By Paul Austin
JOHN Brumby's government lost last month's state election because it became too cosy with the big end of town and lost touch with the real-life concerns of ''ordinary'' people, says a senior federal Labor MP.
In a scathing critique of the defeated government, the member for the Melbourne seat of Wills, Kelvin Thomson, said suburban planning outcomes under former minister Justin Madden were ''a disgrace''.
The former frontbencher said people in his north suburban electorate had been ''screaming for years'' for a new high school in Coburg, but the Labor state government had not delivered.
State Labor had also failed to build train lines to Doncaster and Rowville in the rapidly growing eastern suburbs.
But the ''heart of the problem'' was that Labor had sided with business in backing excessive population growth.
''We have been cheerfully increasing Melbourne by 200 people a day, 1500 per week, 75,000 each year, standing shoulder to shoulder with property developers saying what a good thing this is for Melbourne,'' Mr Thomson said.
''It is not. Melbourne's runaway growth is the reason for the rising cost of living, the transport problems, the planning debacles and the crime.''
Mr Thomson, a critic of ''big Australia'', said: ''Taking a bow in corporate boardrooms for running their high-migration, high-population, bugger-the-environment agenda has seen the Labor Party grow out of touch with ordinary voters.''
In defiance of new state Labor leader Daniel Andrews's call for party members to keep criticisms of the election campaign in-house, Mr Thomson said the defeat required ''serious analysis''.
''It is not enough to write this off to an 'it's time' factor, as if the voters change governments once a decade without regard to circumstances,'' he said. ''To think like this will become a self-fulfilling analysis and condemn us to the next decade in opposition.
''Nor is it enough to utter platitudes such as 'we made mistakes', 'we aren't perfect', and 'we need to do better', without any tangible sign of a change in direction or approach.
''Such platitudes mask a defiance, which voters will sense and question our sincerity.''
Mr Thomson said Labor had ''grown out of touch with the reality of life for ordinary people'' during its decade in power.
In that time electricity prices and council rates had doubled and gas and water bills had increased by more than the inflation rate.
To win back support, Labor should pledge to peg household electricity prices and council rates to pension rises, he said.
''If the pension goes up by 2 per cent then household electricity prices should not be allowed to rise by more than 2 per cent,'' he said.
''If electricity companies need to build more infrastructure, they should recover the cost of that from the businesses and property developers who are the beneficiaries of that infrastructure, not from ordinary households and certainly not from pensioners.''