Mark Cameron, the dairy farmer who carried Northland’s rural voice into Parliament for ACT, has confirmed he will not contest the 7 November general election, drawing a hard six years in Wellington to a close as kidney failure and family grief take their toll.
Cameron told RNZ he now does dialysis three days a week because his kidneys have completely failed, and that he can no longer give the job what it asks of him. “I do dialysis three days a week now, because my kidneys are completely failed, and it’s just not fair on the people that I represent,” he said.
He had hoped to return to the House after a kidney donor was lined up earlier this year, expecting to be back by about March or April. That plan fell apart two days before Christmas, when his heart failed and made him ineligible for the transplant list. “Everything changed at the moment, I was taken off the transplant list, and I sit in this purgatory of unknown,” he said.
The decision ends a parliamentary run that began in October 2020, when Cameron entered the House as a list MP on the back of a strong ACT result. A dairy farmer from Ruawai who has lived and worked the land in Northland for about 30 years, he built a reputation as one of the few genuine farmer voices in the chamber, pressing the case for primary industries, regional development and biosecurity. He was returned at the 2023 election from seventh place on the ACT list.
His time in Parliament has been shadowed by loss as well as illness. In 2024 Cameron lost his son Brody, who was 22, to suicide, and he returned to the House soon after to deliver an emotional speech that drew sympathy from across the political divide. He has since used his platform to argue that rural communities are too often left out of the country’s mental health response. “We still have a long way to go and the $2 billion we spend on mental health in part should be spent in rural New Zealand,” he said.
Even as he announced his exit, Cameron spoke warmly about the work itself. “I genuinely love the place and I thoroughly enjoy working with a group of Kiwis that have put their hand up to represent what they believe in,” he said. “And after six years and battling kidney disease and the loss of my son, I’ve had a bloody tough time of it.” What he kept coming back to was the community he came from. “I want to do best by Kiwi folk, and the people I certainly love, which are rural people, and I simply can’t do it,” he said.
His departure was marked in an unusual way on the same day it was announced. National confirmed it would lift funding for the QEII National Trust, the body that helps landowners place voluntary covenants over wetlands and native bush on private property. ACT leader David Seymour described the move as a tribute to Cameron, who had championed the model for years, telling Scoop that National had effectively adopted an idea Cameron promoted and that ACT took to voters in 2023. The party had campaigned on a $10 million biodiversity fund to help councils and trusts strike conservation deals with willing landowners, an approach Seymour said was voluntary and respected property rights.
That blend of conservation and farming sat at the heart of Cameron’s politics. He was a sharp critic of regulation he saw as landing hardest on rural families, and in 2024 he put up a member’s bill seeking to change how climate considerations are weighed in resource consent decisions. Whether colleagues agreed with him or not, few doubted that he spoke for a part of the country that does not always feel heard in Wellington.
Cameron will stay on until Parliament is dissolved ahead of the election, which Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has set for 7 November. ACT will need a new rural standard-bearer for the campaign, and voters weighing the parties before polling day can compare where each one stands on the issues using Newswire’s voting tool.
For a farmer who came to Parliament straight from the cow shed, the exit is bittersweet. He leaves with his health failing but his affection for the job, and for the people he represented, plainly intact. You can read more on his decision at Stuff and the NZ Herald.
What do you make of Mark Cameron’s time in Parliament, and does rural New Zealand get a fair hearing in Wellington? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply