Cameron, who entered Parliament in 2020, has announced he won’t contest the November election due to his failing health and the toll the death of his son has taken on him.<\/p>\n
“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 told RNZ’s Midday Report.<\/p>\n
“And, after six years and battling kidney disease and the loss of my son, I’ve had a bloody tough time of it, and I just know the dear old taxpayers’ paying my wages, and I cannot do the job that I once did with the kidney disease that I have.<\/p>\n
“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 and the people that pay my wages.<\/p>\n
Cameron had grand plans to return to Parliament after a kidney donor was lined up for a transplant earlier this year.<\/p>\n
He expected to be able to return to work in March or April but then, two days before Christmas, his heart failed, making him no longer eligible for the donor list.<\/p>\n
“Everything changed at the moment, I was taken off the transplant list, and I sit in this purgatory of unknown.<\/p>\n
“It’s a real ‘bugger me’ moment where you swear at the sky and consternation and don’t get any answers back.”<\/p>\n
He said he’s been in recovery and rest mode since, and been unable to return to his work in Wellington.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
‘Long way to go’ on rural mental health support<\/p>\n
Cameron said his experience of the health system was “incredible gratitude and immense disappointment”.<\/p>\n
He said he doesn’t know where the country’s $33 billion of funding for health goes, given how many people are waiting for help at hospitals where emergency departments are full.<\/p>\n
“For the average user we spend an inordinate amount of money and sometimes the results are not what you would want or expect.<\/p>\n
“Certainly in my case… I rang my specialist and didn’t get a reply for five days. One would argue at that point, with all the money being spent, that that professionalism is being lost, and maybe in that instance it was.”<\/p>\n
Cameron lost his son Brody to suicide in 2024 and as a Northland farmer, has been a huge advocate for the rural community and mental health.<\/p>\n
He said there’s still a “long way to go” to get the right assistance to rural men suffering mental health issues.<\/p>\n
“Isolated rural young men, often working long long hours in quite difficult jobs, and they find themselves isolated and don’t have the wherewithal to reach out.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Where to get help. (Source: 1News)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kidney failure means ACT Party MP Mark Cameron can no longer do the job he signed up to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":466760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,134,43,135,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-466759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-health","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}