Malcolm Turnbull has assured Australian taxpayers they won't be out of pocket following August's census fail.
He has told Melbourne's radio 3AW that IBM has covered the costs of the debacle in a confidential agreement with the federal government.
Speaking from Canberra, Mr Turnbull said: “Overwhelmingly, the failure was IBM's. They have acknowledged that. They have paid up, they have accepted the blame and they should have. They were being paid big money to deliver a particular service and they failed.”
The census website was hit by a number of so-called denial of service cyber attacks on August nine, which prompted the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to shut it down for almost two days.
No data was lost but tens of thousands of Australians were affected by not being able to complete their census forms.
News that makes sense
Your trusted source for staying up-to-date with the world around you. Get free daily news updates and analysis, straight to your inbox.
The Prime Minister has confirmed there have been "personnel changes" at IBM as a result.
But despite saying heads would roll at the ABS when he first responded to the blunder, there have not been any government staff sacked since.
“There has been criticism of the ABS. They should have supervised the contract better, there's no doubt about that. The important thing is to make sure the lessons are learned and the Australian people get a better service from the government,” he said.
The census fail sparked a major backlash from the community and resulted in ridicule online.
Two inquiries were launched into the 2016 census to work out exactly what went wrong.
A Labor-dominated senate committee has reported back to say the roll out was the primary responsibility of the government.
The report concluded that issues of financial and human resourcing at the ABS needed to be reassessed, after the bureau’s funding suffered a number of cuts while demands and expectations increased.
Another report was handed down yesterday by the Prime Minister’s own special adviser on cyber security, Alastair MacGibbon.
He said the census fail only added to a “a roll call of sub-optimal online outcomes", which suggest the government's capacity to deliver digital services is failing.
Mr MacGibbon made a range of recommendations including a “cyber boot camp" for senior government officials to help educate them on the fundamentals of cyber security.
