Willow-Jean Prime

Willow-Jean Prime (née Downs; born 1983) is a New Zealand politician. She was first elected a Member of the New Zealand House of Representatives at the 2017 general election as a list representative of the New Zealand Labour Party. She was elected as the Member of Parliament for Northland at the 2020 general election and was re-elected as a list MP in 2023.

Prime was Minister of Conservation and Minister for Youth in the final year of the Sixth Labour Government.

Prime is of Te Kapotai, Ngāti Hine and Ngāpuhi descent and grew up in Northland. She attended Bay of Islands College in Kawakawa. Her father Barry (d. 2018) was a train driver; she learnt to drive a train before a car and wanted to follow her father's career but was advised at school that women could not drive trains. Prime played basketball at school and was offered a scholarship to play in the United States.

Prime is a graduate of Waikato University holding a Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Laws, post-graduate Diploma of Māori and Pacific Development with distinction, and Master of Laws focusing on recent developments in Treaty settlements, Māori governance and indigenous development. In 2014, she had started a Doctor of Philosophy in law at Waikato University.

She worked as a solicitor in Wellington before returning to Northland.

She lives near Pakaraka with her husband Dion, who is a teacher, and has two children. She was pregnant during both her 2015 and 2017 election campaigns.

Prime began her political career when she was elected to the Far North District Council for Bay of Islands-Whangaroa in 2013; she was the youngest person on the council at age 30. She was re-elected for a second term in 2016 and resigned from the council after she was elected to Parliament in 2017.

Prime first ran for parliament in 2014. She ran for the Northland electorate, placing second with 29% of the vote. She was placed 34th on Labour's party list for the election, which due to a poor result by Labour was not enough for her to enter Parliament.