About Paul

Paul is an unusual combination of public intellectual and poet. Even as his pride and joy, The Three Graces: Companionship, Discretion, Passion was published, in 2022, in fact in the same month, he was inducted, in 2022, as a Fellow of the London and New York based Institute for Law and Strategy. He has also been, since 2019, a Fellow of the Rationalist Society of Australia and an editorial board member of its online journal Rationale, in which his essays, on a very wide range of topics, have appeared for the last half dozen years.

His poetry has been an avocation, but is a growing passion. His university education centred on a First-Class Honours degree in European History at the University of Melbourne and a PhD in International Relations, at the Australian National University. He served as an intelligence analyst on East Asia for the Defence Intelligence Organisation, between 1990 and 1995. He headed the Japan and Koreas Desk by 1992 and the China desk from 1994.

He spent several years teaching Chinese politics and strategic affairs in leading universities, before co-founding a consulting company, in 2000, specialising in applied cognitive science and structured argumentation. As a principal consultant, he facilitated training workshops and analytic projects for numerous clients, including ASIO, the CIA, the ANZ bank, the Submarine Institute, the Australian Army, Rio Tinto and the coaching panel of the Hawthorn Football Club in the AFL.

It was during those same years that he made his reputation as a public intellectual, writing scores of essays for the Australian Financial Review, scores of opinion pieces for The Age and scores of reviews, op eds and features for The Australian. He also appeared on radio and television commenting on such international phenomena as the Iraq War, the rise of China and the ambitions of Vladimir Putin.