Debates on shutting offshore detention camps, raising welfare payments and scrapping live exports are set to be discussed behind closed doors after being put off at the Victorian Labor conference.

A proposed motion to move Australia Day to May 9 - the date of the first Commonwealth parliament - was also quietly dropped before the second day of the state conference at Melbourne's Moonee Valley Racecourse on Sunday.

The motion, which argued "the date of 26 January 1788 is offensive to indigenous people", does not have the support of Premier Daniel Andrews or federal opposition leader Bill Shorten.

Other motions called on federal Labor to phase out the export of all live animals and not just of sheep, recognise Palestine as a state, increase Newstart payments, and close offshore detention camps and bring the remaining asylum seekers to Australia.

A last minute vote to defer them to Labor's administrate committee was likened to "student politics" by Special Minister of State Gavin Jennings.

"The disappointing thing is there was a strange alliance of people who actually decided rather than to deal with important issues ... they'd rather go home," he told reporters, citing an earlier controversy over a series of proposed changes to the way the Victorian Labor party worked.

One of them was a rejected motion to force online branch members to be part of a local branch.

"I think they decided to have a bit of fun (with the rest of the motions) because some of them didn't have their way on the rules changes," Mr Jennings said.

"It was a bit of young Labor, a bit of student politics we saw today."

But CFMEU official John Setka, who voted in favour of the deferrals, labelled it "democracy at work".

Among the motions passed were calls for an audit of how many ministerial staff were ALP and union members and demands for greater protection against assaults on transport workers.

Earlier Mr Shorten galvanised the ALP's union base, saying Labor was ready to take on the Turnbull government in July's Super Saturday by-elections.

"We will deal with these by-elections with the same fighting spirit, no matter what obstacles the government puts in our path, and after those by-elections, we will then be ready to fight the next general election", he said.

Mr Shorten also called on Victorian Labor to run an indigenous candidate in the November state poll, saying the move was "long overdue".

The conference heard state Labor was in a strong financial position ahead of the November 24 election, with a net profit of more than $500,000 for the 2017 financial year and more than $11.6 million in net assets.