NEEDLE NETHERWORLD PRICKS POLITICAL CONSCIENCE

Last Saturday Night, One Redfern Resident Had A Most Unexpected Caller.

Carmel Niland, the head of the NSW Department of Community Services, has
confirmed that she phoned Sister Pat Ormesher, a Catholic nun who lives in
Redfern, to ask if she could send a departmental officer around with a copy
of a photograph.

The picture, which caused a sensation when it appeared in the Sydney
Sun-Herald the next morning, showed a youth about to shoot up in Redfern's
Caroline Lane, using a syringe from the government-run needle-exchange
program.

But, even before it appeared, Niland had dispatched a staff member to
Redfern in the hope of identifying the youth in the picture. Indeed, Niland
said she would have gone herself except that she was out of Sydney.

At a press conference next day, in fact, Niland's boss, Faye Lo Po',
appealed to the public to notify the authorities if they knew anything about
the youth.

Although there is considerable confusion about it still, reports suggest the
youth is often on the streets of Redfern but lived in Mt Druitt in Sydney's
western suburbs. He is certainly known to the police.

"The police at Mt Druitt have had dealings with him," said Police
Superintendent Richard Baker. Residents had contacted the police station to
say that the boy had left Mt Druitt and is living in the streets somewhere
in the Redfern area.

Meanwhile, his photograph had dictated government policy - no sooner had it
appeared than NSW Health Minister Andrew Refshauge suspended the needle
exchange in Caroline Lane. But the nightmarish scene in the seedy lane was
hardly a secret.

Last September after the electoral boundaries were redrawn to include a
sliver of Redfern in the seat of Bligh, Clover Moore's seat, after the next
election, Redfern residents took her on a tour of the area.

"What I saw in Caroline Lane is the most shocking thing I've ever seen in my
life," says Moore. "There were some young girls, they were shooting up; one
had a needle in her arm." Moore recalls that the girl looked no more more
than 12.

The next week, she said: "I told the Minister for Health . . . exactly what
I'd seen.

"He said something like 'yes, isn't it terrible'."