Pubdate: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 Source: Age, The (Australia) Copyright: 2001 The Age Company Ltd Contact: 250 Spencer Street, Melbourne, 3000, Australia Website: http://www.theage.com.au/ Forum: http://forums.f2.com.au/login/login.asp?board=TheAge-Talkback Author: Chloe Saltau Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?142 (Safe Injecting Rooms) IT'S NOT HEAVEN BUT IT'S HOME There are people living in North Richmond's sprawling, soaring Elizabeth Street public housing estate who think Rod Crisp - the magistrate who last week reportedly described their home as something far beyond anything Lewis Carroll could have imagined when he wrote Alice in Wonderland - might be prone to embellishment. There are others who think he has a point, but they will only speak of it in whispers, as if talking aloud about the heroin problem that hit Richmond five years ago (but by most accounts has ebbed over the past 12 months) will only serve to make their lives more difficult. Mr Crisp had heard evidence in the Melbourne Magistrates Court about an undercover sting operation at the flats in June last year that erupted in violence, resulting in a police officer being injured, and he duly concluded that the area was a nether world where heroin dealing, paranoia and betrayal thrived. Li Lai, a City of Yarra councillor who has lived in one of the five Leggo-like high-rise buildings since the mid-1980s, tilts his head in frustration. "Yes, this is not heaven, but people's perceptions are really bad ... It's not that bad," he says. Nearby there is a life-sized concrete cow by the name of Daisy. Stephen Nash, from Outreach Victoria, which runs a tenancy advice service from an office underneath one of the high-rise buildings in Elizabeth Street, explains that a folklore has built up around Daisy the cow over the years. Today she is beset by pigeons, but in the past she has apparently been found tipped upside down with her legs in the air, and another time engulfed by flames. "But she's survived and she's cherished ... not a bad symbol really," Mr Nash says. He guides us around the estate, past Richmond West Primary School where children, many of them Asian youngsters with floppy broad-brimmed hats, big smiles and little backpacks, are being deposited by their parents. Then there is the Community Garden where women such as 57-year-old Georgia Tsipouros, who came from Greece more than 20 years ago, tend tomatoes and deliver surplus vegetables from the Richmond market for the tenants' worm farm. A 1999 report by Jesuit Social Services shows the Richmond estate houses many races, and a recent population growth study by KPMG found its high-density living approached that of Manhattan's Upper West Side. In Australia, the only urban area more densely populated is Kings Cross. The Jesuit study identified big Vietnamese and Chinese populations, many of whom came to Australia on humanitarian grounds during the '80s and '90s. (One-third of the 4101 tenants were born in Vietnam, 20 per cent speak Chinese as a preferred language, and there is a smattering of tenants who speak Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Lao, Polish, Spanish and various African languages.) Recently there has been an influx of East Timorese. About a third of the Richmond public housing tenants are aged under 17, and 10 per cent are under four years of age. Over the road are the more dilapidated digs. The old "walk-ups", built during the 1950s and painted an unfortunate pale blue, are, to put it kindly, ripe for redevelopment. Victorian Housing Minister Bronwyn Pike has already announced that the low-rise Elizabeth Street walk-ups will be pulled down and rebuilt at a cost of at least $6.5 million, finishing the work begun by the previous Labor government in the early 1990s, when the flats at the western end were refurbished and their surroundings landscaped. Richard Wynne, the Labor MP for Richmond, says the public housing estates were neglected during the seven years of the Kennett government, but traces many of the problems experienced now to another era altogether, when working-class families were moved out of their cottages and into Ministry of Housing accommodation under the Bolte government's slum reclamation program. Mr Wynne calls it a "great failure of social policy. Families were uprooted, they pulled down housing that in today's terms would be worth a fortune ... The big difference between then and now, though, is that people were working. It will take a whole-of-government approach, access to education and training, and then it can become a thriving community," he says. Still, Mr Wynne points out, the rate of employment among tenants at the North Richmond estate is relatively high - Mr Nash says it is about 25 per cent compared with 5 per cent in public housing across the state. They join Cathy Guiness, a community program coordinator with Jesuit Social Services, in saying there are many families who have lived at the North Richmond estate for 20 years or more and raised children there. They like it - the position, the ethnic welfare groups, health centres and neighborhood houses within walking distance, the strong sense of community, the vitality of the nearby Victoria Street strip. But another Jesuit study produced last year suggests they would like it even more if it were not for the drugs, which Mr Nash says gained a foothold here, as in other parts of the inner city, about five years ago. "There is a subconscious curfew placed on people," said a Timorese man in his 50s, quoted in the report. Other residents reported drug use in the laundry that prevented them from doing their washing, drug use in the lifts and stairwells that kept them from leaving their flats, discarded needles in the playground, which made the area unsafe for children. Another man, who would not be named, said in hushed tones this week that he still felt frightened when he stepped out of his flat, remembering the vomit he found on his doorstep once and the drug deals happening near the lift. But Superintendent Ian Baker, in charge of policing the cities of Yarra and Stonnington, says crime associated with drug use in the North Richmond estate has dissipated to the extent that it is "almost negligible" at the moment. "At the present time, there's no heroin around, literally, and like any area where there's drug activity we target our resources to address those problems," he says. Police maintain a plain-clothes and uniform presence in the area, and Superintendent Baker says they work closely with the local council and the tenants to keep it safe. Richard Wynne says the government is close to trying out a new security system, in which a "concierge" would act as a kind of gatekeeper for public housing flats. This could help keep out dealers who come into the estate from outside in search of a secluded stairwell in which to trade, bringing their drug-using clientele with them. Meantime, he laments the defeat of his government's plan to open supervised injecting rooms in the area, citing a high level of public support for a strategy that might have reduced the "public nuisance" of drug use on the estate. This week, the nether world magistrate Rod Crisp described was almost deserted apart from the pigeons, Daisy the cow, a few school children and a bunch of young men trading expletives and threatening to trade blows outside a milk-bar with bars across its windows. Then it was just Daisy and the pigeons, and all else was quiet. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake