John Seddon

John Bryan Seddon (29 December 1934 – 30 November 2021) was a New Zealand politician and chief executive. He was the deputy mayor of Lower Hutt and later chief executive of Porirua City Council for twenty years from 1980 until 2000.

Biography Early life Seddon was born in 1934 in Chislehurst, England. His grandfather came from St Helens and was a relative of former New Zealand Prime Minister Richard Seddon. He qualified in gas engineering and moved to New Zealand in 1957 as an assisted immigrant. Once in New Zealand he found his surname and distant kinship with a former Prime Minister advantageous. He was an engineer and was employed by Fletcher Construction and later Mobil Oil, eventually becoming a senior manager. Seddon's first marriage had broken up while he was running his own small business after a succession of senior management jobs in local companies.

Political career He stood for election to the New Zealand House of Representatives as the Labour Party candidate for the seat of at the , finishing second and significantly increasing Labour's share of the vote. Apart from the one-term of the Third Labour Government, Labour was in opposition the whole time he was trying for a seat in the 60s and 70s, "I could see no fun sitting in opposition year after year" he later recounted. At the 1971 local-body election he came within a few hundred votes of unseating the sitting mayor, John Kennedy-Good, who had been appointed mayor in 1970 after Dowse's death. While not being able to unseat the mayor he won a seat on the council again and served three terms from 1971 to 1980. Seddon served as both deputy mayor and chairman of the finance committee during his second spell on the council. He was the focus of much media attention when he unsuccessfully tried to block Apartheid era South Africa's participation in the 1976 Men's Softball World Cup, which were held at the council owned Hutt Recreation Ground in central Lower Hutt. That same year he relinquished the Labour leadership on the council to Ernie Barry. Ahead of the he put himself forward for the Labour nomination in the and electorates, but was not selected for either.

He left Lower Hutt and moved to Titahi Bay. Shortly afterwards he was elected chairman of the Porirua Labour local body committee and briefly "had thoughts" of running as a candidate for the Porirua City Council. By 1997 he had become the country's longest serving local body chief executive.

Honorific eponym John Seddon Drive in Porirua was named after him in 2012.