Carlton Community Network helped save Carlton housing towers from hard lockdown  

When nine public housing towers in North Melbourne and Flemington abruptly went into hard lockdown in July, Carlton residents were fearing the worst.

But after the community rallied together, the residents of the towers on Lygon, Elgin and Drummond streets were able to avoid facing the same fate.

Carlton Community Network (CCN) convenor Elle Morrell said the actions of the network with the residents meant the Carlton towers never went into a hard lockdown.

“We had a testing room set up in the towers the Thursday after the towers in North Melbourne and Flemington went into hard lockdown because we anticipated that we would eventually get an outbreak,” Ms Morrell said.

“Together CCN rallied, among other things, to prepare the community legal service to assist residents and be aware of their rights, set up a food delivery service so residents could access free food, and made a leaflet into nine languages which had information about all the Carlton key services available.”

When the Carlton towers eventually did have an outbreak of 63 cases, the work of CCN meant they were much better prepared.

Ms Morrell said that by engaging residents about how best to support them was the key to successfully avoiding the police-driven hard lockdown that occurred at North Melbourne and Flemington.

“We reached out to community leaders at the estates and set them up to go door-to-door with DHHS to let residents know it was important to get tested, with interpreters present to make sure the information was in their own language,” Ms Morrell said.

CCN also had the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) write a statement to say that working with them was only in the interest of health and was not related to their immigration or tenancy status.

“There’s a lot of mistrust between residents and DHHS so it was important to have open communication between them,” Ms Morell said.

“We also had residents give feedback to DHHS constantly and advocated for door-to-door testing because many residents were worried about the risk of transmission by going to the testing room.”

In mid-December the Carlton Community Network was awarded the Victorian Multicultural Commission’s Award for Excellence for Community Response and Recovery in recognition of their collective response to the pandemic’s impact on public housing in Carlton.

Ms Morell said that while the circumstances were difficult, it was a learning exercise in how the government can communicate better with housing tower residents.

“It’s so important to engage with the community and their leaders to empower them to work with agencies to achieve their needs and find out how best to support them,” Ms Morrell said •