Simon Upton

Simon David Upton (born 7 February 1958) is a former New Zealand politician and member of Parliament from 1981 to 2001, representing the National Party.

Upton was educated at Southwell School, St Paul's Collegiate School and the University of Auckland, where he gained degrees in English literature, music and law, and Wolfson College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar.

Having joined the National Party in 1976, he served as Chairman of the New Zealand Young Nationals among other positions and became the then-youngest MP for Waikato in the 1981 elections. In the 1984 elections, he was elected MP for Raglan, which he held until the 1996 elections, when he chose to become a list MP.

Cabinet minister

Upton became one of New Zealand's youngest ever Ministers in the Cabinet in 1990, when he became Minister of Health, Minister for the Environment, and Minister of Research, Science and Technology. In the environment post, Upton enacted the Resource Management Act 1991. He was responsible for establishing the Crown Research Institutes. He has an interest in sustainable development, and chaired the OECD's Round Table on Sustainable Development. He is a founding member of the Board of the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction.

He was sworn to the Privy Council in 1999.

He resigned from Parliament in 2001, and moved to France. He took up a full-time post at the OECD as the chair of the Round Table on Sustainable Development which he held until 2005. He was also a part-time consultant at PriceWaterhouseCoopers for several years. In April 2010 he was appointed as the head of the OECD Environment Directorate, in Paris, France.

He has two adult children.