Emily Henderson (politician)

Lorenza Emily Preston Henderson is a New Zealand politician. She was a member of parliament in the House of Representatives for the Labour Party.

Biography
Henderson was born in 1972 and has lived in Whangārei since the age of seven. She attended Kaurihohore Primary, Whangarei Intermediate and Tikipunga High School. She completed a Master of Jurisprudence at the University of Auckland in 1997 and a PhD titled Cross-examination: a critical examination at the University of Cambridge in 2001. Before becoming a Member of Parliament in 2020, she worked as a consultant at the law firm Henderson Reeves, which was co-founded by her father. Her legal area of specialty is the Family Court.

Political career
Henderson was approached to stand in the electorate for the Labour Party in, but declined, because her children were too young. She was selected as Labour's candidate for the election. The preliminary results released after the election night count placed her 164 votes behind the incumbent MP, National's Shane Reti. The closeness of the initial figures meant that Henderson attended induction events for new MPs. When the final results were released after the counting of special votes, Henderson had overtaken Reti to win the seat by 431 votes, and hence became a Member of Parliament.

In her first term, Henderson was appointed as a member of the Justice Committee and the Social Services and Community Committee. Henderson chaired a sub-committee of the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation and voted in favour of the bill.

On 17 March, Henderson announced that she would retire from Parliament at the 2023 New Zealand general election in order to return to her legal career, focusing on court reform and sexual violence. Henderson also claimed credit for establishing Sexual Violence Courts, lobbying for government funding to rebuild Whangarei Hospital and state housing projects in Whangarei.

Legal career
Henderson, a former crown prosecutor, was awarded a fellowship from the New Zealand Law Foundation in 2012 to research the reform of cross examination. The resulting paper, "Expert witnesses under examination in the New Zealand criminal and family courts", was published in March 2013.