KEY POINTS:
Broadcaster Paul Holmes has offered some blunt advice to Social Development Minister Paula Bennett over dealing with unwanted family connections to "low-life" gang members.
Holmes, whose daughter Millie has battled P addiction and has had connections to the Headhunter gang through her boyfriend, said parents needed to do all they could to keep gang members out of their children's lives.
The father of Ms Bennett's grand-daughter - a youth gang member - is in jail for violent offending and it was revealed recently that the minister supported him while he was on bail.
Holmes told the Sunday Star-Times his advice to Ms Bennett was to convince her 21-year-old daughter to wash her hands of the young man.
If that didn't happen she needed to consider cutting ties with her daughter.
He said gangs were bringing good families down, and Ms Bennett had done her best in difficult circumstances to bring up a girl to whom she offered a future.
However, her daughter had become involved with someone who appeared to be "irredeemable, bad and violent".
"Because she loves her daughter, I would say, and because she's anxious to look after her grandchild, Paula Bennett has gone the extra mile for the young man."
"Why do I feel like this? Because my own daughter, as it is widely known, is connected to a young, useless Headhunter. My daughter knows where I am, but she knows we will have nothing, ever, to do with Headhunters."
Holmes said he had had run-ins with Headhunters over damage caused to an apartment he rented for Millie and had been regularly threatened by gang members.
However, he was not remotely frightened of Headhunters or any of "ambitionless young thugs", responsible for doing so.
Gangs were "filth, criminals, low life who have no aspiration, no respect for work and peddle drugs", and needed to be outlawed, he said.
- NZPA
