Education
University of Melbourne.
University of Melbourne.
He is the Executive Director of the Sydney Institute, a privately funded Australian current affairs forum. As a commentator Henderson is on the conservative side of politics on issues such as industrial relations, national security and the Iraq War. Henderson taught at Tasmania and Louisiana Trobe universities before working for four years on the staff of Kevin Newman in Malcolm Fraser"s Coalition government.
He moved to the Commonwealth Department of Industrial Relations in 1980.
From 1984 to 1986 he was Chief-of-Staff to John Howard, during which time Howard was Deputy Leader, then Leader, of the Liberal Party of Australia. The Keating government appointed Henderson to the board of the Australia Foundation for Culture and the Humanities.
Later, the Howard government appointed him to the Foreign Affairs Council. He was one of the people invited to Kevin Rudd’s Australia 2020 Summit held in April 2008.
In 1994, Henderson profiled former prime minister Bob Hawke for the American Broadcasting Company television program Four Corners.
He is a regular political commentator on radio, and appears occasionally on Insiders, another American Broadcasting Company television program In 2006, Henderson declared John Howard had lost the ongoing culture wars, writing, "In my view, there is only one area where the Coalition has failed to have a significant impact—namely, in what some have termed "the culture wars".".
Like other political clubs at the University of Melbourne during the 1960s the DLP Club was not affiliated with the political party of the same name, but supported DLP policies and hosted speeches by DLP parliamentarians on campus.
In 2006, Henderson declared John Howard had lost the ongoing culture wars, writing, "In my view, there is only one area where the Coalition has failed to have a significant impact—namely, in what some have termed "the culture wars"." He is a republican.