Mark Cameron on his late-stage kidney disease: ‘I’m pretty frightened’

Sunday, 6 July 2025

The morning the Sunday Star-Times is due to meet ACT MP Mark Cameron at his Parliament office to discuss his end-stage kidney disease, news reaches all curves of the Beehive that Te Pāti Maori MP Takutai Tarsh Kemp has died.

Kemp had kidney disease and while she had taken time off her duties last year, she had been in Parliament that week, before travelling home to Auckland where the party’s president John Tamihere later said she had continued to work into the night, and having dialysis, before her death.

The news is shocking for everyone, especially for Cameron, who knows better than most how precious every moment is when you’re living with kidney disease.

Would he like to reschedule? The party’s communications advisor says nah, but he doesn’t want to talk about Kemp so soon, out of respect. That’s fair - there are many unknowns at this point.

And so it’s off to the parliamentary library, a beautiful ornate building where you take visitors to gasp, and where the ACT offices are located. They are modern, almost an aberration within the beautiful realm of the library.

Embracing the environment of contrasts, Cameron, first and foremost a Northland farmer of three decades, has brought the farm to him - gumboots by the door, a crocheted tractor, some bovine horns propped behind his desk (he drove them down, probably too big for an Air NZ seat).

As Cameron navigates a visual journalist’s microphone, he talks about missing the farm, his pride in bringing his rural roots to Wellington, how out of place he feels in the city, the dedication he has to his work. As much as he’d love to be farming, spending time with his family - his son died by suspected suicide last year and he acutely understands how precious life is - he feels he has a duty in Parliament.

So when he talks about whether he’s ready for another term, whether he wants to keep coming back to this place, the question is about his love for his work, whether he wants to be back on the farm, but the answer is about something else.

“If my kidneys let me, yes.”

Cameron’s representation of the farming community in Parliament, the challenges he’s set for himself, are complicated by this disease, one he later compares to a hitchhiker, a looming presence you can’t get rid of.

“Sorry for the emotion,” Cameron says, trying to explain that tension. “We all have families, we’ve all got kids… You know? You know what you’re fighting for. Is it worth it? By god, it is.”

But the reality of the hitchhiker, the one holding the knife, is playing havoc. It’s tiring, his phone is always on, just in case Today is the Day.

Mostly, though, Cameron remembers something his grandmother once said.

“‘Son, you can’t kill weeds.’ And I’m one of those. So I will fight, and fight, and fight for the people that this place does not understand. So yeah, if I’m asked to stand again, I will, in so much as that my body allows me.”

‘I knew I was stuffed’

Cameron returned to Parliament in mid June after four surgeries in the preceding weeks, and the beginning of what will be regular dialysis treatments. His kidneys, as Cameron would put it, are stuffed.

Essentially kidneys clean our blood, by clearing waste from the body. When the kidneys are damaged and don’t work - there are myriad reasons for this - waste will start to build up and people begin to feel sick. There are different stages of the disease, but end-stage, where Cameron is at, requires dialysis and, ideally, a new kidney.

The “kidney people”, as Cameron calls them, calculate how well the kidneys are working by something called a Glomerular Filtration Rate (GFR). Stage one is when they are working at a GFR of between 90-100. About 18 months ago, Cameron’s GFR was 15 (stage four). Now, five.

Cameron refused dialysis, “because I had work to do… I haven’t got time to die”. But now, “it’s got its fingers in,” he admits, describing sleepless nights and falling asleep in the House. Cameron became concerned - and embarrassed.

“One of my colleagues [ACT MP] Simon Court said, ‘Mark are you alright?’ And I knew at that point I was stuffed, and it was an impediment to my work and my responsibilities.”

He started dialysis three times a week, five hours at a time.

Here’s Cameron on that treatment: “I have what they call a cycling machine, which is gibberish to me. It’s a gizmo, you plug the gizmo into the wall and into myself, got a thing in my belly, plug it into that, and turn the tap on. Yeah. Hopefully get a nap. Get some kip. And this gizmo circulates the fluid around.”

