Premier Daniel Andrews hailed the trial a success when responding to Mr Guy's pledge on Wednesday. Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: "That trial is saving lives. To do otherwise means those lives won't be saved. It's very, very simple," he said. Liberal health spokeswoman Mary Wooldridge said the Coalition would work with North Richmond Community Health on alternative help for heroin and ice users in the area. The injecting room trial was recommended last year by a coroner investigating the overdose death of a 34-year-old mother-of-two who had frequently visited North Richmond to buy heroin, overdosing alone in the bathroom of the Hoddle Street Hungry Jack’s.

There were 80 deaths in the Yarra council area, which includes Richmond, between 2012 and 2017. After initially opposing the injecting room, the Victoria Street Business Association wants the facility to remain, saying it had made a visible difference to the Richmond community. There are now fewer syringes in the streets, they hear fewer ambulances and not as many people are found unconscious in laneways or near schools, according to the group’s president Meca Ho. “The injecting room we traders do support, because it saves lives, and that what matters most,” he said. The Coalition’s announcement was blasted by the Australian Medical Association of Victoria, with its president Associate Professor Julian Rait dubbing it a "retrograde step".

"I’ve been there and I’m convinced it’s saving lives and assisting people who would otherwise be at the margins of society," Professor Rait said. "I think we need to change our mindset about addiction being a crime [when it’s really] a health issue." Medical supplies at the safe injecting room. Credit:Darrian Traynor Mr Guy’s announcement is a broader pitch to Victorian voters, rather than locals, because the Liberal Party is not running a candidate in the seat of Richmond, where Labor Planning Minister Richard Wynne will battle the Greens. Zareh Ghazarian, lecturer in political science at Monash University, said it was likely that the move was calculated to appeal to voters in marginal electorates the Coalition must win in the outer suburbs, far away from North Richmond and its heroin problem.

"It’s not a seat that they would have hoped to have won anyway," Dr Ghazarian said. "It’s very much a symbolic move to confirm the Liberals as that party with a tough-on-crime, zero tolerance approach to law and order." The safe injecting centre's medical director Dr Nico Clark said since the facility opened in July there had been about 320 overdoses, including 61 very serious incidents requiring opioid reversal drug naloxone. “I can’t say we have [prevented] 61 deaths … but certainly everyone walked out of here alive,” Dr Clark said. “If they were my children or friends I wouldn’t have wanted to take the chance that they were OK.

“We’d be very happy to sit down with anyone from the opposition and … demonstrate the enormous success in the centre in the first four months of operation.” Richmond resident and surgeon Jill Tomlinson said she used to have to regularly call triple-zero for people who had collapsed unconscious on Victoria Street. Since the injecting centre opened in July, she said she had encountered no one needing assistance. The injecting room operates out of the North Richmond Community Health centre on Lennox Street where Dr Tomlinson also takes her nine-month-old daughter for appointments, but the surgeon said she felt safer in her community now with the injecting room open. “I don’t think it exposes children to greater risk. I think there is greater risk in not having it,” she said.