Meanwhile, the lack of corporate integrity at the Bureau of Meteorology has been revealed in the Federal Circuit Court, in this judgment. Key paras of the judgment:
Dr Stone’s evidence is dealt with further on in this judgment. [Dr Stone is the BoM’s ‘Chief Customer Officer’ and ‘Group Executive Business Solutions.] The Court found his evidence unsatisfactory and not credible or reliable. He sought to explain away issues with his evidence. His explanations were unconvincing. The lack of credibility of Dr Stone’s evidence however not only impacts upon his evidence. It impacts on the entire narrative being put forward by the Bureau. It invites negative findings as to the whole of the narrative, despite the evidence of other witnesses.
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In his oral evidence Dr Stone was an unsatisfactory witness. When pressed, he acknowledged that at [28] of his first Affidavit was untrue, when he said there was “no decision to be made about recruiting or not recruiting”. However, the Court is satisfied that the claim by Dr Stone that until after 1 July 2021 he did not have a budget for the GM-IR role and that was the reason for continually delaying recruitment action was a deliberate attempt to mislead the Court.
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Dr Stone had worked with Dr Johnson [the BoM’s CEO] for an extended period of time (approximately 15 years) and had followed Dr Stone from the CSIRO to the Bureau. Given the close and detailed style of management that I have found was exercised by Dr Johnson, it is inconceivable that Dr Stone would have taken any action in relation to the applicant without the knowledge and approval of Dr Johnson. The lack of credibility in relation to the majority of Dr Stone’s evidence, in the Court’s view, must be considered when considering the denials of Dr Johnson that the applicant’s exercise a workplace rights was not a substantial and operative factor in the adverse action that was taken against the applicant. This view is supported further by the failure of the Bureau to take reasonable steps to assign the applicant new duties or to allocate her to a lower classification position with income maintenance.
The Court is reasonably satisfied that the redeployment action was taken with the aim of managing the applicant out of the Bureau. That decision not to map the applicant to the position of GMID was taken by Dr Johnson (Transcript 1 November 2023, page 672). The decision reflected a desire to manage the applicant out of the Bureau. It was taken because she was a difficult senior employee who had actively and successfully exercised her workplace rights. On the available evidence, the Court is not satisfied that the Bureau has rebutted the evidentiary presumption contained within s 361 of the Act.