Jo Luxton

Jo-Anne Marie Luxton (born 1973) is a New Zealand politician. She has been a Member of Parliament in the House of Representatives for the Labour Party since the 2017 general election.

Before her political career, Luxton was an early childhood educator. From 8 May to 27 November 2023, she was Minister of Customs and Associate Minister of Education, with responsibility for early childhood education, in the Sixth Labour Government.

Luxton was born to parents Jim, a builder, and Margaret Thompson in Rotorua. She has two younger sisters. The family moved around the North Island during Luxton's childhood and she was raised mainly in Gisborne, where she attended Campion College and Lytton High School.

In her twenties, Luxton moved to Ashburton with her then-husband, a farm worker, and worked on a dairy farm with him. When their marriage broke up, she began working for Playcentre and had a twenty-year career in early childhood education before her election to Parliament in 2017. She owned and operated the Hinds Early Learning Centre, which was an accredited living wage employer.

Luxton is the great-niece of former Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk. She is of Māori descent, through her mother's biological father, which she did not learn until about 2004. She has a blended family of five children with her second husband, a builder, and is also the guardian of her younger sister who has Down syndrome.

In October 2022 she admitted causing a three-car crash in Timaru.

Luxton became involved with the Labour Party in 2013 and became the chairperson of her local party branch. In 2016, she was selected as the Labour candidate for Rangitata electorate in the 2017 election. She was ranked 29 on Labour's party list.

Luxton did not win the electorate, which had been held by the National Party since 2005, but entered parliament as a list MP. She was the second speaker in the address in reply debate on 8 November 2017. Her maiden speech highlighted her views that education "needs to be free and accessible to everyone [because] it could mean the difference between living a decent life and contributing to society in a positive way, and ending up in our overcrowded prisons." She also acknowledged former Labour MP Maryan Street as a political mentor.