The Labor party has become undemocratic with too much focus on leaders and not enough consultation on policies, a senior ALP MP says.
Former minister Kelvin Thomson says he will not be returning to the party's frontbench and believes he can work most effectively from the backbench.
Party leaders had failed to consult Labor members on a number of key policies including asylum seekers, he said.
"Over the years we have seen a steady and relentless drift of political power away from the electorate, away from members of political parties, away from members of parliament, away from ministers and shadow ministers towards party leaders," Mr Thomson told reporters in Melbourne on Monday.
"This is fundamentally undemocratic and it is a recipe for disaster.
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"When party leaders are filling the airwaves, coming out 24/7, what it means is that ordinary Labor Party members and ordinary members of the electorate don't get a say."
Mr Thomson said his advice to the incoming opposition leader was first to do less and not fall for the media cycle.
He urged the party to take the time to get policies right.
"We have regularly seen botched policy announcements which were the consequence of too few people being involved in the decision making," Mr Thomson said.
"There were quite a number of them, but classics were the announcement of the East Timor solution which had not been checked off on by the East Timorese themselves."
He also said announcements of the Northern Territory tax break, the Malaysia solution, media reform and superannuation changes were botched.
"There were a litany of policy areas where we should have done better and would have done better had they been a matter of discussion by the parliamentary Labor Party and indeed around the electorate more broadly rather than them being announced without that kind of scrutiny," he said.
Mr Thomson said the election campaign was run poorly, but a better campaign would not have changed the outcome.
