Some Labor sources expressed concern Donnelly’s involvement in the election campaign would draw unwanted attention to his links to the 2014 scandal.

Labor’s head office has strict new procurement rules to uphold probity.

News of Donnelly’s potential campaign involvement comes a month after the Andrews government faced criticism for the ongoing campaign role of former treasurerJohn Lenders,who devised the red shirts payment scheme. Donnelly did not respond to requests for comment.

The premier’s office did not dispute any of the details of this story when presented with them and did not respond to specific questions about Donnelly or the role. A spokesperson accusedThe Age of taking aim at Andrews’ private staff.

“The continual assertions byThe Age that female staffers in the premier’s office are incapable of managing their professional obligations are regressive,deeply offensive and completely incorrect,” the spokesperson said.

Before the 2014 campaign,Donnelly argued Labor’s door-to-door campaigning model,which had been used in other parts of the world,represented an evolution in political campaigning as it “cut through all the noise of an increasingly hostile mainstream media to persuade undecided voters in target seats with personal one-on-one conversations”.

A 2018ombudsman’s report said that Donnelly ran the red shirts program,recruited the campaigners,interviewed them and managed them.

One of Lenders’ key staffers told ombudsman investigators that Lenders “had spoken to” Donnelly about the way the campaigners would be paid.

Ombudsman Deborah Glass labelled the employment arrangement as “wrong”.

“While some electorate officer work was done for some Members of Parliament,the arrangement to employ field organisers as electorate officers was an artifice to secure partial payment for the campaign out of parliamentary funds,and was wrong,” she wrote in the 2018 report.

Glass reopened an inquiry into the issue this year after the Victorian upper house voted for a motion from dumped Labor MP Adem Somyurek calling on her to do so. But she found no new evidence to recommend criminal charges. “It is time to end this debate,” she said in her July report.

Despite this,the Coalition requested this week that Glass conduct a third probe after a police officer complained to the state’s anti-corruption agency that the original police investigation was stymied by senior command to protect MPs. Its attempt to make the referral fell short of succeeding in the upper house on Wednesday.

On Monday, The Age reported that Labor campaigners and senior party officials had met taxpayer-funded electorate staff during work hours to discuss the campaign strategy for the upcoming state election. The meetings may breach the strict laws that were introduced three years ago in response to the red shirts affair.

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