This will be a regular occurrence until such time Cameron finds a kidney donor.

‘By crikey, you’ve only got 15% function left’

Kidney disease is insidious. Many people don’t know they have it and it’s common for symptoms to only become apparent - poor appetite, nausea, lethargy, breathlessness - late in the piece when it’s well advanced.

Unknowingly, its tentacles reach in and rob the body, and by the time it’s caught it’s not unusual that someone may have lost 90% kidney function. If caught early, effective management can delay its progression by up to 10 years. About 1 in 10 have it, but may not even know it.

Armed with the knowledge that his stepfather - who raised him - had died early from cancer, 10 years ago Cameron, aged 42, went for a warrant of fitness, of sorts - he wanted a physical “all’s OK”.

He was told his blood pressure was “through the roof” but it was rationalised by medical staff and Cameron was sent away.

Years later, for an unrelated medical reason, Cameron gave a urine sample.

“And they said, ‘by crikey, you’ve only got 15% kidney function left.’

“Which, candidly, pissed me right off, because this disease is a runaway train… I don’t criticise or critique the doctor that made the mistake, because people make mistakes, but that’s the outcome.”

Cameron is now 53.

He’s aware of people who have had their diagnosis earlier and been able to arrest the escalation of the disease. Cameron believes things could have been different.

Kidney Health NZ chair David Shearer (not the former Labour leader) says finding out if your kidneys are failing is as straightforward as a blood test, and anyone can ask their GP for one because it’s not necessarily always in the blood-work panel.

The news that not only do you have kidney disease, but your condition has deteriorated to the point of end-stage, is understandably difficult to process for many people, he says. Shearer has known from birth that one day he would need dialysis or a transplant - and he’s recently had one. Immediately he felt better.

But for those who don’t have decades of time to process the double whammy of sickness, wondering what’s next, and an anxious wait for a donor, is a lot. About 400 people are on the list for a kidney at any one time, and about 100 kidneys are donated from the deceased every year. Some wait several years. Meanwhile, dialysis is tough.

“It’s a heck of a lot to take on-board,” Shearer says. “Our focus is to get in there early - that early detection is so important.

“Finding a way to be able to test people earlier on, somehow, is the gold standard that we’re after.”

Donor-matching is, as Shearer puts it, a careful exercise that is so intensive it can take up to a year. It involves checking for blood type and antibody matches, and then any possible comorbidity, even as minor as a tooth abscess, is raked over. Such is the range of factors that it reduces the probability of finding a perfect match. And even then, potential donors are repeatedly asked: are you sure about this?

When all is done and dusted, a kidney might not take, or a donor may eventually need another new one.

Having recently had one, Shearer says, he feels “a million dollars”.

For Cameron, while he’s full of praise for the care he’s received in hospitals, his experiences of trying to find a donor have frustrated and mystified him. Initially his partner was canvassed as a donor, but was ruled out. Cameron says hospitals appeared to have different views over whether she was viable - “to me, that’s a nonsense” - and has appealed to his colleagues with health portfolios for improvements in the system.

“You use your influence wisely, there’s multiple people I’ve spoken to in this building that know someone, that they’ve had a kidney donated, and other organs, double lung transplants. Science is a wonderful thing, and the bloody bureaucracy in all of it … it’s fraught.”

‘The phone is always on’

You could imagine when your kidneys are failing and you’re waiting for a potential donor, you don’t want to be stumbling into, say, an area with no reception.

“Oh yeah, phone is live, every day. Always on. And it’s, ‘you could go today’, and that’s real exciting.”

Cameron doesn’t want to get ahead of himself, nor cry again, but he cautiously describes a remarkably generous offer from someone he’d met only in passing in an ACT tent, who is going through the process to see if they are a match. That man’s friend had died of kidney disease and learning of Cameron’s story, wanted to help.

“I’ve got a spare,” Cameron recounts. “I said, ‘I can’t take your kidney mate, I barely know you.’

“If that comes off, that is the kindest thing that any one human could do for another.”

