The Greens will on Friday call for electricity assets to be returned to public ownership, starting with a commonwealth acquisition of privately owned interconnectors, costing $2.8bn.

The new energy policy from the Greens, to be released as the party gears up to contest the Batman byelection in Melbourne’s northern suburbs after the resignation of Labor’s David Feeney on Thursday, would seek to transition privately owned transmission infrastructure in three states, including Victoria, back to public ownership.

The Greens policy hits a hot-button political issue, with polling showing voters are worried about rising power prices and would favour more government regulation. A small majority in a Guardian Essential poll five months ago supported bringing privatised coal generators back into public ownership.

The Greens’ policy is in line with calls from the Electrical Trades Union to reverse electricity privatisations, and the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, recently argued the Liberals should never have privatised electricity assets in the state.

Daniel Andrews (@DanielAndrewsMP) I expect a lot better than what happened last night. Fact is, there was more than enough power being generated to meet the demand yesterday – but the private companies and their distribution systems failed yet again.



The Liberals never should have privatised electricity.

The Greens’ climate change spokesman, Adam Bandt, said his party’s new policy favoured starting an electricity privatisation rollback with privately held interconnectors.

“As we’ve seen in recent times, these are vital pieces of national critical infrastructure that underpin the reliability and stability of the grid and they should be run for public benefit,” Bandt said. “It’s time for Labor and the Liberals to finally admit that privatisation of the grid has been a failure. Labor state governments need to stop whinging about this neoliberal nightmare they helped create and work with the Greens to put the grid back in public hands.”

Friday’s policy launch will happen as the Batman byelection unofficially starts, although the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tony Smith, is still considering dates for the contest.

Labor sources say its candidate in Batman will be the Australian Council of Trade Unions president, Ged Kearney, who was looking at a state seat but has been prevailed upon to run federally in a seat ALP insiders confess the party will struggle to hold.

The Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese, who has successfully held back Green incursions in his Sydney seat of Grayndler, told the ABC pointedly that the ALP could hold Batman “with the right candidate, the right campaign”.

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

The Greens candidate will be Alex Bhathal, who went close to taking the seat from Feeney at the last federal election.

The Batman contest will be framed in Canberra as a test of Bill Shorten’s leadership but factional chiefs in his home state have been embroiled in a poisonous internal fight triggered by a proposed power realignment between rightwing and leftwing powerbrokers.

Labor's David Feeney resigns, triggering byelection in Batman Read more

Rightwingers championing a new power-sharing pact in Victoria that overturns a longstanding stability arrangement negotiated between the right and left factions intend to have supporters sign on to the deal on Friday, even though the proposal has split both the right and the left.

The Turnbull government has also signalled it will continue to pressure Labor about other MPs currently facing questions over their citizenship status – a combative message before the resumption of federal parliament next week – although it is understood the government won’t be rushing to immediate referrals.

The government has trained its guns on the Labor member for Longman, Susan Lamb. On Thursday, the manager of government business, Christopher Pyne, said Lamb should follow Feeney and resign from federal parliament because she was a British citizen, a move that would trigger a second byelection contest in the Queensland marginal seat.

In the event Labor holds out, the government is likely to refer Lamb to the high court to determine her eligibility, and it would have the numbers to proceed with a hostile referral.

The government will look for further clarity from the high court when it considers the case of the ACT senator Katy Gallagher, who was a UK citizen when she nominated for the 2016 election, before determining how to proceed with other Labor MPs facing questions about their eligibility.