Labor’s own call for policy overhaul

Furious Labor MPs are urging the next leadership team to dump Bill Shorten’s tax agenda and end class warfare.

Labor MP Milton Dick says party leaders must ‘look people in the eye and hear their ­concerns’.

Furious Labor MPs are urging the next leadership team to dump Bill Shorten’s tax agenda, end class warfare and reach out to coal communities as recriminations grip the party following its surprise election loss.

Labor figures were yesterday scathing over the Opposition Leader’s campaign, which ­included a raft of big-spending ­announcements without a central theme.

Victorian Labor MP Maria Vamvakinou has called on the ­future leadership group to reconsider its franking credits and negative gearing policies, declaring they would have a detrimental ­impact on working and middle-class Australians.

Ms Vamvakinou, a Left faction MP, said Saturday’s result showed the public had rejected Labor’s policies and class-warfare rhetoric.

“We need to look at it from the point of the people who said to us that they cannot afford to lose their retirement savings,” she said.

“I don’t believe the top end of town was going to be suffering very much.

“It is the middle group that can’t afford to lose what they planned to have.

“I think we need to not only ­accept it is real and understand them, but we need to find a way to address it.

“A lot of people didn’t vote for us because they didn’t want the policy change.”

Queensland Labor Right MP Milton Dick called on the ­future leadership team to immediately visit mining towns in central Queensland and “look people in the eye and hear their ­concerns”.

“I won’t sugar-coat this: it is a really, really tough result for us in central Queensland,” he said. “We have received some of our lowest votes there. We have got a hell of a lot of work to do to rebuild the trust in some of those mining and resources communities.

“That is one of the key take-outs from this election. We have got to take the medicine, we have got to hear what people have said.”

Mr Dick said Labor needed to talk more about the benefits of the resources sector, which he ­described as the backbone of Queensland’s economy. “We need to take a stronger and firmer view of talking about resources and the benefits they bring to our economy, not just here domestically in Queensland, but across Australia,” he said.

Labor MPs said Mr Shorten’s popularity was a problem and ­believed the thought of him ­becoming prime minister swung votes to the Coalition.

ALP president Wayne Swan shifted blame to Clive Palmer and “vested interests”, which he said had spent more than $100 million campaigning against Labor. He said Mr Palmer and business ­lobbies spent about nine times that spent by unions.

“Whatever mistakes the Labor Party made, we do know democracy is under threat when an individual can spend $60m in chequebook democracy, basically with a revolving preference deal with the Liberal Party to help steal an election,” he said.