Steve Price: Public policy on drugs and booze in Victoria now a dangerous joke

On Cup Day this year police will ignore streets full of drunks putting themselves and bystanders at risk while someone in Spring St pats themselves on the back about a PC-driven reform. Will the Andrews government ever learn?

When it comes to the Andrews government’s progressive law changes, the reasons behind them are typical.

On Melbourne Cup Day this year if you are staggeringly drunk in public, Victoria Police will not be able to touch you.

Cup Day is of course the first Tuesday in November — this year November 7. Two or three days earlier you could be arrested, thrown in a paddy wagon and put in a police cell for a few hours to sober up.

Public policy on drugs, including alcohol, in Victoria is a dangerous joke.

Heroin addicts can stick needles in their arms or between their toes in a Richmond gutter or choose the drug centre next to a Richmond Primary school to do it undercover.

Plans have been floated to use mobile drug using vans cruising the CBD in case your urge for an ice pipe strikes you in Bourke St.

Now it’s been revealed, with public drunkenness considered a “health issue” not a crime, that the same Victorian government simply cannot learn from its mistakes.

A former aged care centre in Cambridge St, Collingwood, will be renovated at your expense and turned into a “drunk tank” – a sobering-up centre. Work on it has already started.

On Melbourne Cup Day this year if you are staggeringly drunk in public, Victoria Police will not be able to touch you.

Cambridge St is a narrow inner suburban residential road and guess what? It’s home to a school – the Collingwood English Language School.

How do these fools not learn from past mistakes – like Richmond’s so-called safe injecting facility? Or are they so blinded by ideology they can’t see that ferrying so-called compliant drunks to this crazy experiment won’t result in more community anger and outrage.

So pathetically stupid is this idea that the new drunk tank has a total of 20 beds, or drunk pods or some other spin term.

When the law changes in November this centre will service all of metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria.

Typically, local homeowners found out that the old aged care centre on their street was to become a drunk tank when a producer from 3AW knocked on their door early this week and told them.

Heroin addicts can stick needles in their arms or between their toes in a Richmond gutter or choose the drug centre next to a Richmond Primary school to do it undercover. Picture: Jason Edwards

No consultation, zero debate, just the mandatory and typically arrogant Andrews government decision-making that even the local Green/Left Council didn’t know about.

Construction teams are already on site to convert the building into Melbourne’s first nanny-state drunk minding centre.

Victoria Police are still in the dark as to how this whole process of picking up drunks and ferrying them to this sobering centre will in practice work. There are reports that Victorian taxpayers will fund the purchase of 20 vans manned by two person crews to act as drunk taxis.

The idea would be that, say, outside the Revolver Nightclub in Chapel St, Windsor, on a Saturday morning about 5am when it starts to empty, police might come across a drug-addled drunk.

Victoria Police are still in the dark as to how this whole process of picking up drunks and ferrying them to this sobering centre will in practice work.

The drunk is so intoxicated they decide to relieve themselves on a nearby shopfront and use an excuse that no one could see them. Police accept the excuse and Victoria’s axing of public drunkenness as a crime means you can ask to be taken to the sobering up centre.

We’ll get more of an idea in November, but it seems the police patrol will then need to wait with the drunk until the little van arrives to act as a taxi to Collingwood.

Surely even the most progressive of law makers in Victoria can see the craziness of this process. As a serving police officer, how would you feel about being forced to be a babysitter for some nightclubbing drunk.

Those same police would today throw you into a police van and make the five-minute trip to the Prahran police station where a sobering up cell is waiting for a couple of hours.

Job done.

As a serving police officer, how would you feel about being forced to be a babysitter for some nightclubbing drunk.

Typical of the Andrews government when it comes to these progressive law changes is the reasons behind them.

In 2017 an Indigenous woman by the name of Tanya Day was on a train travelling between Bendigo and Melbourne. She was intoxicated and fell asleep before the train reached Castlemaine. A V-line conductor alerted police who boarded the train and took Tanya Day to the Castlemaine police station and put her in a cell to sober up.

CCTV footage shown to a coronial inquiry showed the woman hitting her head five times against the cell wall. She was taken to the local hospital and tragically died.

Her death resulted in a campaign highlighting the issue of indigenous deaths in custody and her family claimed there were racial undertones to her removal from the train.

It’s a horrible story and you can’t blame the family for their anger, but should the Tanya Day death really result in a blanket removal of the crime of being drunk in public?

It goes beyond that though as it always does with this state government. The new laws require a “dedicated Aboriginal service response.”

A discussion paper leading up to the drunk laws being dumped said the changes would need to “focus on Indigenous drunks and be mindful of the LGBTQI+ community, refugees, asylum seekers, the disabled and the neurodiverse community (look it up).

Key words used during the law changes debate were they should be “consent-based” and focus on “harm reduction.”

I’ll tell you what will happen come Cup Tuesday in November.

Victoria Police will simply ignore streets full of drunks causing danger to themselves and innocent bystanders and drive straight past them.

You and I will have to put up with the vomit, urine and abuse while someone in Spring St pats themselves on the back about yet another politically correct driven reform.

Loathe

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Uber trying to sell the idea of “Green Uber” using EV’s or Hybrids – just get me home.

Cost of watching an AFL game at Adelaide Oval last weekend $200 for two nose-bleed seats plus outrageous food prices.

Government red tape keeping netballers off new courts at Yarra Bend built at a cost of $8m.

Love

Federal Coalition finally has a sensible debate about the use of Nuclear-energy as a transition out of coal.

Reasonable cost of long-term car parking at Tullamarine airport.

Royal Melbourne Show back in September bigger and better than any time since Covid.

The most famous calf muscle in Australia sees Sam Kerr back in action.

Originally published as Steve Price: Public policy on drugs and booze in Victoria now a dangerous joke