Melbourne City Council backs plan for safe injecting room

Lord Mayor Sally Capp has backed a second safe injecting room for the CBD but not everyone - including her supporters - agrees.

Melbourne City Council has backed a safe injecting room for the municipality, despite police concerns it will lead to a “surge in crime”.

However, a number of councillors voted against the move on Tuesday night, saying the facility would harm the city’s recovery from the pandemic.

Lord Mayor Sally Capp backed a council management report that recommended councillors support a second injecting room for Melbourne.

“I acknowledge that the location of a medically supervised injecting service in the City of Melbourne will be controversial, but the evidence shows that services such as these save lives and they do reduce the number of people who are shooting up in our city streets,” she said.

It’s understood that the state government favours the former Yooralla building in Flinders St for the facility.

Lord Mayor Sally Capp supported the motion for a second injecting room. Picture: Alex Coppel.

Ms Capp said the nearby intersection of Flinders and Elizabeth streets had been called “a slum” by a resident.

“Nobody wants that, and I acknowledge that any response to address these issues must improve the outcomes, not exacerbate the situation,” she said.

A motion by councillor Roshena Campbell – a member of Ms Capp’s election team – to oppose an injecting room was voted down.

Ms Campbell said putting an injecting room near tourist area Degraves St was “nothing short of insanity”, and the bungling of the existing injecting room in Richmond gave no confidence about the operation of a new one.

But Greens councillor Olivia Ball said an independent evaluation of the Richmond service was clear.

“There is no evidence that the North Richmond injecting facility adversely impacted local amenity,” she said.

Also supporting a second injecting room were Deputy Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece and councillors Rohan ­Leppert, Davyyd Griffiths, Jamal Hakim and Elizabeth Doidge.

Voting against were councillors Campbell, Philip Le Liu, Jason Chang and Kevin Louey.

The safe injecting centre in North Richmond has divided Victorians. Picture: Jason Edwards

A submission to the ­meeting by the Police Association warned that an injecting room in the CBD would trigger a “surge” in crime and divert ­officers from other operations.

The association predicted the Flinders St site would attract an influx of ice users.

It would also be “practically impossible” for officers to use discretion when policing drugs around the centre given the number of people in the city.

City-based police – consulted for their union’s council submission – said a medically supervised injecting room in the CBD would significantly affect police resourcing “in one of the most challenging police service areas”.

Officers surveyed wanted the facility somewhere “largely unpopulated”.

A quarter of heroin overdoses in Melbourne’s CBD are within 250m of the Elizabeth St and Flinders St intersection, and overdoses have increased 70 per cent in five years.