El Nino and dry weather

I'm getting a bit sick of the media coverage about "why is this summer so wet across Australia when the weather bureau said it should be dry because of El Nino?"

I mean, I was sure that I had read often in the past that El Nino does not necessarily guarantee a dry summer, and it took all of one Google search to find a BOM page from 2016 that confirms this:

El Niño is often, but not always, associated with drought in Australia. But the drying influence of the 2015–16 El Niño was initially tempered somewhat by very warm temperatures in the Indian Ocean. From April to August, above-average rainfall fell over parts of inland Western Australia, New South Wales and eastern Victoria.

But by spring, the Indian Ocean was helping El Niño, resulting in Australia's third-driest spring on record, limiting growth at the end of the cropping season. A record early heatwave in October further reduced crop production in the Murray-Darling Basin.

Yes, I get that the BOM late last year did give a seasonal forecast of dry conditions because of El Nino, but I have always assumed seasonal forecasts are "rubbery" because they fall into the "bumps along the way" gap between short term weather forecast (pretty accurate, but only up to about 7 - 8 days) and long term predictions of certain climate changes, like increasing global average temperature (also pretty accurate because it's based on physics and the bumps along the way are averaged out).  

I thought this was pretty obvious, but media with its "BOM got it wrong - why?" style headlines are not helping much.