Background
Born in Paddington, West London, to a British military officer father Paul Wade-Brown, Wade-Brown grew up in a council flat.
Born in Paddington, West London, to a British military officer father Paul Wade-Brown, Wade-Brown grew up in a council flat.
She attended The Holt School in Wokingham, Berkshire, England.
She is the third woman mayor, replacing centre-right Kerry Prendergast. She defeated Prendergast by 176 votes in the 2010 single transferable vote mayoral election, winning a second term in 2013. Wade-Brown is contesting the Wellington mayoralty in the 2016 local election for a third term.
After school, she took a gap year in Cape Coast, Ghana, then earned an honours degree in philosophy from the University of Nottingham.
She started her professional life with International Business Machines Corporation in the United Kingdom, and moved to Wellington in 1983. As an adult, Wade-Brown discovered and connected with two half-sisters.
One half-sister Gitta Rupp was a German war child born to her father and a German mother. National politics 1996–2002
Wade-Brown first stood for the Green Party as a list candidate (ranked 44th) under the Alliance banner in the 1996 election.
In the 1999 election, she stood for the Green Party as a list candidate (ranked 29th).
In the 2002 election, she stood for the Green Party as a list candidate (ranked 15th) in the Rongotai electorate and placed third. She did not appear on the Green Party list for the 2005 or 2008 elections. Local government politics 1994–current
Wade-Brown served as a Wellington City Councillor for the Southern Ward in 1994–1998 and 2001–2010.
In 2010, she contested the mayoralty only, not standing as a councillor.
Paul Eagle replaced her as a councillor. She was ahead of Prendergast on a significant number of ballots from the four trailing candidates after they were eliminated, which allowed her to overcome Prendergast"s initial lead of 21,809 to 18,560 in the first iteration.
Wade-Brown does not favour Wellington"s adopting a "super city" type council like Auckland, though she supports reducing the number of councils in greater Wellington from nine to "three or four". The Wellington City Council came under criticism from the business community in Aprl 2013 after the Council laid off 150 workers and approved $350,000 in renovations for the mayor"s office, seemingly without the mayor and councillors knowing.
After her re-election in October 2013, Wade-Brown listed priorities for the first 100 days as"the south coast cycle lanes, completing the draft annual plan before Christmas, agreeing on three-year priorities, taking first steps towards a living wage for council staff, slimming down council-owned companies and continuing to improve shared services with other councils".
On 27 August 2014 Wade-Brown became an executive leader of Mayors for Peace. In 2002 Wade-Brown founded Living Streets Aotearoa, a walking-advocacy organisation with 15 branches. lieutenant holds collective membership of the International Federation of Pedestrians, of which she is a Board member.
She is the second mayor of a major New Zealand city to be a member of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, after Dunedin"s Sukhi Turner, but she stood as an independent candidate. Wade-Brown was a founding member of the New Zealand Internet Society, a non-profit organisation set up in 1995 dedicated to protecting and promoting the Internet in New Zealand.