ABOUT ME

I was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1972 but when I was four my parents moved to Sydney and then to Brisbane, Australia.

After attending school and University in Brisbane I moved to Melbourne where I worked for Senator Sid Spindler. In 1994 I left the office of Senator Spindler to become the Executive Director of Liberty - the Council for Civil Liberties, where I led numerous human rights and civil liberty campaigns.

During this time I was also the President of the Victorian AIDS Council and Gay Men's Health Centre and served on the executive of the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations. I was also involved in broader public health work as the non-government member of Australia's National Public Health Partnership.

In 1998 I was preselected to stand for election to the Victorian Parliament in the seat of Prahran for the Australian Labor Party. I was the first openly gay man in Australia to have been preselected by a majorparty for a winnable seat. However, I failed to win the seat at the 1999 election! After that I took up an opportunity to work in Haiti, a country in which I had a long standing interest. I worked as an adviser to the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, Haiti's leading human rights Non-Government Organisation.

I moved to the UK with my partner in August 2001 where I took up the post of Deputy Chief Executive of the National AIDS Trust. In 2003 I left the Trust to set up Kathina, my consulting company which provides policy, management and communications services to public interest organisations.

Through Kathina I worked for an amazing range of organisations, including Amnesty International, UNAIDS, Saferworld, and the International Action Network on Small Arms and the International HIV/AIDS Alliance. I moved from doing consulting work for the Alliance to working there full time from mid 2004 until November 2006.

In preparing for the 2006 World AIDS Conference in Toronto it occured to me that it was my sixth World AIDS Conference. The fact that they are are every two years meant that I'd been doing HIV related work for a long time. I concluded that I could probably do with a change and went to work for Book Aid International where I was the Head of Policy and Programmes. Working at Book Aid introduced me to the world of education in general and literacy in particular.

I left Book Aid to help the Association of Teachers and Lecturers develop their international work and to launch two new public interest start ups, dedicated to working on two issues that I'm passionate about, namely early childhood care and ducation and the rights of sexual minorities.

First Read will implement an innovative, scalable model aimed at improving learning and educational outcomes for families of pre-school children in the developing world.

Free and Equal on the other hand will seed, strengthen and link organisations of gay, lesbian and bisexual and transgender people in the global South.

Im also the Chair of Trustees of Interact Worldwide which works to reduce poverty by championing universal access to reproductive health and have recently joined the board of Read: the Reading Agency, whose mission is to inspire more people to read more.

Gravely disappointed by the British Labour Party's war mongering, disregard for civil liberties and human rights and failure to invest in sustainable energy and to do more for the environment I've joined the Green Party. I've come to the realisation that the extent of change required to save the plant just can't be delivered by the old parties and that the step change in our thinking and decision making needs a more radical approach. I believe that the Greens offer exactly that and I'm delighted to have joined them and am the Comvenor of Southwark Green Party.

Working with Southwark's only Green Councillor and London Assembly Member Jenny Jones we secured a commitment from Southwark to become a living wage employer , which will mean that everyone who works for Southwark or one of its contractors will be paid the London Living Wage whcih is nearly 2 pounds more than the minimum wage, whcih will help lift thousands of families our of a working poverty trap.

We're now campaigning for universal free school meals, a borough wide food strategy and  support for the creation of green jobs.

I'm interested in the arts and culture and how they can be used in representing and promoting social change in particular. In 2006 I developed and led a very exciting multi-country, participatory photography project called 'Unheard Voices, Hidden Lives', which you can learn more about by clicking here. I've got a new photo project that I'm working on but until it gets to the next stage I can't say a huge amount about it, except that its very exciting!

I'm also very interested in writing.

I wrote my first letter to the editor of our local paper when I was eleven. It was about pollution in our local creek and it was written on a typewriter that my parents had bought me at the local toy shop. I've only recently realised the impact that having that letter published had on me. It gave me a taste of communicating with a wide audience about important issues and it's something that I've done ever since.

Whilst living in Melbourne I wrote regularly for The Age, Victoria's daily broadsheet, largely about human rights, civil liberties and HIV/AIDS. In fact almost all of my writing has been directly linked to issues on which I've been campaigning.

At the height of my involvement with the campaign to defend the ABC, Australia's public broadcaster, from political interference and budget cuts, I co-edited, together with Morag Fraser, 'Save Our ABC: the case for maintaining Australia's National Brodcaster.' I had direct experience of working with the ABC and a strong sense of its importance to Australians because from 1994 to 1998 I was a member of its statutory advisory body.

As a writer I'm concerned at the restrictions imposed on free expression and on other writers in particlular and am a member of Pen an international organistaion dedicated to protecting writers’ freedoms around the world and campaigning against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views.

I have also been a long standing advocate of choice in end of life matters and in 1998 I edited 'The Final Choice: considerations on choosing to die'. The book provides an overview of some of the considerations people might make in choosing to die, choosing to ask someone to help or choosing to provide assistance to someone who wants to die.

This site is in part designed to provide access to my writing which is published in print elsewhere.

I enjoy reading, traveling, yoga, riding my bike, swimming - especially in the sea - going to the theatre, cinema and art galleries and socialising with friends. I also try to find time to meditate and every time I do, I vow to do it more often. I came to meditation through the kind advice of a good friend who, in response to my sense of how badly things were going in the world, suggested I look into Buddhism. She was absolutely right, Buddhism offers a new way of seeing and relating to the world, along with a set of practical tools for achieving both personal and social change. I practice Buddhism within the context of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order and on Parinirvana Day in 2008 I became a Mitra. People become a Mitra when they are happy to consider themselves Buddhists, want to live in accordance with the five ethical precepts and believe that the FWBO is the appropriate spirtual comunity for them.

I live in London with my partner, Huey Nhan, with whom I enjoy spending time more than absolutely anything else. I ask myself every day what I did to deserve the companionship and love of such an amazing, generous and mature spirit. And every day I conclude that it was just luck.