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ACT Party agriculture spokesman Mark Cameron says he regrets earlier statements made prior to his time in Parliament but stands by the tone in which they were made.
Cameron, a dairy farmer of over 30 years, came to Parliament in the 2020 election when ACT picked up 10 seats.
His comments refer to a number of tweets which have been picked up numerous times by media, first after a November 2021 argument with then Forestry Minister Stuart Nash who had labelled the farming advocacy group Groundswell NZ “racists and antivaxxers”.
The tweets have subsequently made headlines again amid the current election campaign.
In those tweets, Cameron directed ire at then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
The tweets, made in 2019 prior to his Parliamentary career, label Ardern as a “feckless wench”, and a “vacuous teenager”.
In an interview with Country TV, Cameron says the comments came at a difficult time for him both personally and professionally.
“Everything was going wrong in my life at that point,” he says.
“We’d just recently bought this farm, I’d been diagnosed with kidney disease only a few years earlier… so this is all new to me, and then we’ve got this thing called the Zero Carbon Act,” he explains. “All my dreams were being marginalised the way I saw it and I didn’t know where my future lay.”
He says that the language used was more of a reflection of what he felt was going wrong at that time, especially on-farm.
“So, I’m not being an apologist for the nonsense, but I maintain why I was being so visceral in my language.”
Cameron says that at that point in time, farmers were leaving the profession “every day”, and three of his farming colleagues had committed suicide.
“You can’t lay that at the feet of Government entirely, the Government has a role in that. Farming’s hard, the weather is always changing, issues on farm are ever-evolving, but the fact that I maintain, and so many maintain, the role of Government was widening, the remit was widening.
“Why was it such that a narrative on the right which afforded us as being really good farmers seemed to be disappearing?”
He says that some of the more visceral language used was “probably” attached to those feelings.
“We felt like we were no longer that part of society that was celebrated. It was more ‘you lot are the reason all these things are going wrong’ and I took umbrage with that and all the issues in my life personally probably made my tone and choice of words, which I might not use now, a little bit more front and centre.”
Get the full story on Country TV, tonight at 7.30pm on sky channel 81, or get 30 days FREE access, online and on demand at www.countrytv.co.nz.
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