OUR SAY
Fortitude Valley is home of a number of organisations that help the homeless, the needy and indeed the afflicted, and there’s nothing wrong in that at all. They are services the precinct should be proud of.
But it’s also a vital part of town trying its hardest to develop a strong day-time retail economy to go with its image as a fun destination for music lovers at nights and weekends. So unless City News can point to a real problem that needs to be addressed, its report last week – especially given its prominence and total lack of balance – besmirches the Valley’s image at a time when local traders to trying their best to make a bob in hard times.
We can all be compassionate – but should the interests of these traders going about their lawful business and trying to make a living take second place to people who are risking their own lives doing something illegal?
An article that gives potential customers the impression that the Valley is a place to be avoided is simply bad news for those businesses. The City News article quotes a Sydney-based injecting room supporter and director of the alcohol and drug service at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital Dr Alex Wodak as saying the Valley has two to three drug overdoes a week that require ambulance callouts and “a lot of these people will die”.
Averaging that out at 2.5 a week means 125 a year, and he’s saying “a lot” of these will die! We respect his expertise but it’s a big call from a long way away. The Indie will seek police statistics on the issue and report back next edition.
Our local pollies think the scenario painted in the story – that street injecting is now at a level where safe injecting rooms are needed – is simply wrong. And in the absence of any real evidence to the contrary, we agree with them. And we believe that the unanimous attitude of the limited number of traders we spoke to would be endorsed by many; many more. Injecting rooms? No!
Sadly, City News has form in tarnishing the Valley’s image. In years past they’ve collaborated with The Courier Mail’s Punch Drunk campaign to portray the Valley as a dangerous place to visit – a place where you’re likely to be king hit at best; glassed at worse.
We thought some of the stories were beatups then, and The Indie at the time ran a story from a top Valley cop worried that such articles highlighting glassings and other violence did more harm than good.
With this latest assault by Quest Newspapers on the Valley’s image, spare a thought for Winnings Appliances, the company that has invested well over $4 million on its recently opened outlet in the Valley heart. Or the developers behind the Melba residential project in nearby Wickham Street, where work on 112 boutique apartments has begun. Our bet is that neither of those company’s research before opting for the Valley heart for their projects suggested an area plagued with a level of street drug injecting that called for safe injecting rooms?
And our guess is that they would be pretty upset over an article that suggests that anyone making a trip to the Valley stands a very real risk of seeing that illegal street drug injecting first hand, or even standing on one of their used syringes, for that matter.
