Kristine Hayward lost her husband Bruce three years ago to prostate cancer.
"I don't have my husband here any more, and that's why I'm doing this. He was an amazing man."
Today, she delivered a petition carrying 30,000 signatures from across New Zealand to a bi-partisan collection of MPs, with National's Gerry Brownlee set to table it in the House this afternoon.
Among them was ACT's Chris Baillie, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer when he was 42.
"[The petition] is very worthwhile, and long overdue," he said. "It's something very treatable if it's picked up early. We'd certainly support it [the petition] and look at ways of getting those early detection programmes into law."
Labour's Greg O'Connor was also on hand to welcome Hayward to Parliament.
"As a cancer survivor myself — bowel cancer in my case and left it far too long as men do — what was said today really resonated. And if there's one message that needs to come out of here, blokes get checked. We're not invincible."
He said there's "no shortage of people pushing for these things to happen".
National's Michael Woodhouse was on a health select committee which conducted an inquiry into early detection programmes for prostate cancer more than a decade ago.
"Some recommendations were made then, I'm not convinced they have all been implemented. So this petition I think will give quite an impetus to the very important issue of prostate cancer."
Green Party MP Ricardo Menéndez March said "the time is now to take a range of cancers seriously as some others do."
Other cancers do currently benefit from early detection programmes, like breast and colorectal cancers, which both introduced early detection programmes in 2017.
Hayward said when it comes to prostate cancer, the numbers speak for themselves.
She said getting Parliament to carry this through to legislative change is crucial.
"If we can get this in Parliament, get this going, this would be fantastic. We need to keep at the parliamentarians and we need to keep pushing it home."
She's been supported in her work on the petition by the Prostate Cancer Foundation, whose chief executive Peter Dickens was among those at Parliament today.
"One in eight men get diagnosed with prostate cancer. Four thousand get diagnosed every year, and 700 die. We think through screening we could bring down that death toll by half. And that's something we should all aspire. We're really proud the New Zealand public has come along with us [through the petition]."
He said men around the country can't afford a lack of action by Parliament.
"If nothing changes then the rates of death from prostate cancer are going to increase. At the moment it's already the second-leading cause of cancer death in New Zealand men. It's the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the country now. Unless we do something about it, and something about it soon, those numbers are just going to get worse."
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