The lively day in Canberra is powering right through to close of business. As we speak the Labor left is having a specially convened caucus meeting to deal with tensions that have boiled over since Bill Shorten last Friday night backed his friend and factional ally, the controversial lawyer Kimberley Kitching, to replace the departing Stephen Conroy.  Let’s keep this as simple as possible. Tensions in the Victorian left have been bubbling away for months, ever since the majority of the faction tried to run the veteran leftwing powerbroker, Kim Carr, off the front bench. Folks aligned with Carr have been cranky that some of their Victorian colleagues lined up with colleagues in Sydney to try and remove Carr from the frontbench after the election.  Let’s call that a pre-existing condition.  Then there was the Kitching transaction last week. Victorian Labor has been absolutely off the long run since Shorten decided he wanted Kitching in the Senate. Normally sedate people were quite literally tearing their hair out over that turn of events. Shorten was advised in the strongest possible terms not to bring Kitching to Canberra, that it would stir up animosities in the Labor caucus.  It appears to have done exactly that. Gavin Marshall (a long time Carr ally) decided to tell Fairfax Media early on Monday that he might come after a couple of sitting MPs in the left when preselection time rolled around. He named Andrew Giles and Catherine King, the shadow health minister.  Folks should know by way of background that Marshall lost a position he held in the last parliament, deputy Senate president, in the fight over Carr and the front bench. Clearly he’s not that happy about it, and thought he might have a vent about people he views as being disloyal.  The non-Carr left is now unhappy to put it mildly, hence tonight’s special caucus meeting to determine whether peace can be declared, or whether things escalate.  We can cut to the chase here, now all the background has been declared. Bill Shorten is the leader of the Labor party because he was underpinned institutionally by support from Conroy (now departed) and Carr (now the subject of acrimony from his factional fellow travellers).  That underpinning has been eroded since Conroy’s departure. The caucus is something of a tinderbox after the Kitching decision. That might sound like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. Malcolm Turnbull once talked about exciting times. Seems, they are catching.
The Coalition prepares to bring registered organisations bill to crack down on unions while the windfarm commissioner will appear before Senate estimates. As it happened