Second sobering up centre to open in St Kilda for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

A second sobering-up centre will open in Melbourne next week, with this site exclusively for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

A second sobering-up centre will open in St Kilda when public drunkenness is decriminalised next week.

The six-bed site, the second facility for metropolitan Melbourne, will operate exclusively for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Letters notifying residents of the facility have been posted to residents in recent days.

The facility will operate from an existing health service premises.

“The service will be a facility with trained staff on site to provide care and wraparound supports to people accessing the service,” residents were told.

Ngwala Willumbong Aboriginal Corporation has been appointed to deliver services at the facility.

The program will operate 24 hours a day and will be staffed by outreach workers, alcohol and other drug support workers, and Aboriginal health practitioners and nurses.

Public drunkenness is set to be abolished from Melbourne Cup Day with police stripped of their powers of arrest.

Instead a new system led by health professionals will see intoxicated Victorians taken home or to “sobering-up” centres under new rules.

A single new 20-bed facility in Collingwood, managed by charity cohealth, will be responsible for responding to incidents across metropolitan Melbourne.

However construction delays mean the facility won’t open until later this month.

In the meantime, a six-bed trial site that has been operating in Collingwood will respond to incidents.