The Victorian government could rely on executive privilege to reject a two-week deadline to release a long-awaited report into a possible second supervised drug injecting room.
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On Wednesday the upper house passed a motion ordering the state government to release former Victoria Police commissioner Ken Lay's report by March 6.
The report, which was commissioned in 2020, maps out drug-taking patterns in the Melbourne CBD and will provide advice on establishing a medically supervised injecting service trial in the city.
It was handed to the government at the end of May but remains unpublished almost nine months later.
Premier Jacinta Allan said the government is still considering the key report and would not be rushed into releasing its contents.
"(We) will release it in due course, once the government has made its decision," she told reporters on Thursday.
"That timeline will be determined by the government, not political motions that have been passed in the Legislative Council."
Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes said the Department of Premier and Cabinet was assessing the order but confirmed the government can claim executive privilege over certain documents.
"I don't want to pre-empt the processes," she said.
"It's not a document that is in my portfolio."
Executive privilege allows governments to withhold information from the legislature on public interest grounds.
Opposition mental health spokeswoman Emma Kealy said Ms Symes, who is the government's leader in the upper house, could face punishment if the motion was ignored.
"If Labor choose to continue to keep this secret, there will be ramifications and it could result in the leader of the house being suspended from the chamber for an extended period of time," she said.
A medically supervised injecting room trial in the CBD has been mooted for years, with the government buying a building near Degraves Street and a Salvation Army hub on Bourke Street flagged as a potential site in July.
Victoria's first injecting room in North Richmond was opened in June 2018 under a trial and made permanent in May after a review found it safely managed almost 6000 overdoses and saved 63 lives.
Keep Our City Alive, a group of pro-injecting room CBD residents, business owners and community leaders, said the release of the Lay report was long overdue.
"While we wait, two people die of heroin overdose every month in the CBD according to the Victorian Coroner's Court data," said group spokeswoman and CBD resident Jill Melon-Robertson.
"The CBD community is crying out for a response to the tragic loss of life and the Lay report is a missing piece of the puzzle."
Australian Associated Press
