Allan Gyngell is National President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs and an Honorary Professor at the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific. He was most recently the Director of the Crawford Australian Leadership Forum, the Director-General of the Office of National Assessments (ONA) and, prior to that, the founding Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney.

Between 1993 and 1996, Mr Gyngell was foreign policy adviser in the office of  Prime Minister Paul Keating, and from 1991 until 1993 was First Assistant Secretary in the International Division of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. He also spent a number of years as an analyst with ONA, where he worked on Southeast Asian issues (1978-80) and headed the branch dealing with great power relations at the end of the Cold War (1984-89).

Mr Gyngell served as an Australian diplomat in Rangoon, Singapore, and Washington. He is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs and was appointed as an Officer in the Order of Australia in 2009 for service to international relations. His new book, Fear of Abandonment, a history of Australian foreign policy, will be published in early 2017 by Latrobe University Press.