9 Mar 2013

Former Labour MP Geoff Braybrooke dies

8:05 pm on 9 March 2013

Long-serving former Labour Party MP Geoff Braybrooke has died at the age of 78.

Mr Braybrooke, who represented Napier from 1981 to 2002, died in a Palmerston North hospice following a long illness.

He was a former Deputy Speaker of Parliament and as a backbencher campaigned for official recognition of Vietnam veterans suffering from the effects of the defoliant Agent Orange.

He was also a leading opponent of homosexual law reform in the mid 1980s.

A friend of Mr Braybrooke, former Hawke's Bay MP Bill Sutton, says he was the most popular Napier MP of the past 50 years.