[5] His government also purchased vast amounts of land from the Māori, aided by his allies Alfred Cadman and James Carroll as the Ministers of Native Affairs.

[5] An imperialist in foreign policy, his attempt to incorporate Fiji into New Zealand failed, but he successfully annexed the Cook Islands in 1901.

[5] His heritage from the region defined him not only as a politician, but as a man; he became well-known for the "uncouth" stereotypes of the generally West Coast Pākehā population of the time, expressed in his lack of education, boisterous and aggressive persona, and his dialectal tendency to drop his aitches.

Seddon continued to live on the West Coast of the South Island throughout his premiership, only coming to Wellington on a regular basis very reluctantly, from the late 1890s.

[5] Ironically, this was something Seddon had been instrumental in creating, through his successful attempt at suppressing New Zealand's previously dominant political cohort of independents.

[5] Despite being derisively known as "King Dick" for his autocratic style,[3] and criticised for his actions on Māori land deprivation and his views on race (especially towards Chinese), he has nonetheless been named as one of the greatest, most influential, and most widely known politicians in New Zealand history.

[6] His father Thomas Seddon (born 1817) was a school headmaster, and his mother Jane Lindsay was a teacher; they married on 8 February 1842 at Christ Church, Eccleston.

Despite his parents' attempt to give him a classical education, Seddon developed an interest in engineering, but was removed from school at age 12.

After working on his grandfather Richard's farm at Barrow Nook Hall for two years,[7] Seddon was an apprentice at Daglish's Foundry in Sutton.

Initially, Seddon was derided by many members of Parliament, who mocked his "provincial" accent (which tended to drop the letter "h") and his lack of formal education.

Attacks by the opposition, which generally focused on his lack of education and sophistication (one opponent said that he was only "partially civilised") reinforced his growing reputation as an enemy of elitism.

After Ballance's death in April 1893, the Governor David Boyle, 7th Earl of Glasgow asked Seddon, as the acting leader of the house, to form a new ministry.

Despite the refusal of William Pember Reeves and Thomas Mackenzie to accept his leadership, Seddon managed to secure the backing of his Liberal Party colleagues as interim leader, with an understanding being reached that a full vote would occur when Parliament resumed sitting.

John Ballance, founder of the Liberal Party, had been a strong supporter of voting rights for women, declaring his belief in the "absolute equality of the sexes".

Seddon's tactics in lobbying the council were seen by many as underhand, and two Councillors, despite opposing suffrage, voted in favour of the bill in protest.

One of the policies for which Seddon is most remembered is his Old-age Pensions Act of 1898, which established the basis of the welfare state later expanded by Michael Joseph Savage and the Labour Party.

After he attended the Colonial Conference in London in 1897, he became known "as one of the pillars of British imperialism", and he was a strong supporter of the Second Boer War and sponsored preferential tariffs for trade with Britain.

Following the example of anti-Chinese poll taxes enacted by California in 1852 and by Australian states in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, John Hall's government passed the Chinese Immigration Act 1881.

Richard Seddon's government increased the tax to £100 per head in 1896 ($20,990 in modern New Zealand dollars), and tightened the other restriction to only one Chinese immigrant for every 200 tons of cargo.

Seddon compared Chinese people to monkeys, and so used the Yellow Peril conspiracy theory to promote racialist politics in New Zealand.

Seddon was also accused of cronyism – his friends and allies, particularly those from the West Coast, were given various political positions, while his enemies within the Liberal Party were frequently denied important office.

[citation needed] Sir Carl Berendsen recalled seeing Seddon in 1906 as a Department of Education junior innocently bearing what was an unwelcome document.

"[citation needed] Successive governments had also shown a lack of firmness in dealing with Māori, he said: "The colony, instead of importing Gatling guns with which to fight Maori, should wage war with locomotives"... pushing through roads and railways and compulsorily purchasing "the land on both sides".

[45] On the eve of his departure, he had sent a number of telegrams, among whom was one to the premier of Victoria, Thomas Bent, which contained the words, “Just leaving for God's own country”.

[54] Seddon centralised government decision-making around himself—at his peak he exercised "almost one-man, one-party rule"[25]—and, in doing so, he established the premiership as the de facto most important political office in New Zealand.

When Thomas met former US President Theodore Roosevelt in 1918, he expressed admiration for his late father, particularly the labour legislation his government passed.

Wellington Zoo was originally created when a young lion was presented to Prime Minister Richard Seddon by the Bostock and Wombwell Circus.

The memorial was designed by government architect John Campbell and constructed by Edwards and Son of Wellington with the above ground portion consisting of reinforced concrete faced with Coromandel granite.

[59] Constructed between 1908 and 1910[61] the memorial is topped by a bronze female figure approximately 8 feet (2.4 m) in height and weighing 2 long tons (2,000 kg) symbolising the “Zealandia”, the country mourning its dead.

In November 1988 a group protesting against the signing of the Antarctic convention and the risk they believed it posed to wildlife enclosed the statue in a giant penguin suit.