Former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry is planning to retire from his last remaining corporate directorship, with stock exchange operator ASX Ltd announcing the former bureaucrat and environmental protection enthusiast will step down in September.
The hairy-nose wombat lover retains a number of directorships in the not-for-profit sector, including several social-environmental foundations such as Accounting for Nature, Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation and The Cape York Partnership Group.
Ken Henry made no statement about his retirement from the ASX board on Wednesday. Credit: Peter Rae
It is unclear whether Henry, who is young by company director standards at 64 years of age, will continue to seek board appointments at large listed companies after his September retirement.
Henry’s first corporate appointment after leaving Treasury in 2011 was to the board of National Australia Bank in 2011. But his role as the bank’s chairman ended abruptly in 2019 after he and the bank’s then chief executive Andrew Thorburn resigned together following a scathing assessment of their evidence in the final report of the Hayne banking royal commission.
“Having heard from both the CEO, Mr Thorburn, and the chair, Dr Henry, I am not as confident as I would wish to be that the lessons of the past have been learned,” Commissioner Kenneth Hayne, QC, said in his final report.
“More particularly, I was not persuaded that NAB is willing to accept the necessary responsibility for deciding, for itself, what is the right thing to do, and then having its staff act accordingly.”
Henry apologised to shareholders in his resignation letter from NAB, saying: “I am enormously proud of what the bank has achieved and equally disappointed about what the Royal Commission has brought to light in areas where we have not met customer expectations.”
ASX’s shareholders stuck by Henry, voting to re-elect him to their company’s board that year.
Current ASX chairman Damian Roche praised Henry’s nine-year contribution to the company. “Ken has been an outstanding director of the ASX and brought formidable intellect and insight to the governance and oversight of the company. Few can match his knowledge of economic and public policy, or his commitment to broader social and environmental issues.
“On behalf of all our stakeholders, I thank and congratulate Ken on his service, not only to the ASX but to the Australian community more widely.”
Dr Henry caring for wildlife at his home in 2010.Credit:
ASX also announced on Wednesday it had appointed a new director, Heather Smith, to its board. Smith, who holds a PhD in Economics from Australian National University, has spent 20 years in the public service including as the Secretary of the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science between 2017 and 2020.
Henry’s foray into the business world in 2011 followed a storied career in the federal treasury, including 10 years as the nation’s top bean counter between 2001 and 2011. In 2008, Henry was commissioned by the Rudd government to conduct a full review of the Australian taxation system. His recommendations, while widely praised when they were released in 2010, went largely unimplemented.
Henry has been on the ASX board since 2013 and was, earlier in his tenure, the chairman of the group before stepping back into a non-executive director role. Most recently he was part of the ASX’s audit and risk committee and nomination committee.
On Tuesday the corporate watchdog, which regulates the markets and market operators, issued new guidelines for how market operators should act during an outage.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission said it expected all market participants during an outage to permit new orders to trade on an alternative market by mid-2023.
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