Peter Baines
Crisis exposes whether a leadership culture is real or rehearsed. Most senior teams have never had to make consequential decisions under fatigue, ambiguity and public scrutiny at the same time. The question is what kind of authority, composure and shared purpose holds when the operating environment stops being stable.
Peter Baines OAM is a former forensic investigator and humanitarian charity founder who helps senior leaders make better decisions under pressure, drawing on two decades of disaster response and the leadership lessons of building Hands Across the Water in Thailand.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Peter Baines
- His authority on crisis leadership is operational, not theoretical. He led international forensic teams in Thailand after the Boxing Day tsunami and held senior roles in the response to the Bali bombings, the 2010 Jeddah floods and the 2011 Japan tsunami.
- He is one of the very few speakers who can talk credibly about leading in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear risk, having led an Interpol counter terrorism project on CBRN threats in Lyon.
- He brings a 20-year, AUD 40 million case study in purpose at scale through Hands Across the Water, which lets him talk about values, culture and CSR with real numbers behind him rather than slogans.
- He has published with Wiley twice on the substance of his work, Doing Good By Doing Good (2014) and Leadership Matters (2023), giving organisations a coherent body of thinking to engage with beyond the keynote.
- He carries an Order of Australia Medal and a royal Thai honour, which gives the talk a level of public standing that lands credibly with boards, philanthropic committees and senior leadership audiences.
Biography highlights
- 22-year career as a forensic investigator with NSW Police, including leadership roles in the response to the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand
- Seconded to Interpol in Lyon to lead an international counter terrorism project on chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats
- Founder of Hands Across the Water, an Australian charity that has raised more than AUD 40 million for children in Thailand since 2005
- Awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2014 for international humanitarian work, and the Most Admirable Order of the Direkgunabhorn by the King of Thailand in 2016
- Author of four books, including Doing Good By Doing Good (Wiley, 2014), Leadership Matters (Wiley, 2023), and Together We Can: 33 Marathons in 26 Days (2025)
- In December 2024, ran 1,400 km across Thailand in 26 days, the equivalent of 33 marathons, in support of Hands Across the Water
Biography
The bodies were still being recovered in Thai temples when the question of leadership stopped being abstract. In the weeks after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the Australian and international forensic teams operating out of Phuket and Khao Lak had to identify thousands of victims with limited infrastructure, exhausted personnel and grieving families waiting for answers. The leader running multiple rotations of that operation was a NSW Police forensic investigator on secondment.
That investigator was Peter Baines. By the time he resigned from the force in 2009, he had also worked through the Bali bombings, been seconded to Interpol in Lyon to run an international counter terrorism project on chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats, and worked with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Southeast Asia. The Saudi government later engaged him to review the response to the Jeddah floods. He was deployed again after the 2011 Japan tsunami.
The leadership argument he draws from that work is simple but unfashionable: authority comes from how you behave when nobody is keeping score, and culture is what survives a bad day. He set out to test it in practice. In 2005, he founded Hands Across the Water, an Australian charity that has now raised more than AUD 40 million for children in Thailand and supported 46 of them through university degrees. He has written it up in two Wiley books, Doing Good By Doing Good (2014) and Leadership Matters (2023), and most recently in Together We Can (2025), the account of his 1,400 km, 26-day run across Thailand at age 57. The Order of Australia Medal and the King of Thailand’s Most Admirable Order of the Direkgunabhorn followed, but the real proof point is that the operation he started in a tent of orphaned children in 2005 is still functioning, and growing, twenty years later.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership in crisis and disaster response
- Decision-making under uncertainty and operational pressure
- Purpose-driven leadership and culture
- Corporate social responsibility and shared value
- Resilience and recovery after shock
- Building and sustaining high performing teams
- Storytelling and humanitarian impact
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees rebuilding leadership credibility after a crisis, restructuring, or reputational shock
- CHROs, CSOs and culture leads designing values-based leadership programmes with substance behind them
- CSR, sustainability and foundation leads who need a credible voice on shared value and authentic purpose
- Senior leadership offsites and partner conferences in professional services, financial services and complex operating environments
Audience outcomes
- A clearer view of what authority actually looks like when titles, scripts and procedures stop helping
- Specific reference points for decision-making under fatigue, ambiguity and public scrutiny
- A practical model for connecting organisational purpose to measurable community outcomes, not slogans
- Renewed appetite to hold leadership teams to a higher standard of behaviour in ordinary, not just exceptional, conditions
- A repertoire of concrete stories, tested in disaster response and humanitarian work, that senior leaders can carry into their own teams
Talks
A keynote on leadership tested in disaster response, drawing on two decades of crisis operations and twenty years of building Hands Across the Water.
Key takeaways:
- Leadership comes from actions and reactions, not position or title
- Clarity of purpose is what holds a team together when the conditions deteriorate
- Adversity is a credible source of leadership growth when the lessons are honestly extracted
A keynote on aligning corporate values with measurable community impact, based on his Wiley book of the same title.
Key takeaways:
- Shared value programmes work when the business case and the social case are designed together, not bolted on
- Authentic CSR strengthens employee engagement, retention and customer relationships
- Impact has to be measured, not asserted, for the programme to keep its credibility internally
A keynote on sustaining performance after exposure to high-intensity, high-stakes work.
Key takeaways:
- Recovery and meaning are operational requirements, not personal indulgences, for senior leaders
- Discomfort and challenge build the capacity that smooth conditions cannot
- The past is reference material, not a verdict on what comes next
A keynote built around his 1,400 km, 33 marathon run across Thailand in 2024, used to explore what teams achieve when one person carries a hard public goal with the right support around them.
Key takeaways:
- Ambitious public commitments change the quality of effort a team is willing to make
- Visible support structures are what turn an individual goal into a collective achievement
- The story behind a result is often more useful to a leadership team than the result itself