Cameron is clearly trying not to get his hopes high, and says he deliberately hasn’t kept in close touch with this potential donor, so as not to pressure him.

“If it ever works, fantastic. … I have made him aware of that. I don’t know if this disease will ever give me a break and might be my end, I don’t know, even if he’s not a match… I will be eternally grateful to that human being, irrespective.”

‘Man, this world is so different’

Cameron loves the people he represents, but his parliamentary colleagues and his farming community don’t understand one another, or know how to talk to each other, he says.

“They’re not ignorant or rednecks or anything but … [farmers] just don’t understand this place, they really don’t. I can’t express that enough, with a risk of overplaying my hand. They don’t understand how laws are made.”

His voice is useful. There are two “farmer Joes” in the ACT caucus, as leader David Seymour calls them; Cameron, and former Federated Farmers president Andrew Hoggard. National’s Barbara Kuriger has a farm, and Labour’s Kieran McAnulty has rural connections. But the numbers of bona fide farmers in the Beehive are few, and Cameron says it shows.

“They’ve never seen a raised board, or a handpiece or a gut, they have no idea what it is let alone the process of taking wool off.”

Cameron describes a life that looks like being in the debating chamber one day, pulling off his tie as he drives away from Whangārei Airport that night, to the next day, in Ruawai, “putting a magnesium bag in a cow because she’s down”.

“And I think to myself, man, this world is so different.”

‘Yeah, I’m pretty frightened’

In general terms, says Cameron, “I’m alright, you know, I don’t allow myself a lot of time to sit in self-pity.”

But frankly? “I’m pretty scared.”

“Actually, I got the shits with the whole thing. What’s happened today [with Kemp’s death] is a real reminder of how fragile we really are. I try not to think about it. It’s not the big C, but it’s pretty close to it, right?

“So, I don’t dwell in self-pity, periodically when I’m feeling unwell I’m pretty effed, and it’s a constant reminder, it’s like, ‘Hey Mark, hey, we’re still here, dude’… It’s the hitchhiker I can’t ever get out of my car after volunteering to pick the bloody thing up.

“But yeah, I’m pretty frightened. I mean, I don’t want to die early, no-one does. That said, I have this arrogance about me that says, I don’t have time to die, I’ve got too much stuff to do.”

Cameron points out that everyone, at some point, has something difficult to deal with. This is just his. He didn’t ask for it. He continues his farm-work when he can, but admits he feels queasy every few days, though that’s an improvement on most of the last three years, pre-dialysis.

He says he relies on his peers to tell him, including Speaker Gerry Brownlee, when he shouldn’t be at work, but when he’s feeling good, well, in fact, even when he’s not feeling good, he feels the responsibility of being a voice in Parliament.

“You have your off days… and I just go back to work.”

On a whiteboard in his office, Cameron has written down, “Facts don’t care about your f…ing feelings”.

Cameron says that the sudden death of his son last year, due to what he called “the scourge of suicide” in the House, has been harder than his battle with the hitchhiker. Sometimes he feels pretty rotten, 'because you go, man, what else is life going to throw at me?”

He has a message for people reading, though, who will know what he’s going through. And that is, “you’re not alone. Health humbles all of us at some point, and I’m being humbled very quickly.

“I’m lucky to have a very powerful position, as it were, but it means nothing. I’m just a bloke, a Kiwi bloke getting beaten up by something that I didn’t ask for.

“And you know, god willing, the people that have the same affliction will find some light in the tunnel of darkness that they’re going through in that moment. And yeah, I would just say to them, be brave. Be honest, don’t be shy about, you know, raising the alarm if you think the health care that you’re getting is not suited for you.

“Sometimes you have to be your own best critique into your health care, because sometimes the best of intentions don’t create the best outcomes.”

Anyone concerned about their kidneys should ask their GP to check their kidney function. Alternatively call Kidney Health New Zealand’s free helpline from 8.30am to 5pm Monday to Friday on 0800 543 649 to speak to a renal nurse. Or visit kidney.health.nz for more information.