Podcast #016: Peter Baines

Peter Baines served with the New South Wales Police for 22 years. He led teams responding to acts of terrorism and natural disasters on a scale not previously experienced by Australian police.

Becoming a specialist in forensic crime scene investigations, he was called upon to bring his skills to the Bali Bombings in 2002. But it was the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that forever changed the direction of his life, helping the people of Thailand identify their dead. He then met the countless children left behind with nowhere to go.

In late 2005, he founded Hands Across the Water to raise funds for awareness about the orphaned children of Thailand.

In his final years with the New South Wales Police, Peter spent time on secondment at the National Institute of Forensic Science, building projects around counterterrorism and leadership.

He advised Interpol in France and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Southeast Asia. He also worked in Saudi Arabia and Japan, following disasters that had fallen upon those countries.

Since 2006, Peter has been routinely travelling the globe, sharing stories and learning lessons along the way. Peter has been fortunate to speak as a keynote speaker in the US, Europe, and Asia. Speaking allows Peter to mix something that is a deep privilege: to stand on a stage and share stories with the charity work that now occupies so much of his time.

He has raised over 30 million Australian dollars to date; they have built several children's homes across Thailand, purchased a rubber plantation to create a sustainable regular income, constructed a community centre in the Cadillac region of Thailand, and a digital learning centre in the Northeast.

The charity now has operations in seven different locations in Thailand. It provides a home for several hundred children every night, but it focuses on the children's long-term future and the communities in which they live.

They have also supported more than 30 children through university, all of whom have graduated and look forward to a life of choice rather than chance.

Peter has received various awards, including an Order of Australia Medal in 2014 for his international humanitarian work. In 2016, he was awarded the Fifth Class of the Most Admirable Order of the Direkgunabhorn by the King of Thailand.

He was the New South Wales finalist for the Australia of the Year in 2010, the first Australian to be awarded the international honour of the Rotary Professional Excellence Award in 2008, and medals from the New South Wales Police Service and the Australian Federal Police Operations work in Asia.

Peter and his wife, Claire, have three adult children and one grandchild; they divide their time between their farm in Cap Tree Valley and Terrigal. Peter has written three books, Hands Across the Water, Doing Good by Doing Good, and Leadership Matters.

“I think of myself as me. But I also acknowledged that at times it needs to be about the brand, and when it needs to be about the brand, it is when I’m putting my hat on for hands across the water.”

— Peter Baines - AOM, Founder of Hands Across the Water, Author