National’s New Gang Policy - What About Family?
Over the weekend, the National Party announced its new gang policy. It strikes me that there are two important aspects to this issue, but frustratingly, only one of them is dominating the public discourse right now.
Aspect One | The actual policy.
The policy feels disappointingly light on substance and primarily reactionary in nature, focusing on the symptoms instead of addressing both the symptoms AND the underlying causes.
The concept of Consorting Prohibition notices for up to 3 years is troubling to me, as I can imagine scenarios where this would break apart families, or even prevent conversations/meetings that could well be the catalyst for someone leaving a gang or refusing to engage in subsequent criminal offending.
The banning of gang patches and insignia is nothing more than a symbolic action. I don’t have any problem with the government banning symbols of violence and criminal unrest for the sake of signalling their commitment to upholding the common good, but we should not delude ourselves: this policy will not have any meaningful impact on reducing gang crime in NZ. Some of our most effective organised crime is currently carried out by gangs with no patches or publicly visible insignia.
Which brings me to the second important aspect of National’s gang policy:
Aspect Two | The very serious and spiralling gang crisis currently plaguing NZ which National’s policy is responding to.
National is correct to say that there needs to be urgent political leadership on this - the Government is failing in its duty of care, so simply criticising or lampooning National’s policy isn’t good enough.
Even though policing is an important part of the solution, in my humble opinion, the real issue here is much deeper than just criminal law and its enforcement.
If we fail to recognise, and order our public policy according to the truth that human persons are born into, ordered toward - and that our human flourishing is dependent upon - the good of community and tradition (with the first and most important community of tradition being the family). And, that, if these communities of tradition are dysfunctional or non existent, then human persons will live lives of dysfunction and gravitate toward communities of dysfunction, then we are unlikely to make any meaningful headway on this issue.
One other thing…
While socioeconomics is part of the equation, it isn’t the most important one. I grew up in a very poor family (consigned to permanent welfare while I was still in primary school), but not once did I, or any of my 4 brothers or sister ever consider joining a gang. This is because we were raised in a stable two parent home, with a loving mother and father who instilled in us a code of Christian virtue and honour, while living in community with other families who raised their children in the same, or very similar fashion.
While there’s no such thing as a 100% guaranteed way to gang-proof your kids, there is no doubting that our loving stable family life, grounded in tradition, lived out in communities of families with many of those same shared traditions (the modern ‘tribe’), reduced our risk of ending up on the path of criminality to almost zero.
So, it seems to me that the dogmas of enlightenment liberalism which plague the current leadership of both Labour and National - in particular the core enlightenment liberalism doctrine of the untethered and self-creating individual as the natural state of man (a policy which prioritises individualism over family and community, and personal preference over tradition) - is something that requires remedy.
