Arron Wood: Injection room should be next to a hospital
Forget putting a safe injecting room next to a Melbourne icon, Victorians would be better served if it was put next to a hospital where experts can focus on helping those with addiction, writes Deputy Lord Mayor Arron Wood.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
I am not a health professional, nor am I an expert on heroin or ice. But I am elected by the ratepayers of Melbourne and I plan to stand up and fight for their interests.
The city economy, the engine room of Victoria’s economy, is in dire straits. It is not the time to impose a heroin and ice injecting facility next to Queen Victoria Market.
Thanks to coronavirus, 30 years of economic growth has come to a screeching halt almost overnight. Businesses are going under and foot traffic is down 90 per cent.
QVM is the gateway to the $100 billion central city economy. It is home to 600 traders and 2000 workers. It is the centrepiece of the City of Melbourne’s fastest-growing neighbourhood in terms of residents, including many international students, and is the location for small businesses, hotels, childcare, and the multicultural community hub.
This area is earmarked as an innovation jobs precinct, future home to 22,000 new residents and 60,000 new jobs. The precinct will be home to affordable housing, family services and childcare upon completion of the Munro development. The precinct is already home to vulnerable residents near the preferred site.
The economic impact of COVID-19 has been huge for all. But for the city, the effects are disproportionate — a 90 per cent reduction in foot traffic and office and retail closures mean bars and restaurants are fighting for survival.
Top-tier professional services firms are halving workforce salaries. Property owners are facing years of rent relief and economic pain.
That’s why I fought to ensure the City of Melbourne provided rate relief to our 120,000-plus ratepayers. But we must do more to help our ratepayers.
That is why I brought a proposal to last week’s Future Melbourne Committee, to reject the State Government’s preferred location for a second medically supervised injecting room on Victoria St, near QVM. That location, next to the state’s No. 1 tourist attraction, is not the right site and I wonder how and why this site has been seemingly plucked out of nowhere.
Why was a specific location chosen when a panel report evaluating the Richmond injection room was silent on a preferred location, only noting a second one should be located somewhere in City of Melbourne?
The Lord Mayor and councillors had six days to consider the motion before the meeting. We received 35 submissions, with more than 95 per cent supporting a rejection of the preferred site near QVM.
But that motion split the council on the night and was defeated by two votes with the Lord Mayor putting up another motion, circulated five minutes before the meeting, that effectively asked the government to continue consultation on an injecting room in the City of Melbourne.
It’s a bit rich to ask for further consultation when this plan was dumped on us on the Friday of a long weekend and the Lord Mayor’s demands to meet with the Premier or a minister to discuss it have apparently fallen on deaf ears.
How was the Lord Mayor only made aware of the proposal 24 hours before the announcement? Surely the government would have briefed well before the announcement? What other sites were considered and what criteria was used for assessment?
City of Melbourne has yet to be provided with this information after the June 5 announcement, despite requests from our chief executive.
I’m also concerned about the plan’s failure to address any of the issues that surround introducing another centre like this.
The government must establish a metropolitan heroin and ice taskforce to co-ordinate and implement early intervention, rehabilitation pathways, co-located detox and rehab facilities, drug overdose response, drug education, enhanced street outreach, mental health and counselling services and co-located facilities. It would make more sense to put an injection room next to a hospital where those kinds of services are available.
I support a harm-minimisation and public health approach to drug addiction, but not the decision to proceed with a second injecting room for Victoria (in addition to Richmond) without implementing an overarching strategy to tackle the root cause of drug addiction as opposed to the symptoms.
The Premier established the ice taskforce, but that hasn’t met since 2017. That taskforce has morphed in to the Drug Rehabilitation Plan, which contains 20 actions, of which trialling the first drug injection room is only one. We need a full-spectrum approach.
I want to be clear: I am not against supervised injection rooms, but we are failing people and families who are being torn apart by addiction because we are not investing enough in early prevention, the upstream services. The investment and action on the pathway into addiction and the investment and action on the pathway out of addiction.
It’s a far more complex undertaking, requiring much more long-term focus and needing co-ordination across many issues.
During my time on SBS program Filthy Rich and Homeless, I spent time in a Newcastle boarding house. Many of the men were recovering addicts and all said how difficult it was to get a rehab bed once they made the decision to get clean.
There are many things we can do to help City of Melbourne ratepayers, residents and businesses to come out the other side of this COVID-19 pandemic.
The Andrews Government is doing a great deal to invest in our city. But we are on a precipice and looking likely we will fall off a cliff. While virus cases spike and lockdowns continue for business and universities, job options remain limited, banks tighten lending criteria, investment in our city is increasingly limited to and reliant on government stimulus. We need the government to be thinking about a stimulus package for the City of Melbourne.
Putting a drug injection room on the doorstep of Victoria’s No. 1 tourist destination and the gateway to our $2 billion economy, and near vulnerable residents, is not one of them.
Arron Wood is Deputy Lord mayor of the City of Melbourne