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Dr Raby was one of the recipients of the La Trobe University Distinguished Alumni Award in 2007.

Geoff Raby has been involved in the international dimensions of Australian public policy for the past 25 years, especially Australia’s bilateral relations with China, and in advancing Australia’s trade and commercial interests in the World Trade Organisation and APEC.

After leaving La Trobe University, where Geoff was Senior Tutor in Economics and finishing off his PhD thesis, he first joined the Office of National Assessments in Canberra as the China economic analyst. In 1986, Geoff was seconded to the newly created position of First Secretary (Economic) in the Embassy in Beijing where he worked along side a junior officer at the time called Kevin Rudd. Geoff was subsequently promoted to Counsellor (Economic) and, in all, stayed in Beijing almost five years. During that time he also completed his PhD part time at La Trobe.

He left Beijing in 1991 with a promotion to the Senior Executive Service to establish the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s first think-tank, the North-East Asia Analytical Unit. This was a highly innovative and successful venture which contributed substantially to aligning Australia’s foreign and trade policy settings with the dynamic change occurring in North-East Asia at the time. Throughout the 1990s and until a few years ago, Geoff devoted his energies to Australia’s trade interests in multilateral and regional forums. That period saw him working in the Secretariat of the OECD in Paris for some two years, then back in Canberra re-positioning Australia’s trade policy in the mid 1990s after the Uruguay Round of Trade Negotiations, as Ambassador for nearly four years to the World Trade Organisation in Geneva, then Ambassador to APEC and, in recent years, Australia’s Chief Trade Negotiator.

Geoff has been Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, with accreditations as Ambassador to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and to Mongolia. Over the years, Geoff has continued his academic publishing in a wide range of fields. In 2002, he was awarded the highest national honour for foreigners by the Chilean Government, the Order of Bernado O’Higgins, for services to liberalisation of world agricultural trade.