You may end up with egg on your face in regard to that no degree statement.

I'm not sure about Applied Linguistics but he definitely studied at UQ when I was there in 1994 to 1997.
So he was studying something. He also married an Asian girl who was studying there at the time. I saw them together
around St Lucia many times.

He is also part of the alumni of University of Queensland. The linguistics degree thing may be a fib. The engineering
degree is more likely in my book. His exact degree is not listed on LinkedIn and other sites.