Computer giant IBM will pay more than $30 million in compensation for its role in the bungled census, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has indicated.
The Prime Minister described the four Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that caused a 40-hour outage inconveniencing millions of Australians as "utterly predictable, utterly foreseeable".
"I have to say — and I'm not trying to protect anyone here at all — but overwhelmingly the failure was IBM's and they have acknowledged that, they have paid up and they should have," he said.
"They were being paid big money to deliver a particular service and they failed."
Mr Turnbull said the settlement would "absolutely cover" the costs of the outage, which has been billed at close to $30 million by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
"It would not be an exaggeration to say we had a collective sense of humour failure about IBM's performance here and they have fessed up, they've paid up and we are going to learn the lessons of this incident very diligently," he said.
The Prime Minister's comments came after his cyber security adviser Alistair MacGibbon released a scathing report describing the census as a serious blow to public confidence in government services.
The Government has also accepted all recommendations from a Senate inquiry report into the census, which found it was plagued by poor preparation, inappropriate tender processes and changing ministers.
ABS put too much faith in IBM: Turnbull
Despite blaming IBM for the failures, the Prime Minister also criticised the ABS, saying it should have better managed the contract with the computer giant.
"What is very clear is that the ABS put too much faith in IBM, and to be fair, IBM is one of the biggest brand names in the computer world," he said.
Mr Turnbull said the census would continue to be held online, provided the Government and contractors learned all lessons from the bungled census.
"This was not a particularly clever attack or some great international assault on the census, this was a series of common or garden, utterly predictable, utterly foreseeable denial of service attacks," he said.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said the Turnbull Government needed to accept responsibility for the census failings.
"They had three years to prepare for the census," he said.
"They had one job and they couldn't even do that properly."
At a Senate inquiry in October, IBM blamed one of its subcontractors for failing to follow geo-blocking protocol to prevent the DDoS attacks. This has since been denied by the subcontractors.
IBM Australia managing director Kerry Purcell offered an unreserved apology for the company's role in the census earlier this year but said no-one had been disciplined or sacked.
"There have been a lot of personnel changes at IBM as a consequence so I suppose heads have rolled there," Mr Turnbull said.
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