Dr Donald Greenlees

Senior Advisor

Asialink

Donald Greenlees is an award-winning journalist, author, and advisor on international political and business affairs. He has spent more than 20 years working in East Asia for international media, business consultancies and conducting academic and book research.

As a political journalist in Canberra in the 1980s and 1990s, Greenlees covered the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments for several newspapers and television networks, including The Australian and ABC’s Lateline program.

He also has extensive experience in the international media. He was a correspondent for the UK’s Independent Television News and SBS’s Dateline in South America in 1990-1991. His Asian assignments include staff correspondent in Jakarta for The Australian, in Seoul for the Far Eastern Economic Review and Wall Street Journal, and in Hong Kong as regional correspondent for The New York Times.

He co-authored Deliverance: The Inside Story of East Timor’s Fight for Freedom, a groundbreaking work that examined the East Timor crisis from multiple angles, including insights into policymaking in Jakarta, Canberra and New York and the implications for Indonesia’s process of democratisation.

From 1997 to 2003, as The Australian’s correspondent in Indonesia he witnessed the downfall of Suharto’s New Order regime, the emergence of democracy, and the eruption of violent civil conflict at numerous sites across the archipelago. Between 2004 and 2009, Greenlees was based in South Korea and Hong Kong, from where he covered political, security and business issues across the region.

In 2001, he won the Walkley award for Asia-Pacific reporting and was short listed for the same award the following year.

Since 2010, he has conducted academic research on Indonesian and regional foreign policy and worked as an advisor to multinational firms and high-net-worth individuals on a range of complex business, political and security challenges in Southeast Asia.

He has a PhD in international, political and strategic studies from the Australian National University and a master’s degree in international relations from Deakin University.