The Melbourne electorate of Batman is more than 1,700km south of the proposed Adani Carmichael coal mine. Despite the distance — and two state lines — the mine is shaping up to be the leading issue in the fight to win the newly vacated seat.

With Labor strategists blaming the loss of the state seat of Northcote to the Greens in a November byelection on the Adani mine issue, they are determined not to be caught out again.

Northcote sits within the southern part of the Batman electorate, where Labor lost all but one polling booth in a 9.58% swing toward the Greens in the 2016 general election, winnowing what was once the safest federal Labor seat in the country down to a margin of 1.03%.

Without Liberal preferences, the seat would have been lost to the Greens then, and the campaign of Richard di Natale’s party, around Adani and other issues, has only strengthened since then.

So it was with a measured air that opposition leader Bill Shorten stood in front of a “Stop Adani” sign held up by an activist in Melbourne on Friday and told reporters he was “increasingly sceptical” of the project.

Shorten signalled Labor’s rapidly cooling support for the Adani project at his National Press Club address on Tuesday.

But when beleaguered Batman MP David Feeney resigned on Thursday, admitting that he could not find the documents required to prove to the high court that he had renounced his British citizenship and would therefore stand aside to let someone else try to hold back the green tide, the timeline firmed up.

“Labor believes that in the Northcote byelection … it was Adani that killed them,” veteran political reporter Jim Middleton said.

While Adani had become the catchword, Middleton said, support for campaigns against the Indian company had become a byword for support for the environment in general.

“It’s a generic metaphor for: do you want to save the environment? Are you in support of real measures to prevent climate change?” he said. “So it really plays. It’s not just a matter of shoring up Green support, it’s an attack line against Labor as well.”

Di Natale said he expected the Adani mine would be “front and centre” in the byelection, and that Labor would declare itself opposed to it before the campaign was over.

That’s also the aim of climate not-for-profit 350.org, which launched a volunteer door-knocking and phone-banking campaign on Tuesday, similar to the one run in the Queensland state election, aiming to push Labor into ruling out support for Adani.

The challenge in Batman is to find a policy and a candidate that can appeal to the working-class solidly Labor north and the increasingly affluent and progressive south, bisected by Bell Street.

Adani may not be that policy. Labor will also campaign on its push to increase the minimum wage and strengthening union rights while the Greens are calling for the electricity grid to be returned to public ownership after widespread blackouts. Both messages are likely to appeal to the Labor heartland in the north.

Among the southern, progressive voters is Lucy Foskey, a 23-year-old student. She lives with her family in Alphington and said they were a Labor-voting household until Julia Gillard proposed the ‘Malaysia solution’ for refugees in 2011. Now they vote for the Greens.

Australia’s treatment of refugees remains her key concern. The proposed Adani mine is “a big issue for Australia”, she says, but not a decisive one for her.



Foskey says attitudes toward Feeney, who failed to declare a $2.3m house on his parliamentary interests register before becoming embroiled in the dual citizenship saga, could have turned voters towards the Greens.

“I don’t think anyone was particularly excited about David Feeney as an MP,” she said.



Batman is bordered on the south by the seat of Melbourne, the first in the country to go Green with the election of Adam Bandt in 2010, and in the east by Wills, which is next after Batman on the Greens’ list of most winnable federal seats.



On the other side of Wills sits Maribyrnong, Shorten’s electorate. The three electorates are growing increasingly progressive as they become home to young inner-city professionals. If the Greens win Batman, other dominos could fall.

According to David Hayward, the dean of global, urban and social studies at RMIT University, Ged Kearney’s nomination is a measure of the seriousness of the seat for Labor. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) president’s left-leaning position replaces Feeney’s factional weight in the party’s right.

“Having somebody like Ged Kearney could be a very good card to play in that context because she’ll be able to appeal to both sides of the divide,” Hayward said. “She’ll be able to play well [in the northern half of the electorate] and I think she’ll also be able to play well at the southern end of the electorate, being able to talk up Green-type issues.”

Kearney displayed that double-edged appeal at the news conference announcing her appointment on Friday. She talked up her early career as a nurse and emphasised that — unlike Feeney and his predecessor Martin Ferguson — she had lived in the electorate, before promising to respect its values and saying she did not “personally” think the Adani mine would go ahead.

“The last thing I want is to see this wonderful community used to derail the possibility of us having a really good progressive government in Canberra, and that is a Labor government,” she said.

Unlike Feeney, Kearney may not have the support of Liberal preferences to get her over the line.

The Victorian Liberals are under pressure from the Jewish lobby to block the Greens because of the latter’s support for Palestine, and have not yet declared whether they will run a candidate. It’s a “dilemma,” Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger said: run and preference Labor to keep out an unsuitable Green; or quit the field, as they did at the Northcote state byelection, to increase the chance that the Greens would win and weaken Labor’s position in parliament.

Kroger told Sky News the decision depended on whether they thought the Greens candidate had been involved in anti-Israel campaigns or made anti-semitic comments.

“If the Labor candidate was someone like David Feeney, someone with Feeney’s views, pro-Israel, pro-American, versus say a [NSW senator and longtime pro-Palestine campaigner] Lee Rhiannon Green, well the Liberals will run and they will preference Feeney,” he said. “We will not in any way be responsible for getting into parliament someone with Lee Rhiannon’s extremist views.”

It may not make a difference to the Greens candidate Alex Bhathal. She has already run for the seat five times, taking part in every campaign bar one since 2001, and achieved a personal swing of 9.8% in 2016.

The social worker has a defacto incumbency. After 17-years on the campaign trail, she’s well known and a regular at most community events.

She is backed by a very large and well-organised volunteer base, still riding high from its Northcote victory.

“They’ve got the biggest green branches in Melbourne in the Wills electorate, they’ve got the best field operation ... which gives them considerable force – particularly in a byelection – to well and truly match Labor,” Middleton said.

Bhathal’s campaign is not without bumps. She is facing a backlash from some local branch members reportedly over her support of newcomer Lidia Thorpe, now the first Aboriginal woman to sit in Victorian parliament, for Northcote preselection over a candidate who had previously run.

The factional wolves are at play in Labor, too. Feeney was a key support for Shorten. If Labor loses Batman, it will be seen as an indictment of Shorten’s leadership.

Polling day is likely to be as early as 10 March, sandwiched between the Tasmanian and South Australian state elections. It could either boost Labor towards victory at a federal election or trip it up, securing a third term for prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

“It’s going to be quite an astute juggling act,” Hayward said. “This could either be a really great start to the year for Bill Shorten or it could be a very bad one. We’ll have to wait and see.”