Senior Research Fellow

John is a Senior Research Fellow working at the UNSW Centre for Law, Markets and Regulation on its 'Professionalism Project', an Australian Research Council ('ARC') Linkage Grant project entitled 'Professions in the 21st Century: Regulatory Engagement, Design and Strategies'.

It is an $820 000, three-year project (2015-2018) (ARC Grant LP140100219) led by UNSW Law (Professor Dimity Kingsford Smith) researching ways to improve professional standards in Australia's various industry sectors, in particular, its financial sector. The Project arose out of concerns around the poor standards and ethics in the financial services industry, which were highlighted during the 2008 global financial crisis ('GFC').

The Project links UNSW Law and various other Australian and international universities with the law firms of Allens and Corrs Chambers Westgarth, and the primary industry linkage partner, the Professional Standards Councils, Australia's government regulator of professions.

PhD Candidate

John is also a PhD candidate at UNSW Law researching possible regulatory reform of the financial markets sector with a particular focus on derivatives - speculative contracts traded on financial markets and blamed, in part, for the GFC.

His thesis, 'Financial Derivatives versus Gambling: Where Should Australia Draw the Regulatory Dividing Line?', tackles the conceptual, legal and regulatory overlap and interconnection between derivatives and gambling. The global financial markets have been described as the 'world's biggest casino' and the thesis looks at the extent to which this is true and how this issue can be properly regulated.

Among other things, the thesis compares Australia's law and practice with that in the US and the UK.

His supervisors are Professor Dimity Kingsford Smith and Dr Scott Donald, both at UNSW Law.

Past Work Experience

John has over two decades of experience working and researching in the areas of law, financial markets and financial regulatory reform. Prior to commencing at UNSW, he was a lawyer at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (‘ASIC’), the financial markets regulator, for 12 years working on a wide range of regulatory reform projects for the financial markets and services sector including, for example:

• Australia’s implementation of the G20’s co-ordinated international global derivatives regulatory reforms responding to the problems arising out of the GFC
• Advising Treasury and the Minister, in conjunction with the RBA, on the ASX's proposed new clearing and settlement facility for over-the-counter derivatives
• ASIC’s development of Corporations Act Market Integrity Rules for supervising the ASX, ASX 24 and Chi-X securities and derivatives markets post the GFC
• ASIC’s implementation, from 2002 onwards, of the then newly-enacted Corporations Act Chapter 7 financial markets and services regime.

Prior to this, John worked as a lawyer in two law firms for a number of years; as a derivatives trader and advisor for a financial institution in Hong Kong; and as an editor for the international finance publishing house, Euromoney.