The Bureau of Meteorology executive who led the agency during last year’s heavily criticised $96 million website redesign that left users unable to navigate the site during a spate of bad weather has resigned.
Dr Peter Stone, the bureau’s chief customer officer and former acting chief executive, is expected to leave the agency at the beginning of next year after finishing active duties at the end of June and taking extended leave. He had been at the agency since July 2017.
Stone’s resignation comes almost seven months after the agency launched a disastrous website update during savage storms across Australia’s southeast that stopped regular users – including farmers and fishermen – from navigating the site.
While Stone issued a mea culpa one week after the new website went live, he stopped short of conceding a mistake had been made, instead saying it would “take time for some to adjust” to the changes.
Shortly after the website update, Dr Stuart Minchin took over as head of the agency.
Environment Minister Murray Watt at the time called for the bureau’s top brass to report to state ministers and explain what they would do to address the public fallout, which resulted in a swift reversion of the BoM radar to the old version.
“Our government’s unyielding expectation is that the BoM, as with all federal agencies, spends taxpayers’ money efficiently and appropriately,” Watt said at the time.
The website saga was not the first time Stone was implicated in national news. He was previously caught up in a court case in which the BoM was found to have breached workplace rules when it unlawfully drove out a senior manager in a “sham redundancy”.
Judge Doug Humphreys of the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia singled out Stone’s conduct during the 2024 case, saying: “In his oral evidence Dr Stone was an unsatisfactory witness.”
Humphreys went on to state: “When pressed, he acknowledged that [a section] of his first affidavit was untrue, when he said there was ‘no decision to be made about recruiting or not recruiting’.”
The Bureau of Meteorology and Watt’s office have been contacted for comment.
More to come.
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Nick Newling is a federal politics reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.
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