Gerard Henderson | |
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Born | 1945 (age 79–80) Balwyn, Victoria, Australia |
Occupation | Author, columnist and political commentator |
Nationality | Australian |
Education | Xavier College |
Alma mater | University of Melbourne |
Subject | Politics, Culture & Media |
Spouse | Anne Henderson |
This article is part of a series on |
Conservatism in Australia |
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Gerard Henderson (born 1945) is an Australian author, columnist and political commentator noted for his right-wing Catholic and conservative views. [1] [2] He founded and is the executive director of The Sydney Institute, a privately funded Australian current affairs forum. [3]
Henderson was educated at Melbourne's Catholic, Jesuit-run Xavier College, one of the city's elite private schools. He went on to study arts and law at the prestigeous University of Melbourne during the second half of the 1960s. [4] He later completed a PhD.
Henderson taught at the Tasmania and La Trobe universities before working for four years on the staff of Kevin Newman in the Fraser government. He moved to the 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. [2]
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. [2]
For several years, Henderson had a weekly column in The Sydney Morning Herald . He also writes "Media Watch Dog", a weekly compendium of media criticism, written from the perspective of a blue heeler named Nancy. [5] In December 2013, his column moved to The Weekend Australian, which also carries Media Watch Dog. [6]
He has written several books.
In 1994, Henderson profiled former prime minister Bob Hawke for the ABC TV program Four Corners . [2] He was a regular political commentator on radio, and appeared occasionally on Insiders , another ABC TV program. [2] In early 2020, Henderson was dropped from the show after new host David Speers reportedly wanted to try new conservative voices amid claims from sources in the ABC that Henderson failed to sufficiently engage with issues during panel discussions. [7] [8]
In 2006, Henderson said 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'." [9]
Henderson has supported the movement for Australia to become a republic. [10]
Paul John Kelly is an Australian political journalist, author and television and radio commentator from Sydney. He has worked in a variety of roles, principally for The Australian newspaper and is currently its editor-at-large. Kelly also appears as a commentator on Sky News Australia and has written seven books on political events in Australia since the 1970s including on the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. Recent works include The March of Patriots, which chronicles the creation of a modern Australia during the 1991–2007 era of prime ministers, Paul Keating and John Howard, and Triumph & Demise which focuses on the leadership tensions at the heart of the Rudd-Gillard Labor governments of 2007 to 2011. Kelly presented the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) TV documentary series 100 Years – The Australian Story (2001) and wrote a book of the same title.
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Anne Elizabeth Henderson, is an Australian writer, deputy director of The Sydney Institute, editor of the institute's The Sydney Papers and co-editor of The Sydney Institute Quarterly.
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This article assesses Gerard Henderson's work and ideas. Henderson mainly contributed to Australian conservatism with a concern for social justice and feels that government plays a vital role in securing the conditions for freedom. This article identifies Henderson's vision for Australian society and evaluates how well he achieves his aims. The article also takes Henderson's conservatism seriously, treating his ideas as a coherent philosophical statement worthy of analysis.
While not a think tank, it operates as a forum for debate. It does not commission research or have policies." "The institute is privately funded, with all papers delivered to it published in The Sydney Papers.
I was at the University of Melbourne in the second half of the 1960s