Act MP Mark Cameron returns to Parliament after his son’s tragic death

Act MP Mark Cameron has returned to Parliament after the death of his son. Photo / Mark Mitchell

His care for the mental health of farmers and rural communities inspired Act list MP Mark Cameron to enter Parliament. Then he lost his beloved son, Brody, in May to a suspected suicide. He shares their father-son story with deputy political editor Thomas Coughlan and recounts his recent painful return to Parliament.

At 2.30 in the morning, a 30-something Mark Cameron found himself in the middle of a paddock with a tractor digging post holes for a fence.

Twenty years later he would become an Act MP, but on this day Cameron was anxious to prove himself. From the age of 4, he had wanted to be a farmer. Despite spending some of his early years on a Northland dairy farm, his time in Auckland as a teenager branded him a town kid.

Cameron was racked with self-doubt. “I wasn’t raised on a farm to believe that I could actually do it,” he told the Herald.

Others made “sniping remarks” about his efforts. He knows now these remarks weren’t intended to wound or harm him, but they did.

Then the rot set in: depression, which Cameron describes as a hitchhiker he couldn’t get rid of.

He had bought 500 cows, a substantial investment for the former share milker.

“Now, I’ve got the responsibility of getting these things in calf, and if I don’t get them in calf, I don’t generate an income,” Cameron told the Herald.

He threw himself into work, believing that exhaustion would assuage his self-doubt, but things got worse. There was a dispute over a boundary fence. Cameron said his “stupidity”convinced him to resolve it by refencing a paddock in the dead of night.

“I knew I had a short window the coming week to get it all done,” he said.

Then, at 2.30 in the morning in a lonely paddock with only a tractor for company, he realised he had a problem.

“I knew I was a man – I’ll use the word broken – at that point,” Cameron said.

After that morning in the field, he knew he needed help. A good GP, six weeks with a psychologist and more than three years on medication. Progress was uneven. He discovered recovering from disrupted mental health is not as easy as repairing broken bones.

“I think I was 30 or 32 – I’m 52 now and it was absolutely one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” he said.

Cameron entered Parliament in 2020, resolving to help other farmers and remove some of the stress from their lives, to be a voice for rural communities, and to help other people who had suffered what he had.

He made no secret of his struggles. In his maiden speech Cameron spoke of the “pangs of depression” he’d suffered in his thirties and the mental pressures that often go unspoken of by New Zealand’s farmers.

Brody Cameron and Mark Cameron making silage last year.

Cameron told the Herald this week he came to Parliament to stop all that – and, if he couldn’t stop it, to help farmers who had gone through it.

He now says his efforts look like a “fool’s errand” and somewhat futile because, in May this year, Cameron’s son, Brody, 22, died by suspected suicide. The coroner has yet to make a final ruling on the death.

Cameron was rocked.

He returned to Parliament not long after, feeling he knew what everyone was thinking – that there was an irony to his political mission. He keeps coming back to it.

“I’m embarrassed,” he said. “I came to Parliament, but I couldn’t even save my own bloody child.”

“What the hell was I doing? I came here for this reason. I couldn’t stop it. The rot comes into my own home,” he said.

The self-doubt ran deep. How could he and his son tread such similar paths in life – they even played the same rugby position, open-side flanker – yet come to such tragically different conclusions? Isn’t the point of fatherhood to try to beat an easier path for your children?

Act MP Mark Cameron wells up talking about his son. Photo / Mark Mitchell

“All those years before, I saw the rot that was metastasising in me. I’d had the wherewithal to go out and get help. Unbeknown to me, my son was suffering, and he didn’t get help,” Cameron said.

Then, of course, there’s the overwhelming sense of loss about the fact he spent Brody’s last years working away from home in Parliament.

“I came back to this place after Brody took his life and I was thinking, what the hell did I miss?

“I’ll be a politician a brief time, but a dad for a long time and you’re just going, ‘This is the madness of all of it’... I don’t understand it,” he said.

Tributes to Brody almost unfailingly made mention of his abilities on the rugby field.

He was a former member of the Vikings Rugby Football Club in Northland, playing with the team in 2018 and he played in the Whangārei Boys’ High First XV.

Cameron didn’t think Brody would “be much of a rugby player” when he was very young.

“He was a very quiet-natured boy, but he was also one of these kids that was not self-assured when he was young so you had to prop him up,” Cameron said.

Like many parents, Cameron had moments where he wondered whether his son’s abilities matched his passions. He remembers Brody playing Rippa Rugby as a young boy and not quite running in the right direction.

“All the kids are going ‘that way’, and my son was going the opposite,” Cameron said.

