‘Premier, go walk around North Richmond with locals whose lives your government has wrecked’

Richmond’s once vibrant Victoria St is now “a dangerous dump” and the closest thing to a capital city ghetto in Australia, thanks to its drug injecting room.

Surfaces are covered in graffiti, many stores are shuttered and many more are for lease or sale, as Richmond becomes “a ghetto”. .

Unlike Premier Daniel Andrews, I went and visited the drug use facility in North Richmond this week.

It was Monday morning, around 24 hours before the Premier took the easy way out and announced the drug room’s permanent home in Lennox St, from the safety of a garden outside Parliament House.

A nice backdrop of healthy trees as Premier Andrews confirmed Richmond locals’ worst fears – they are stuck with a daylight drug room that acts as a honey pot to drug dealers and is stupidly located next to a school.

If anyone can point to a more unhinged, irresponsible piece of public policy, I’d love to hear it. Who in their right mind establishes a drug injecting facility next to a school?

Worse, the man in charge – who must believe we are all stupid – comes out on Tuesday and prosecutes the case for leaving it there.

The Richmond supervised injecting room on Lennox street will become a permanent fixture.

About a dozen people were seen lingering outside the injecting room recently. Picture: news.com.au

If the Premier wasn’t so stubborn and unwilling to admit he can ever do anything wrong, he would have seized the opportunity to shift it from a site where it should never have been.

The problem he has, of course, is after all the horrific publicity this so called health trial has had, nobody is putting up their hand to host a rolling parade of drug addicts and their criminal dealers in their street.

Just as breathtaking as the decision to leave this appalling health mistake in a suburban street is the justification Andrews — and the one local anyone could find who supports it, a woman called Judy Ryan — made to leave it there.

The Premier said it saves lives and that he didn’t want to go to any more drug funerals. I doubt very much the Premier has been to any of the funerals of the 50 heroin overdose victims in the local area since this place opened.

That local by the way is a woman who the Premier failed to tell us was — surprise, surprise — a member of the Reason Party standing in the Victorian and Federal elections in 2018 and 2019.

The Reason Party’s drug policy is to decriminalise the use and possession of all drugs. Wonder why he didn’t tell us this local had those conflicted connections … what a disgrace.

His language to support the Richmond facility — where by the way users can inject all drugs not just heroin including the drug ice – was beyond insulting.

He said: “Stories of people dying in laneways and gutters, stories of literally dead bodies throughout that local community meant we needed to do something different.”

Really? Dead bodies “throughout the local community”? That’s clearly an exaggeration to defend a community-wrecking political decision that’s destroyed an inner Melbourne suburb.

If you don’t believe me, Premier, then go for a walk around North Richmond with a few of the real locals whose lives, and in many cases livelihoods, your government has wrecked.

A man drifts in and out of consciousness on a Richmond street. Picture: news.com.au

Maybe start with the woman I heard on 3AW last Sunday morning who stood by as a teenage boy stabbed a needle into his groin to get a quick hit of heroin.

She was worried he was going to die but he wasn’t in your so-called safe room. He was in the streets of North Richmond because the dealers have a guaranteed market to sell to because of your creation.

And do you really believe heroin overdoses are not occurring in Footscray or Springvale or you own electorate? That’s just blind ignorance to justify what’s turned into a six-year nightmare for locals.

What more evidence do you need than dead bodies in schools or the clear evidence of street dealing and use that police have simply given up on.

Pity you didn’t feel that the backdrop of 23 Lennox St was a good look for the nightly news this week.

If you had been honest enough to get your government car to cruise those drug streets like I did on Monday, you would have seen the closest thing this nation has to a capital city ghetto.

The once vibrant Victoria St, bustling with Vietnamese butcher shops, fruit and vegetable stalls and pho restaurants in the eighties and nineties, is now a dangerous dump.

A two-metre high fence surrounds the primary school, located near the injecting room. Picture: news.com.au

Every possible surface is covered in graffiti many stores were shuttered and many more were for lease or sale. One clearly drug-addled bloke was pushing a shopping trolley down the middle of the road screaming at anyone who dared look at him.

Back at 23 Lennox St a group of indigenous men were slumped on the concrete outside your injecting room while around the corner a couple were shooting up not 50m from the school.

Of all the arrogant media appearances you made during Covid, not turning up in person in Richmond this week to announce in front of the needle room you support that it was permanent could be the worst.

But of course, Premier it’s not in your backyard is it?!

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Originally published as ‘Premier, go walk around North Richmond with locals whose lives your government has wrecked’