A senior figure in the Victorian Labor Party says he will not comment on reports he has tried to smear a Greens state election candidate as anti-Semitic.

Barrister Brian Walters is Labor's main rival in the marginal seat of Melbourne.

Labor has labelled the Greens candidate a hypocrite for representing a mining company and there is now scrutiny of his work for an alleged Nazi war criminal.

Mr Walters has told AM that Labor is engaging in "gutter politics".

Premier John Brumby delivered the official election writs to the Governor, Professor David de Kretser, this morning. The Government will formally enter caretaker mode tomorrow.

But the campaign is already in full swing, with the Government under threat not only from the Coalition but from the Greens as well.

The Age newspaper says it has obtained documents that are a part of a "dirt campaign" against Mr Walters.

It says the documents focus on the barrister's representation of alleged Nazi war criminal Konrad Kalejs.

Mr Walters says they are part of a smear campaign.

"I think it is a particularly nasty smear having regard to 20th-century history to call someone anti-Semitic," he said.

Education Minister Bronwyn Pike holds the seat of Melbourne with a margin of only 2 per cent.

Today is the second day in a row that her rival's work as a barrister has been dragged into the campaign.

Yesterday Treasurer John Lenders labelled Mr Walters a hypocrite for representing mining company Downer EDI.

"It is not what you do but what you say that matters to them," he said.

"So we have a candidate who is out there preaching the evils of brown coal, preaching the evils of our industrial relations system which he says is unfair on workers, but while doing that, he takes a brief working for a brown coal company."

Mr Brumby says the scrutiny is fair.

"It is the first I've seen of it, but I think the people will make their own judgments about the facts as they see them," he said.

Mr Brumby says he does not know whether the story came from anyone within Labor.

Sign of desperation

Mr Walters says the smear campaign against him is a sign of desperation.

"The actual allegations are so laughable in their substance, but the underlying kind of politics that we are seeing is the sort of thing we would have expected from Richard Nixon in the 1970s, not modern democracy in Australia," he said.

"I think it is always a cheap shot, but sometimes people will think because a barrister acts for a certain client therefore they must sympathise with everything that client does.

"I think most people know that it is our duty to represent them in court, to get the best possible outcome for them."

Mr Walters says he hopes people can see past the attacks.

"I hope people will see that I have acted responsibly and ethically for a large number of people including, of course, acting without charge for a very large number of environmental and human rights causes over many years," he said.

Former Victorian Labor Party secretary Stephen Newnham says he has no comment to make about the claim that he contacted influential members of the Jewish community to try to generate a backlash against Mr Walters.