FOOTSCRAY'S NOT THE PLACE TO HIDE OUR FAILURE

I HAVE been told that when very small children cover their eyes they
believe they disappear from the sight of others. I think we still hold
remnants of this belief as adults. Witnessing horrible things, we close our
eyes, not just wishing the horrible things away, but ourselves as well.

I do when I walk along Paisley Street in Footscray. The degradation and
hopelessness is more tangible than the concrete and asphalt. Is this Homo
sapiens tugging at my sleeve for a dollar, trembling and incoherent,
dilated and emaciated?

Like increasing numbers of other locals, I now go to Footscray only when I
have to. Otherwise I stay away, even if it means paying more or travelling
further.

It isn't the first time Footscray has been a place to avoid. For decades it
used to be the butt of eastern suburbs jokes, christened Worst Smelldom and
Stinkopolis, and not without reason. It has a pattern of abuse, much of it
self-inflicted. From its beginnings in the mid-19th century, it quickly
became the place for meatworks, boiling-down factories, tanneries, noxious
metal and chemical industries, the storage of hazardous materials and the
dumping of contaminated waste. It also became the place for high
unemployment, social disadvantage and exploitation.

Like the noxious industries, these did not just pop up randomly in
Footscray. They were and are a consequence of choices and policies, some of
them local, most of them not.

The likes of Hawthorn and Kew are able to exist because of the likes of
Footscray, a place to put the smelly, dirty, unpleasant facts and
consequences of our shared existence.

Footscray, of course, has struggled through and built its own tough dignity
and resilience, but it remains the place to put things no one else wants
and of tolerating things few others would tolerate. Footscray, too many
people think, is that sort of place.

Now the Bracks Government and perhaps the majority of Maribyrnong's Labor
councillors want to put a supervised injecting room in Footscray. There are
two reasons why they should not do this.

First, because the people of Footscray have the right, even responsibility,
to define their own place and not have it defined for them by: a broader
society that refuses to grapple honestly with the real causes of illicit
drug abuse or the most rational responses to it, and is willing to continue
to use Footscray as the place to put the unpleasant, unpalatable facts
about its own reality; experiments promoted by those who lack the will to
address the drug problem comprehensively and choose instead piecemeal,
adhoc responses whose cost must be borne by an already overburdened
community rather than shared by the whole.

Second, because the compassion of the injecting room is a selective,
questionable compassion. It is similar in kind to the compassion many feel
concerning the environment when they see it finally stripped bare, eroded
and ruined.

The question in both instances is pointed: why was this compassion not
exercised before, along the way, when we knew something should be done but
failed to do it? With young people for example, why wasn't it exercised in
the quality of their education and training? In counselling and caring? In
work, created if necessary but certainly shared by the rest? Perhaps the
answer is that as long as they weren't dying in the streets we could ignore
them.

In saying no to the injecting room, therefore, Footscray would not be
turning its back on the tragedy of addiction, nor being uncompassionate.
Rather, it would be saying: this is not our problem and we will not
participate in any measures that treat it as our problem or make it our
problem. We are not its cause or its answer. It is society's problem and we
demand that society deals with it by sharing its responsibility and its cost.

Nor is the compassion of the injecting room a sincere, genuine compassion.
It is the compassion of last resort, grasped at by a society that has
failed, at every other opportunity, to exercise care and responsibility in
the lives of young people.

The injecting room stands as a stark symbol of this failure. Rather than
counselling, care, education, training and work, we offer, instead, a place
to shoot up.