General News
11 February, 2026
Offline weather radar event response
CONCERNS about several outages of the Rainbow radar last year have finally received a response from the Federal environment and water minister, Murray Watt – but Mallee MP, Anne Webster, claimed the response was a reflection of the reduced priority of Federal funding directed to regional areas.
The letter, dated January 19, was a response to Dr Webster’s request for explanations on December 10, 2025, about the outages on behalf of a Mallee constituent, and also discussed details of the new Bureau of Meteorology website.
The radar was offline for a total of 5 days, from November 23 to 26, and on December 6, 2025, leaving farmers and residents unable to view graphical information from the Wimmera Mallee installation.
The 256-kilometre radar went live on March 31, 2020, to fill a gap between the nearest Mildura and Mount Gambier locations, and the then-Federal Government committed $4.3 million for ongoing maintenance and operation.
In the letter, Mr Watt said the BOM apologised “for any inconvenience the outages caused”, and staff had been automatically notified for each of the three unplanned events, with restoration occurring “within 34, 55 and 106 hours, respectively”.
Mr Watt said Horsham CFA had also been notified as part of getting the service back online, and “the BOM's forecasts and warnings were not impacted by the outage” due to having many other methods of gathering data.
As for the new website’s design, Mr Watt admitted it “has not fully met the expectations of some users” and claimed “teams are working to implement improvements in response to user feedback”.
“All of the BOM's infrastructure and software is hosted in Australia,” Mr Watt said in the letter.
“I recently met with the BOM's Chief Executive Officer, Dr Stuart Minchin, to request urgent improvements to functionality and user experience of the new website.”
Mr Watt defended the changes, saying the same sources still informed the website and also detailed improvements since the revamp launch, such as matching “the default weather map rain view to a scale more familiar to website visitors” and adding “a shortcut at the top of the homepage to the rain radar and weather maps page”.
Dr Webster said three outages in such a short time warranted greater priority for investigation, given the importance of weather information to those using the Rainbow radar.
“Yet again, we find that we in regional Australia have to live with unacceptable government service delivery failures for longer than they would in the city,” she said.
“There’s just no question about that.”
“We face much more grave risk to our safety in the bush, as we've seen in the last few weeks – and this next week will be pretty challenging – and the weather instruments, like the radars, are absolutely critical for local fire fighting.”
She was also critical of the BOM website’s revamp cost and claimed the government was “missing in action” in addressing its perceived shortfalls.
Dr Webster was disappointed with an apparent lower priority for regional areas from the government and said it was “insulting to people who grow the food and fibre that we enjoy as a nation”.
“When they stepped into parliament in May 2022, the figures show clearly that by the end of the financial year 2025, 30 per cent less funding is coming to Mallee,” she said.
“If governments want to talk about climate change and extreme events, then you know, why wouldn't they be funding these highly vulnerable areas in the bush?”