It ' s a weird situation . This kind of shit happens all the time with any company that relies IT service providers like IBM , Oracle , etc . But you don ' t hear about it , and usually vendors protect themselves in the contract because generally the customer will fuck something up and try to put it on the vendor . But this was a very public incident and every party involved fucked up IBM is the mammoth IT company from the US and Australians and the media get very sensitive about these kinds of thing for whatever reason , and everything gets blown up . The Census itself cost $ 470 M all up , and $ 10 M was spent on the IT infrastructure ? The ABS cheaped right the fuck out , people need to give more weight to this figure .