SHOOTING GALLERIES JUST A LIE TO GOOD PEOPLE

THEY are lying to you.

The Victorian State Government and local councils are feeding you more bull
than you would find on a pair of peninsular gumboots.

It concerns the campaign to force legalised heroin injecting rooms on the
people of Melbourne -- and ultimately all of Australia.

The Government has proposed five trial shooting galleries in Melbourne.

Four in the suburbs and one in the central business district.

If you are a supporter of such radical moves to solve the drug scourge (and
I am not) you may well ask: what about me?

There are no plans for similar, taxpayer-funded, hidey-holes in Geelong,
Ballarat or Bendigo.

I say they are lying to you because of the torrent of public relations
bulldust that has poured forth since the plan was announced to use
taxpayers' money to fund rooms where people can safely inject with an
illegal substance.

According to the shooting gallery supporters, between 60 per cent and 65
per cent of people support the idea. Oh yeah?

I run a couple of internet sites that ask for raw public opinions on
everything from GST being charged on tampons to John Howard saying I'm
sorry on reconciliation.

On legal shooting rooms for heroin addicts those voters are overwhelmingly
saying no.

The vote makes a mockery of Premier Bracks and Port Phillip Mayor Julian
Hills who says there is growing community support for injecting rooms.

I suspect that a lot of people feel the same way I do about heroin addicts
and I have taken some flack for expressing these brutal and frank views on
air.

I do not give a bleep about them and I am totally opposed to
taxpayer-funded safe injecting rooms for drug addicts.

I feel compassion for their ripped-off, betrayed families.

But I cannot see how a government can spend money to legalise something
that is illegal.

If you want to legalise the drug itself I would support the argument.

It would get the mafia leeches out of the loop.

The Wesley Mission recently spent something like half a million dollars on
a mid-city injection room.

This has since been given the thumbs-down by the Melbourne City Council.

But what's half a million when the compassionate street kids mentor from
the mission is living in a $500,000 apartment in the city's Rockmans
Regency and being paid $160,000 a year.

So let's be brutal about things like junkies and injection rooms.

Only 700 people a year die from heroin overdoses in Australia nationwide.

More women died from breast cancer last year and more men died from
prostate cancer.

None of them knew the risks.

None of them got their cancerous death sentences by voluntarily putting
needles filled with muck in their arms.

Where is their compassionate, multi-million dollar government assistance?

Where is the Wesley Mission flag flying high on these real, uninvited,
health tragedies?

Why not use the $2 million or so this whacky, earnest venture will cost us
to make the lives of old, innocent people better?

They didn't put stuff in their veins.

All they did was inject their lives into this country and our economy.

And if you wonder why and how our courts have gone bad over drug cases,
just look at a recent piece of mea culpa from a Melbourne judge.

Judge John Barrett expressed regret that he had to send two heroin addicts
to jail.

He gave them five years (they'll be out in 30 months) and said how sorry he
was.

Why? Aimee Effendi and Sean Elliott terrorised video stores.

They held people to ransom with blood-filled syringes.

They committed nearly 20 crimes of thuggery.

How would you feel being confronted by a loony with a syringe filled with
suspect blood?

This tawdry couple were described as talented, depressed, fragile.

I don't give a tinker's cuss.

They are criminal bullies.

If convicted then lock them up and lock up a stupid, reckless, unlawful
idea about giving addicts a place to punch into a vein with an illegal
substance.