National's police spokesperson Mark Mitchell has hit out at the whānau of gang members on a hīkoi from Northland to Parliament, saying they should be focused on getting their kids out of the gangs.
The 10-strong trip, led by Matilda Kahotea (Ngāti Pūkenga), is opposing National and ACT's gang policies and is stopping at marae and gang houses to explain the policies and get signatures for a petition.
But Mitchell told AM on Wednesday the group should have a different focus.
"I think number one, her three sons who are all members of the Head Hunters, she should be working on trying to get them out of the gang," she said.
National leader Christopher Luxon has pledged that gangs will "face tougher consequences" under his government, if elected, with membership to a gang to be an aggravating factor when it comes to sentencing.
National would also ban gang patches in public places and boost police powers to enable warrantless searches to find guns held by gang members.
ACT leader David Seymour said his party would introduce Gang Control Orders to crack down on gang members and also increase the power of police to seize assets of members found with illegal firearms if elected.
Kahotea told NZ Herald they feel the policies are ill-informed and they want to be included in solutions that are made for them.
She said when you start targeting gang members and making it an aggravating factor you marginalise these people and if any of them want to leave a gang it will become much harder to get out.
But Mitchell said National will work with members wanting to leave a gang but for those that don't, he had a simple message for them.
"If you decide to remain a member of a gang let me be very clear, under National your life is going to become a lot more difficult and a lot harder," he said.
"They've had the run of the place for the last six years and that is stopping... we have got a tough measure of policies that we're going to implement and being a gang member in New Zealand is going to be a much tougher thing."
Kahotea was scheduled to appear on AM this morning but didn't turn up.
National has been critical of Labour's original plan to reduce the overall prison population by 30 percent, but party leader Chris Hipkins made a U-turn on that policy earlier this week.
"We don’t have a target for the next term," Hipkins told media on Tuesday.
Mitchell said National was "pleased" to see Labour scrap that policy but when questioned about how much it'll cost to put more people in jail, he couldn't provide a figure or how many extra prisoners there would be.
"Let me put it this way, if our policies work and if it becomes really difficult to be a gang member in New Zealand and we have a policy sitting alongside that to help them leave the gang, then maybe we won't have as many going to prison as what we think," he said.
"But if it doesn't work, then you're going to have more gang members going into prison. If they break the law, if they assault police officers, if they intimidate or assault members of the public, they're going to prison."
Watch the full interview with Mark Mitchell in the video above.
