website on census night in August.
Turnbull said on Friday the census failure was “overwhelmingly” IBM’s. “They’ve acknowledged that. They’ve paid up. They’ve accepted the blame and they should have,” he said. “They were being paid big money to deliver a particular service and they failed.”
When asked how much IBM had paid in compensation, Turnbull said: “It is confidential, but it’s a lot of money.”
Australian taxpayers paid nothing, he said. “The additional costs were well covered by the settlement.It would not be an exaggeration to say that we had a collective sense of humour failure about IBM’s performance here, and they have fessed up, they’ve paid up, and we’re going to learn the lessons of this incident very diligently.
“IBM has paid up many millions of dollars.”
At a Senate estimates hearing in September, Kalisch blamed IBM for the census debacle.
On Thursday, a separate report into the census failure was released by the Senate economics references committee.
It found the census was like a house with “a sinking foundation and cracks in the walls” because IBM and its subcontractors were in dispute over the bad build.
It said that primary responsibility for the debacle “lies with the government” and called on “the current minister, on behalf of the government, to take responsibility”.
