‘Greatest public policy disaster’: Yarra backflips, wants injecting room moved

The location of Melbourne’s only safe injecting room next to a primary school is “the greatest public policy disaster in recent Victorian history”, according to Yarra’s mayor, whose council reversed its long-standing support for the location on Tuesday night.

Stephen Jolly, formerly a fierce advocate for the facility, said without any other injecting facilities and a lack of services to reach drug users brought to the area, North Richmond had been left to shoulder the city’s drug burden alone.

The motion was created to “poke some people in the eye” to get movement in a state election year, he said.

The last-minute 6-2 vote was made during an at-times heated council meeting. Residents and local traders painted a grim picture of life in the facility’s shadow, listing frequent drug driving, trade in stolen goods and “multiple sexual exposures to primary school children”. One speaker said police had dubbed the area “a one-stop shop for crime”.

Thanh Ha, from a nearby Buddhist temple, told councillors the community had been forced to “put the metal bars on the windows” due to “violence [and] break-ins constantly”. Local Sharon Neven said her initial support for the life-saving service “has died” after seeing streets “littered with needles vomit, faeces, [and] drug dealing”.

Jolly told The Age on Wednesday that the injecting facility should be moved from its current site at the North Richmond Community Health centre, which sits next to Richmond West Primary School and a high-rise public housing estate, to Victoria Street or St Vincent’s Hospital.

Both are within the Yarra local government area, although these sites were not part of the formal motion, nor discussed at Tuesday’s meeting.

Jolly said that with no other injecting facilities in Melbourne, the burden on North Richmond was too great, and that there were not enough outreach services for drug users it brought to the area. He also said that the mishandling of the facility had ironically made it politically impossible to open other needed clinics.

“[Now] the city don’t want one. Sunshine don’t want one. Frankston don’t want one and Dandenong don’t want one. Nobody wants one. And that shouldn’t be the case,” he said.

The council is simultaneously facing a second major health controversy in the municipality. On Tuesday, The Age reported Jolly was also publicly fighting community health provider cohealth’s plans to cut services in Collingwood and Fitzroy, threatening a “worst-case scenario” occupation of at least one of the sites.

Jolly is also separately facing a charge of unlawful assault, and is expected to be re-elected mayor for a second year at another council meeting on Wednesday night.

Tuesday night’s decision rewrote a key plank of the council’s “Advocacy Roadmap” ahead of the November 2026 state election in the marginal seat of Richmond, which Labor is hoping to take back from Greens MP Gabrielle de Vietri.

The new motion, backed by the “Yarra For All” majority bloc, calls on the state government to move the medically supervised injecting room (MSIR) entirely, a major change from the original wording, which previously called for more outreach services to manage the drug-affected people causing concern in the neighbourhood.

North Richmond Community Health chief executive Simone Heald told this masthead on Wednesday she was “disappointed” and “really surprised” by the move. She acknowledged the site’s challenges, but said the location was chosen because the drug market had “been here for a very long time”.

St Vincent’s also pushed back on the idea of moving the service to the hospital. Chief Executive Nicole Tweddle said the clients were “some of the most vulnerable people in our community ... who might never set foot in a traditional hospital”.

Greens councillors Sophie Wade and Edward Crossland, who voted against the motion, argued the “major change” had been “sprung on the community” without consultation. Wade on Wednesday lodged a recision motion over the vote.

The sole Labor councillor, Sarah McKenzie, was not in the chamber for the vote. McKenzie, who is all but confirmed to be Labor’s candidate in the state election, said in a statement she was attending an event marking the 50th anniversary of the Whitlam Dismissal.

Had she been in the chamber, McKenzie said, she “would have voted against the change”. “My position is clear: I support a medically supervised injecting service,” she said.

McKenzie said even if the matter returned to the council, “the outcome will not change.”

De Vietri on Wednesday called the motion a disgrace and “a thinly veiled push to shut down our overdose prevention centre”. “Any deaths that result from shutting down this service will be on the mayor’s hands,” she said

Premier Jacinta Allan shot down calls to move the facility on Wednesday saying, “we have no intention to change the operations of the medically supervised injecting facility that is located in Richmond because it is saving lives”.

A Victorian government spokesperson described the injecting room as a “vital gateway” and said the facility had managed more than 11,000 overdoses, saved at least 63 lives, and recorded more than 170,000 instances of connecting people to other health services since the facility opened in 2018. They also said the government had already made “significant investments” to improve safety.

The state government abandoned plans for a second facility in the CBD last year.

Opposition mental health spokeswoman Emma Kealey said opening the facility next to a primary school meant it was destined to fail.

“I don’t know of anybody, apart from Premier [Jacinta] Allan, that thinks it’s a good idea to have an injecting room next to a primary school.”

With Rachel Eddie

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