Mereana Richards has spent almost a decade providing warm beds, showers and hot meals to locals in Port Hedland – in Western Australia’s Pilbara region – who have had too much to drink. As the coordinator of a sobering-up service, run by an Indigenous-led not-for-profit, Richards runs the centre that is a safe haven for alcohol-affected locals.
“Sometimes they are legless, sometimes they don’t want to listen or have a shower or do anything,” she says.
“They can come in drunk and play up and use it as an excuse to not remember the rules.”
The eight-bed centre in the town of about 14,000 people is run by the Bloodwood Tree Association. Bloodwood provides a range of accommodation, employment and alcohol treatment services to at-risk Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. But there are strict rules, including a requirement that people shower upon arrival, and a zero-tolerance approach to violent behaviour.
“I just tell them if they don’t want to behave themselves, they can stay away,” says Richards, who has been assaulted three times at the centre.
Sobering-up services are scattered across Western Australia – where public intoxication was decriminalised in 1990 as a result of the interim report of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. The commission found the offence disproportionately affected Indigenous people.
Decades later, Victoria and Queensland remain the only jurisdictions to still have a specific offence for public drunkenness.
The Andrews government last year passed the landmark reform to decriminalise the offence – but has now pushed back the official repeal, citing Covid-related pressures on the health system that have caused a delay in establishing trial sobering-up centres.
That reform was prompted by the high-profile death of 55-year-old Yorta Yorta woman Tanya Day, who was arrested in December 2017 after being found drunk on a train travelling from Castlemaine to Melbourne. She later died in hospital from head injuries sustained in a prison holding cell.
In Day’s case, police officers told a coronial inquiry she had been detained for her own protection and in order to sober up. The coroner found the welfare checks by the two officers responsible for her care were inadequate and did not comply with police guidelines.
The coroner’s findings said Day’s death was “clearly preventable” had she not been arrested and placed in police custody – and recommended the state abolish the offence of public drunkenness.
Victoria is now grappling with the transition to a new way to deal with the issue that diverts public intoxication from the criminal justice system and into the health sector. This will probably involve Aboriginal-controlled community organisations – working alongside alcohol, drug and other health services – being the alternative pathway for people found drunk in public. An expert group, commissioned by the government in the wake of Day’s death to make recommendations for reform, said Victorian police should only be able to detain an intoxicated person in “strictly limited circumstances” – and only be responsible for transporting them when there were no other available options.
Feedback from a pilot program will help crystallise the wider rollout of a health-based response when the decriminalisation comes into effect, which Guardian Australia understands will be in November next year. The government will aim to establish the four trial sites – funded with an investment of $26.4m – by the middle of the year.
In establishing a public health response, the Victorian government will be forced to find a compromise between the state’s powerful police union, which says police have a vital role to play in protecting the community from intoxication, and Indigenous advocacy groups. Indigenous groups argue police must take a back seat, pointing to numerous deaths in custody since the 1991 royal commission and the disproportionate impact policing has on their communities.
The Police Association of Victoria previously warned that decriminalising public drunkenness before having a replacement system to deal with the issue was “dangerous virtue signalling”.
Despite the government committing to establishing sobering-up centre trials, the union says the government’s approach to reform has “failed to deliver clarity to the community about the way that the reform will be implemented and how the community will be protected from alcohol-fuelled offending”.
“Police remain entirely unsure about what tools they will be given to properly protect Victorians and deal with public drunkenness, of which 8,269 alleged incidents are recorded on average each year,” a union spokesperson said.
The latest figures from the state’s crime statistics agency show there were 2,984 drunk and disorderly offences recorded last year.
The Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service argues police should not be involved in a heath-based response or should have their involvement “heavily constrained”.
“Aboriginal voices and health experts must lead the design of the health model,” VALS’s chief executive, Nerita Waight, tells Guardian Australia.
“These reforms will make the community safer because people will get the health support they need. The reforms will particularly make Victoria safer for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who continue to be over-policed and over-incarcerated.”
Balancing the police’s role in dealing with public intoxication is rarely clear cut. In Western Australia, despite decriminalisation, police have the power to apprehend someone intoxicated in public to protect them from themselves or others, or stop them from causing damage to property.
In New South Wales, where “public drunkenness” was officially decriminalised in the late 1970s, it continues to be criminalised via police’s move-on powers, University of NSW law professor Luke McNamara argues.
“Sometimes people treat the moment of formal decriminalisation as some kind of magic moment where the criminal justice system is no longer involved,” he says.
“That is not actually an accurate story in terms of how we should understand the relationship between criminal law, police and public intoxication.”
Intoxication-specific move-on powers for police were introduced in 2007 and expanded in 2011. Failure to comply with move-on orders is an offence that can lead to detainment.
“It’s important to think about all the other ways in which the police might have capacity to engage their powers to address public intoxication, and to make sure that none of those are being used in a way which is inconsistent with the new, appropriate health-based response,” McNamara says.
The health-based response will see health services like drug and alcohol treatment centres working alongside Aboriginal organisations.
But while the Victorian Ambulance Union supports the reform, its general secretary, Danny Hill, says “a lot of work” is needed to ensure a health-based model does not strain a system that is already overburdened.
A Victorian government spokesperson says local outreach teams would provide on-the-ground support for anyone affected by alcohol as part of the reform.
“The new health model will promote therapeutic and culturally safe pathways to assist people who are drunk and will include outreach services and sobering-up services – making sure people are in a safe place where they can receive appropriate support,” the spokesperson says.
In Port Hedland, Richards credits the local police and ambulance services, who work with Bloodwood’s service, in providing support to the local community – relationships she admits are easier to maintain in a small town.
“The beauty of it is because we are all normally serving the same people, it’s like one big circle. They go from one service to the other. We’re all trying to help them,” Richards says.
