Police Minister David Elliott said police will "leave you alone if you decide that you have made a bad decision and you want to make sure that you don't expose yourself to that sort of dangerous behaviour." However, harm minimisation advocates and the mother of a festival victim said the measure falls short of what is needed. Emergency specialist and pill testing advocate David Caldicott said introducing amnesty bins would have "no impact whatsoever" on reducing drug-related harm. "We know that young people are unlikely to abandon their drugs because they aren't doing that already," Dr Caldicott said. "My experience with your average wheelie bin is that it's not particularly efficient at providing customised medical advice to teenagers."

Former Australian Federal Police commissioner and drug law reform campaigner Mick Palmer said it was a positive sign the government was thinking more broadly about harm reduction "rather than continuing to say no" but agreed with Dr Caldicott, saying there "wasn't much evidence" amnesty bins would reduce drug-related harm. Loading Jennie Ross-King, whose daughter Alex, 19, died after taking almost three MDMA capsules before walking into a festival in Parramatta last January, questioned why revellers would discard their drugs "when they brought them in to take them?" "They don't deter young people from taking drugs, they don’t explain why drugs aren’t good for you," she said. "I just don't think amnesty bins are going to cut it. They're not going to save lives."

Ms Berejiklian said the decision to introduce the bins was made in response to Deputy State Coroner Harriet Grahame's report on reducing drug-related harm following an inquiry into the deaths of six young people at NSW music festivals. Ms Grahame found amnesty bins would also give authorities the chance to test the substances that are discarded and provide information to health providers. However, Ms Berejiklian said the government will consider whether to conduct back-of-house tests on drugs that are ditched at a later stage. "I'm not going to close the door on that ... I will continue to take the advice of police and health authorities," she said. Director of St Vincent's Hospital Sydney's acute pain service Jennifer Stevens, who supports pill testing, said the government should test the drugs discarded in the bins.

Independent MP Alex Greenwich, who supports pill testing and a drug summit, said the introduction of the bins is a "harm minimisation breakthrough but a first step". Health Minister Brad Hazzard and NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant, who also warned people against taking "multiple pills and mixing pills", supported the introduction of the bins. Amnesty bins have previously been used in Western Australia and are used at music festivals overseas, including Glastonbury in the UK. NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller also supported the bins. He also welcomed the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission's public inquiry into strip searches, which has heard cases of police strip-searching children as young as 13 at festivals.