“It was one of those [moments] as parents where you say ‘Lord, son’, because you’re embarrassed, or ‘You’ll come right, son!’” Cameron said.

Brody was quiet, content and social. He wasn’t your typical “rough and ready” rugby player.

Mark Cameron with Brody as a young boy.

But he found his rugby talent and became a strong openside flanker.

“The self-determination that he had was something that parents quite often miss in their own children – the tenacity and drive and sheer determination,” Cameron said.

“Man, he became a fierce rugby player... he had electric speed, and he put big guys down,” Cameron said.

He was a hard worker off the pitch too, said Cameron, who is proud of his son’s ambitious nature, which mirrored his own.

“His journey was quite unique... So many young people are disillusioned. He wasn’t, he had a future.” Cameron said.

Brody was an agricultural contractor, working with heavy machinery. He might have inherited this passion for farm equipment from his dad, whose Wellington office is decorated with tractors and as if the 4-year-old Mark Cameron who really, really wanted to be a farmer never fully grew up.

The most impressive of these is a crochet tractor in John Deere green, about a foot long, which he was gifted. Cameron is still impressed by the skill, conceding that never in a million years would he get the knack for crocheting something so intricate.

Grief-stricken and weighing up a return to Parliament, Cameron felt “tormented” by how others would receive him.

Return too soon and he’d seem cruel and unsympathetic, but if he took more time away, like many parents would after losing a child, he was fearful of being painted a “trougher”, bludging off the taxpayer.

Making matters worse, Cameron empathised with those critiques. He remembered being someone on the outside of Parliament, feeling intensely critical of the MPs within.

He also has end-stage renal failure, a kidney disease, which sometimes makes life challenging. But he was surprised by the kindness that greeted him upon his return.

“All of the nonsense disappeared … people are inherently good and they showed it,” he said.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon gave him a hug, and, on the other side of the house, Labour leader Chris Hipkins had a heart-to-heart about his own experiences of fatherhood and Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick gave him flowers.

Cameron is keen to rebuild the bridge between rural and urban New Zealand. He was part of the swing of rural voters to Act in 2020, joining what had been a caucus of one. He’s now joined by former Federated Farmers President Andrew Hoggard who leapfrogged him up the list to five (Cameron was ranked seventh in 2023).

Unlike some colleagues from the 2020 intake, Toni Severin and Chris Baillie, who were dropped to unwinnable positions in 2023, the party saw something in Cameron that kept him in Act’s winnable top 10.

In the last Parliament, he had a Member’s Bill drawn that would have allowed regional councils to set environmental standards in each region rather than the Government. It was pulled from the ballot and ultimately voted down.

Despite the Ardern Government’s rural regulation agenda animating his desire to run for Parliament, Cameron often spoke warmly of Dame Jacinda Ardern herself, defying the ugly rhetoric that tainted the end of the Ardern years.

In 2022, he told the Herald he had a lot of respect for the then Prime Minister.

Cameron and his crochet tractor. Photo / Mark Mitchell

“I have a lot of respect for her, even though I’ve said flippant remarks as an angry farmer. She’s running a country as best she sees it,” he said.

His experience since losing Brody has affirmed that desire to build a bridge between urban and rural New Zealand.

Cameron says he means no disrespect to “our urban cousins” who have “huge pressures as well”. He just wants to make the case that farming is a seven-days-a-week, four-seasons-in-a-day, high-debt, poor-cashflow kind of business that’s only getting harder.

Like a lot of politicians, he enjoys the quiet, consensus-building moments with members from across the house.

“Chlöe Swarbrick is a classic example. She and I are so divergent in our thinking, so inherently divergent - that’s fine, she’s got her audience and I’ve got mine.

“But there’s moments of brilliance that happens once in a while where you can sit with someone who’s the polar opposite to you politically, forget all the ideological crap and actually sit down and talk about people.

“So let’s, let’s find an off-ramp where we all agree and, if we have to agree to disagree some of the time, that’s okay too, but it’s having the conversation which I think, for certainly 12 years I would argue, had been missing,” he said.

Cameron is keen to make it to the end of the Parliament, if his kidneys will allow it.

He’s keen to stick around beyond that, if the public will let him.

“The conviction for being here has not changed. People will decide whether there is enough value or not,” he said.

He’s still “refocusing” after Brody’s death, and thinking about what that means for his time in Parliament. It’s too late for Brody, it’s not too late to make a difference for rural mental health.

“If I can’t save my own bloody son, I can save someone else’s and I genuinely mean it.

“I say this candidly, the world can be buggered that I’ll quit because there are good people out there way beyond my boy and he deserved – and they deserve – some help, and I’m here to do it.”

Thomas Coughlan is deputy political editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.