Labor frontbencher Penny Wong has weighed into Labor's gathering internal reform and policy debate calling for a new focus on multiculturalism, the development of a more positive policy program to go with the anti-Abbott government push and faster democratic reform of the party.
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That would include direct rank-and-file election of senators - a move being discussed at the top level of the party leadership.
In a pointed move likely to place additional pressure on leader Bill Shorten, the popular Left faction senator said Labor was "rightly holding the government to account, and calling out its regressive policies of austerity and cuts" but it was not enough.
"We also need to articulate a positive vision and policies to ensure Australia realises the opportunities of the future," Senator Wong said.
She said the task for the opposition in the face of the government's plans to water down the Racial Discrimination Act was to more fully defend and advance multiculturalism.
"We must make a case for multiculturalism as intrinsic to Australian nation-building and we must connect multiculturalism to Australian citizenship," she told a New Left Public Issues seminar.
She slammed the government as fundamentalists advocating "free speech" in a way that was abstracted from ordinary peoples' lived experience of discrimination and abuse.
She said, however, that Labor had a lot of repair work to do internally if it wanted to return to office.
With Mr Shorten preparing to unveil a democratisation package of his own aimed at attracting more members and candidates from a wider talent pool, Senator Wong gave him some additional food for thought.
"We need a better, stronger, reinvigorated party - not for ourselves, but for the country," she told the audience.
Like Mr Shorten, she praised the recent leadership ballot, which involved rank and file participation.
"Looking back, I think it's going to be hard to explain to the Australian public why members of our party have a direct role in the election of the parliamentary leader - the woman or man who would be prime minister - but not in the pre-selection of senators and other candidates for public office," she said.
As previously reported by Fairfax Media, Mr Shorten already wants to give rank and file members a 70 per cent say in candidate ballots for House of Representative seats on the way to full local ballots.
But unlike many in the Labor party, Senator Wong also wants to "strengthen the relationship between the Labor party and the millions of Australians who belong to trade unions."
