The prime minister’s attack focuses on Labor’s policy shift on Carmichael mine and renews attempts to paint Labor leader as ‘not fair dinkum’

Malcolm Turnbull has blasted Bill Shorten for going “snorkelling” on the Great Barrier Reef courtesy of the Australian Conservation Foundation, and for selling blue-collar jobs down the river “to get Green votes” in the Batman byelection.



The prime minister went on the political offensive against Shorten after the businessman and environmentalist Geoff Cousins revealed a series of conversations with the Labor leader over the past three months about stopping the controversial Adani coal project in Queensland.

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Cousins told Guardian Australia on Wednesday Shorten had contacted him just before Christmas to seek his advice on toughening Labor’s position on Adani, and the two men had travelled with experts to the Great Barrier Reef in late January – a trip which resulted in Shorten signalling to him that he would commit to revoking the licence for the project over the ensuing weeks.

Keen after a torrid fortnight consumed by Barnaby Joyce and his private travails to resume the Coalition’s preferred tactic of muscling up aggressively against the Labor leader, and questioning Shorten’s character, Turnbull seized on the account early in the day, accusing the opposition leader of trying to be all things to all people.

“This is a guy who says one thing to the greenies and another thing to the miners,” the prime minister said.

“He isn’t straight. He isn’t fair dinkum and he’s being shown up for precisely what he is – someone who will sell out workers and miners and his own union members in order to pick up some Green votes in inner-city electorates like Batman.”

The prime minister then amplified his theme in the parliament, declaring a “two-faced” Shorten had been on a secret trip with Cousins, with the Labor leader only declaring the January travel supplied by the Australian Conservation Foundation this week.

While Shorten’s dialogue with Cousins has not been reported before this week, the trip was not a secret.

The fact Shorten had been in Queensland to fact-find on Adani, and had been in dialogue with environment groups before the resumption of parliament in early February, had been publicly reported.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A mural of Bill Shorten is seen along High Street, in the Melbourne suburb Preston, which is located in the federal electorate of Batman. Photograph: Luis Enrique Ascui/AAP

The ACF’s chief executive, Kelly O’Shanassy, said Shorten made contact with Cousins, who was no longer the president of the organisation, last year, and “the Labor leader proposed that they travel to the Great Barrier Reef to witness the damage from climate change-fuelled coral bleaching and to discuss the Adani coal project”.

“Geoff approached ACF asking for our assistance in organising such a trip and arranging scientific experts to explain the further damage the Adani coalmine would inflict on the reef, the climate and our native species,” she said.

“ACF was happy to organise the trip as it provided one of our senior elected representatives in Canberra with a chance to see firsthand the damage climate change is doing to our Great Barrier Reef.

“In the past ACF has made similar offers to Coalition and crossbench MPs so that they too might witness the unprecedented mass coal bleaching that hit the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and 2017.”

Shorten has been telegraphing publicly since late January a toughening of Labor’s position on the controversial coal project, but has not specified what if anything the ALP would do by way of concrete action to shut down the project.

According to Cousins – an account which has not been contradicted by Shorten – the Labor leader told him after their trip in January that he would make Labor’s position clear imminently, but then subsequently adjusted that timetable, suggesting he’d met some internal resistance.

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The internal resistance has been in the public domain for several weeks. The mining union made it known publicly that Labor should not harden its position on the Carmichael project, because if it did, it would trigger a divisive internal debate about the future of coal – a debate the party wasn’t ready to have.

Some frontbenchers, including Anthony Albanese, argued Adani had already been through approval processes and Labor needed to be consistent in its approach.

“What you can’t do is look at any one electorate and say this is why we are going to determine national policy on something like mining or energy or climate change action,” Albanese said, in a clear reference to the Batman byelection where Labor is currently facing off against the Greens in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.

Guardian Australia has contacted Shorten’s office on multiple occasions to seek a response to the comments by Cousins.