Former envoy to head P.M.’s office

Press, 17 September 1980, Page 1

Former envoy to head P.M.’s office

PA Wellington A former career diplomat, and the youngest man to head a New Zealand post abroad, has been appointed as the new permanent head of the Prime Minister’s Department. He is Mr G. C. P. Hensley. aged 44, who takes oyer from Mr B. V. Galvin, who has been appointed Secretary of the Treasury. •i JWhile serving overseas, Mr Hensley, who was bom and educated m Christchurch, was a victim of terrorism by mistake when the Palestinian Black September movement shot up his house in Washington in 1973. The Palestinians, Mr Hensley said, were not aiming at him,- .although they narrowly bussed his sleeping parents. The house they lived in was formerly owned , by a Jordanian diplomat After graduating from

the University of Canter* bury, Mr Hensley joined the then Department of External Affairs in 1958.

In 1959 he was posted to Western Samoa, where i he was assigned to the staff of Sir Guy Powles, then High Commissioner of Western . Samoa.

In 1961 he was posted to New York where he was charged with piloting Samoa’s independence through the. United Nations Trusteeship Council. Mr Hensley returned to New Zealand in 1964 and was involved in the big constitutional changes under way in the Cook Islands. From 1965 to 1969 he was special assistant to the then Commonwealth Secretary-General (Mr Arnold Smith) in London. From 1969 to 1973 he was bn the staff of the New Zealand Embassy in Washington. In 1976 he was appointed as the New Zealand High Commissioner to Singapore, then the youngest appointment made to such a post. He returned early this year as deputy head of the Prime Minister’s Department.