Labor's national executive has put off its meeting to discuss how to handle the preselections for key Labor seats.
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Fairfax Media understands the powerful group, which was due to meet on Friday, has now deferred the meeting until the weekend.
This comes as Labor's candidate in the Sydney seat of Bennelong, Jeff Salvestro-Martin, was disendorsed and the party's factional heavyweights work to shore up a diplomat's bid to take former prime minister Julia Gillard's seat of Lalor in Melbourne's south-west.
The ALP national executive met earlier this week to discuss the preselection of candidates for vacancies in Rankin (Queensland), Charlton and Kingsford-Smith (NSW) and Lalor and Hotham (Victoria).
The seats are being vacated by former ministers Craig Emerson, Greg Combet, Peter Garrett, Simon Crean and Ms Gillard, who all announced they would quit politics after Labor's leadership change last month.
Fairfax Media understands that those at the national executive meeting on Wednesday acknowledged that the overwhelming view was that there was a desire for rank-and-file preselections.
However, the executive also noted that it might need to get involved due to a short timeframe before the election – which has not yet been announced.
National secretary George Wright was asked to speak to state secretaries in Victoria, NSW and Queensland to see if rank-and-file preselections could be done quickly.
On Friday, ALP president Jenny McAllister said time constraints could mean intervention by the national executive.
''We do find ourselves in an unusual situation where we've had some very late vacancies,'' Ms McAllister told ABC TV.
''I think that in some of those situations we will see a rank-and-file preselection. But we are consulting to find out whether those things can be conducted in a timely way.''
Late last month in his first press conference since he was sworn in as Prime Minister for the second time, Kevin Rudd said his overwhelming preference was to hold ''local democratic ballots''.
''The only exception I see to that is if you have a genuine crisis of time,'' he said.
He said that he was not sure that a crisis existed in seats such as Dr Emerson's seat of Rankin and Mr Garrett's seat of Kingsford Smith.
With Heath Aston and AAP
