Melburnians have a right to know more about injecting room plans and harms before state election
Melburnians are being “treated like morons who don’t matter” by the Andrews government and Melbourne City Council over drug injecting room plans and reports.
Opinion
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Twenty-two months ago, on these pages with one of my first columns for the Herald Sun, we ran a picture of a heroin addict shooting up in Smith St, Richmond.
Slumped in the gutter, outside a single-fronted cottage with a picket fence, the heroin hit took place not 50m from the North Richmond health facility — also known as the heroin injecting room.
The unidentified addict chose the street not the clinic. It was Wednesday, October 28, 2020. That Wednesday, Victoria had just emerged from a 111-day Covid lockdown — Lockdown 2 was our longest.
Three months earlier, on July 21, the Melbourne City Council had voted against establishing shooting gallery No.2 at 53 Victoria St in the city, just metres from Queen Victoria Market.
That same month, the Andrews government’s health department announced that former police commissioner Ken Lay had been hired to undertake a study to establish a second heroin injecting room.
The department’s media release dated July 7 said: “Mr Lay will present a report to the Minister by the end of 2020”.
Victorians are still waiting to see that report.
That same release stated the Lay Report was being undertaken to “help take pressure off the current North Richmond service” not to clean up heroin use – it’s an illegal drug just in case anyone forgot – so two rooms would be better than one.
So, almost 20 months later, that report has still not been completed, with the Andrews government using Covid as an excuse for its delay.
In the meantime, the state government bought a property at 244 Flinders St from the Yooralla charity without any consultation from local businesses.
The Department of Health issued another media release extending Mr Lay’s heroin injecting consultation process into 2021 with no end date included.
Already — a year later and with an extension from the end of 2020 into 2021 — we are now told, as reported by the Herald Sun, it won’t be ready until the end of 2022.
The state election is on the last Saturday of November this year.
The people of Melbourne, and Victorians generally, are being taken for idiots by this state government and its mates at the Melbourne City Council.
We are being treated like morons who don’t matter.
Why should the people who live in the CBD or Richmond, or in any area close to or controlled by the City Council, not know before they vote where this second drug injecting room is going to go?
Business owners I have talked to believe — rightly or wrongly — that there will not be one drug room but as many as three, with Richmond staying where it is.
Surely the voters of Richmond, where local member Richard Wynne is retiring at the next election, deserve to know what is to become of the idiotic choice of a site next to a school?
If you are a city resident, don’t you need to know if the Flinders St location is to become a heroin injecting room or if the previous Queen Victoria Market location is back on the agenda?
One tip is Docklands and Carlton are also being looked at.
Voters should also be wondering how the heroin addiction problem has become so bad that four locations might be needed. And why this concentration on the Melbourne CBD and surrounding suburbs?
Don’t heroin dealers and users operate in the suburbs; in places like Footscray and Dandenong where there have been issues before.
As recently as Tuesday of this week at a Melbourne City Council meeting, a motion to urgently release the Lay report was voted down and an alternative motion put.
That motion, put by Greens councillor Olivia Ball, reaffirms the city’s support for an injecting facility in the city. The motion’s only reference to the delayed Lay report was once it was completed council management provide a report on the report.
The motion to again support a drug addict’s injecting room in the CBD of Melbourne was supported by Lord Mayor Sally Capp.
So, two-years-and-one-month after establishing a consultation process led by former Police Commissioner Lay into heroin addiction and injecting rooms and under 100 days out from the state election, we still don’t have a report.
This same week in NSW, six months after Lismore was hit by the biggest floods in modern Australian history causing $2.7bn in damage, that state government released its flood report.
It too was conducted by a former police commissioner – Mick Fuller – and will be fully acted on including transforming emergency services and buying back flood prone land.
NSW could complete that work in less than six months but the Victorian government and its consultant Ken Lay have taken two years on a drug injecting room report and it’s still not ready.
Meanwhile, Lord Mayor Sally Capp is off to a climate change summit in Argentina while people are still slumping in streets after overdosing on drugs.
The politics of this heroin decision is a stain on the state government and the council, and every voter affected should be screaming for that report to be released before polling day.
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