Weather bureau executive quits months after $96m website bungle

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, will leave the agency in the coming weeks, as reported by Crikey on Tuesday. He took extended leave at the end of June and has been at the agency since July 2017.

A spokesperson for the bureau said Stone would depart on June 30: “The Bureau of Meteorology’s chief customer officer ... Dr Peter Stone has made the decision to retire.”

Stone’s resignation comes almost seven months after the agency launched a disastrous website update during savage storms across Australia’s south-east 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.

Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt said the website had not met users’ expectations and encouraged Australians to share their feedback with the agency, while the Queensland premier blamed the “flawed” website for failing to enable Brisbane residents to be prepare for approaching storms.

Shortly after the website update, Dr Stuart Minchin took over as head of the agency.

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.

The website saga was not the first time Stone had featured in national news. He previously gave evidence 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 website upgrade was one component of the controversial, nearly decade-long Robust security and technology overhaul, which totalled $866 million. It included forecasting and security upgrades to protect sensitive data from hacking following a serious cybersecurity breach in 2015.

While the bureau initially claimed that the site’s redesign had cost a mere $4.1 million, this figure did not include a $78 million website design contract for private consultancy Accenture Australia, or the extra security upgrades that pushed the disclosed costs closer to $100 million.

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