On Tuesday night in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote, the #StopAdani movement kicked off its grassroots campaign in the federal electorate of Batman.



In case you have tried to erase painful memories of the past 12 months in politics over the summer, and you’ve forgotten, Batman is the seat federal Labor risks losing courtesy of David Feeney, who last year discovered he had no proof of his citizenship status, a problem that has landed him in the high court and will likely trigger a byelection.

With the parliamentary hostilities in Canberra set to resume next week, at lunchtime on Tuesday Bill Shorten delivered a scene-setting address at the National Press Club.

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In response to a question, Shorten dropped federal Labor’s oft-repeated formulation on Adani, which is that the project can proceed on its merits but should not be given taxpayer support.

The public signal from the Labor leader was nascent but important. For the first time, Shorten hinted an incoming Labor government might attempt to stop the controversial mine. He made it clear Labor was considering the issue “closely”.

“If it doesn’t stack up economically and environmentally, it won’t get our support,” the Labor leader said.

Now a cynical person might look at the timing and join some dots.

The seat of Batman is in the same geographical area as the Victorian state seat of Northcote, which the Greens snatched from the most progressive Labor government in Australia in late November 2017 in a byelection.

Federally, the Greens fancy their chances of snatching Batman from Labor, and Labor insiders concede privately that outcome is entirely possible. Right now there is internal speculation Feeney might pre-empt the high court and resign in the coming weeks in order to bring the contest forward.

As a litmus test of the specific problem Adani creates for Labor within the boundaries of Batman, Feeney was one of the first federal Labor MPs to publicly depart from federal Labor’s official position on Adani. That breakout happened last May, just before the Greens launched the “Stop Labor’s Adani” campaign in Melbourne, Batman, Wills and Melbourne Ports.

So is this kite-flying from Shorten on Adani on Tuesday just a bit of rhetorical positioning in anticipation of the Batman byelection with anti-Adani activists already warming up their vocal cords in Northcote?

Well, like most things in politics, it’s complicated.

Obviously Shorten has a close watch on Batman and a bunch of other inner-metropolitan seats where this project is a totemic issue for Labor’s progressive, post-materialist constituency.

To suggest otherwise would be naive.

But it’s also true that Adani is a bigger problem for Labor than the specifics of the Batman battleground. The project has become a national emblem for whether a political party is serious about climate change.

Labor has thus far largely gotten away with trying to have it both ways on the Adani project, supporting it but sort of opposing it, but the pressure of the civil society campaign isn’t going away.

With Labor preparing itself for the possibility there could be an election this year rather than next, an internal conversation about whether the official walking-both-sides-of-the-street position on Adani would hold was inevitable.

In fact, federal Labor was waiting impatiently on the outcome of the Queensland state election before thrashing the problem out in Canberra.

The shadow climate change minister, Mark Butler, has been blunt about his view. He told Guardian Australia last June it would “not be a positive thing for Australia for the Adani mine to go ahead”. The shadow environment minister Tony Burke, is understood to hold the same view.

Internal discussions about how to proceed began after the Queensland election and they have continued over the Christmas break. Shorten visited north Queensland and took local soundings immediately after returning from his Christmas break.

So it’s a live issue. Thus far, the internal discussions are unresolved.

Labor federally has already declined to give the project taxpayer support and Queensland has already decided to veto any loan to the Indian mining company from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility.

Those two developments put the project under significant pressure.

But to go the next step, to flag legal steps to kill the Adani project, is a significant political decision for Labor to make.

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Hard heads apply a sharp political judgment. Promising to kill Adani works in Batman but does it also work in Longman, the marginal Queensland seat where Labor potentially faces another byelection if the dual citizenship saga goes nuclear when parliament returns?

The commitment would obviously win a big thumbs up from Australians deeply worried about climate change but it would also trigger a very noisy backlash about sovereign risk from powerful business elites.

It is also fraught in a practical sense. The practical judgment is actually far more substantive and important and the policy work is ongoing.

There is question Labor hasn’t yet answered. Can we kill this project if we want to? Because it is not at all clear whether or not there is a valid legal pathway to stopping the controversial mine.