Labor veteran John Faulkner says the rise of "political professionals" in the nation's oldest party has many wondering whether it has lost its way.
Delivering a lecture in Sydney in honour of ALP stalwart Neville Wran, Senator Faulkner called for an overhaul of party rules to ensure more positions are directly elected and, more controversially, non-members are involved in pre-selecting candidates.
The speech will stir up debate on party reform in the lead-up to next week's ALP national executive meeting, which will consider a report Senator Faulkner co-wrote on the 2010 election campaign, and the national conference in December.
The former minister said Labor strategists often talked about "reaching out" to other organisations, but such an idea implied an "us" in Labor and a "them" elsewhere.
"The frequency with which it's raised by hand-wringing apparatchiks makes many wonder if Labor has lost its way," Senator Faulkner said.
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"Labor cannot thrive as an association of political professionals focused on the machinery of electoral victory."
He said "careerist party managers" were replacing a generation of party members who once were the "life-blood" of Labor, committed to activism, community engagement, ideas and policy debate.
"The systematic efforts to marginalise and silence them in recent decades has brought us to where we are today," Senator Faulkner said.
He said that without structural and cultural reform "we will risk losing a generation of voters as well".
"The party has now become so reliant on focus groups that it listens more to those who don't belong to it than to those who do," he said.
At Labor's last national conference not one contested measure was put to a vote on the conference floor, with backroom deals heading off any public displays of disunity.
Senator Faulkner said such stage-management was "a symptom of the anaemia that is draining the life from the Australian Labor Party".
"In a healthy democracy, all voices are heard. In a healthy political party, all voices are heard," he said.
While he saw some value in using polling and focus groups to test strategies and messages, "there is, however, something deeply wrong when we use polling to determine our party's policies and even our values".
The NSW senator said factions were valuable to the party, but "when factions become mutual support associations divorced from ideas and devoted purely to securing promotion, they are toxic".
Labor's election loss in NSW showed "in the starkest possible terms the message that the party has problems", he said, and such problems would have a "fundamental and unavoidable impact on the ALP at a national level".
Senator Faulkner called for more direct grass-roots votes for positions, new forums for debate and avenues for activism.
"Labor must be a party of values and ideas," he said.
"We must have a growing, not a declining party. Labor must return real power to its members.
"We must engage and involve our supporters in the community and Labor must have a culture of inclusion and innovation, not exclusion and unbridled factionalism."
Senator Faulkner urged party powerbrokers: "Do not act like the ship's captain steering for an iceberg, refusing to turn over the wheel to a more competent navigator in determination to remain captain, even if only of a lifeboat."
