Scientist Mick O’Leary’s university role queried after judge’s excoriation

A scientist used in a legal attempt to block a $6bn gas pipeline admitted being untruthful in his ‘coaching’ of witnesses in an Indigenous rights claim.

UWA associate professor Mick O'Leary. Picture: LinkedIn

A former lecturer to the scientist excoriated by a Federal Court ­ruling says he should be “ashamed” of his conduct and that the University of Western Australia should question whether he continues in his position.

Michael “Mick” O’Leary, an associate professor at the University of Western Australia and a “climate geoscientist”, was criticised by Federal Court justice ­Natalie Charlesworth, who wrote his “conduct (was) far flung from the proper scientific method, and falls short of an expert’s obligation to this court”.

“My concerns about Dr O’Leary’s independence and credibility are such that I would not accept his evidence as sufficient to establish any scientific proposition at all, even if his evidence had gone unchallenged and even if he possessed the appropriate skills, qualification and experience to express them,” she said.

“My conclusions about Dr O’Leary’s lack of regard for the truth, lack of independence and lack of scientific rigour are sufficient to discount or dismiss all of his reports for all purposes.”

Piers Larcombe, retired marine geoarchaeology academic and consultant, said Dr O’Leary “brought shame upon himself and the university, but most importantly his field of science and his scientific colleagues”.

Dr Larcombe said he taught Dr O’Leary when he was a third-year undergraduate student.

Dr O’Leary was brought onto the Munkara v Santos case by the Environmental Defenders Office as an expert witness. The case, based on Indigenous heritage claims, was an attempt to prevent the Barossa gas field from being developed by Santos, which was trying to build the $5.8bn gas project in the Timor Sea.

The judgment, which was handed down on January 15, said Dr O’Leary had admitted to being untruthful to Tiwi Islanders in a “cultural mapping” exercise in such a way as “to coach the ­attendees about what they might say … so as to achieve their objective of stopping the pipeline”.

Justice Charlesworth also noted other evidence presented by Dr O’Leary which she said was ­insufficient.

Dr Larcombe and Dr O’Leary have been embroiled in a years-long academic split within UWA.

Dr Larcombe, a former adjunct research fellow at UWA, and his wife Ingrid Ward, a senior lecturer in geoarchaeology at UWA, were lead authors on a now-retracted 2022 paper that criticised work co-authored by Dr O’Leary.

Remarking on the Santos judgment, Dr Larcombe said: “I think the judge absolutely nailed it, she understood the flaws in O’Leary’s project design, she understood the flaws in logic, she understood the flaws in obtaining data and in presenting data in a biased way and ignoring information that didn’t fit the narrative.

“He (Dr O’Leary) is pretty much the only marine sedimentologist in the whole of the university. So perhaps he doesn’t get much internal challenge in UWA. The world for him remains fairly black and white and, without mentoring, it appears that he has rushed to judgment in his case. He overstepped the mark. Perhaps he’s not used to limiting himself to what he really knows as fact.”

Dr Larcombe said it called into question Dr O’Leary’s position at UWA. “What does he teach his students?” he asked. “Does he teach his students that acting in that way is OK?

“The university should ask whether it is appropriate for him to be acting in this way and supervising research students.”

UWA declined to comment and Dr O’Leary did not respond to a request for comment.

Physicist and former James Cook University professor Peter Ridd said the judgment was further evidence that there was a “big problem” in the institutions of science. He said there had “never been a better example of how science had been corrupted”.

Dr O’Leary holds a PhD in marine sciences from JCU.