Let me say from the get-go that I despise gang culture and everything it stands for and represents.

I despise gangs for the misery they inflict on people with their drug dealing and the way they treat the people desperate for the poison they peddle.

I despise gangs for the other heinous crimes they are associated with. Their appalling “initiation” processes. All of that. I have zero time for it.

Let me also say from the get-go that the three MPs and a candidate from the Greens and Te Pāti Māori who visited a Mongrel Mob pad, south of Auckland, picked the worst possible time to do it.

It’s the worst possible time because we’re in the middle of an election campaign and any claim that they were there to, you know, “discuss the issues” is just nonsense.

They were there to get votes. Plain and simple.

So I hate gangs, and I think these four from the Greens and Te Pāti Māori have cocked up big time.

But…

Despite what you or I might think about gangs, isn’t it better that politicians engage with them in some way, shape or form?

I’m talking about politicians engaging genuinely with gang members. Not with the objective of getting elected, but with the objective of trying to show gang members that there is an alternative way to live.

It’s been done before. The most obvious example is National Prime Minister Sir Rob Muldoon. You never hear people slagging him off for spending time with gang members. But that’s what he did. In particular, Black Power.

Doing things like helping gang members find accommodation and setting up subsidised work schemes for them.

His thinking was that finding gang members work cutting firewood or getting painting contracts would put them on the straight and narrow. And they loved him for that.

And these gang members didn’t just come to him. He went to them, as well. Drinking with them at gang pads and everything.

There’s even a story about him throwing the dregs of his whiskey at a gang member who had been flicking beer at him.

And then, when he died, about 100 Black Power guys turned up at his state funeral at the Auckland Town Hall in August 1992 and honoured him with a haka.

The following month, after a memorial service in Wellington, his wife, Dame Thea, even spent time with Black Power gang members.

The doubters will point to the fact that, despite Sir Rob’s efforts, gangs have continued to grow. And they’d be right.

But this is where Merepeka Raukawa-Tait comes into it. She used to run Women’s Refuge. These days she chairs Whānau Ora and is an advocate for women and children.

Before the last election, when National was touting its crackdown on gangs, she wrote a piece in the NZ Herald about Muldoon.

She said his relationship with gangs did work. For a while. Until the work contracts dried up and the gang members, as she put it, “turned back to doing what they do best: surviving on the proceeds of crime.”

But she also said this in her article: “I think Sir Robert Muldoon had the right idea: engage with the gangs and understand that whānau is whānau - whether gang whānau or otherwise.”

What she was getting at there is that whether you and I can get our heads around it or not, gangs provide a sense of belonging. A sense of whānau.

And we can choose to reject that or cover our ears and ignore it. Because you, like me, probably don’t have any time for gangs. But that’s reality.

We go on all the time about politicians not being in touch with reality.

So what’s so bad about politicians getting more in tune with the realities of gang life?

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