Mr Casey also praised the union movement for being able to exercise a "different type of power" and damage business. Greens candidate Jim Casey appreciated former prime minister Tony Abbott's ability to stir left-wing agitation. Credit:Wolter Peeters Speaking at the "Greens Reboot Futures Conference" on the "fight against the Abbott Liberal Government", Mr Casey said: "I would prefer to see Tony Abbott returned as prime minister with a Labor movement that is growing, with an anti-war movement that was disrupting things in the streets, with a strong and vibrant women's movement, indigenous movement, and a climate change movement that was starting actually to disrupt the production of coal." "I'd prefer to see Abbott as the prime minister in that environment than Bill Shorten as prime minister without it." Ms Rhiannon and Mr Bandt are both members of the Greens' so-called "watermelon" faction - a nickname that suggests they are "green on the outside, but red on the inside" - that is, socialist.

Mr Casey told the conference unions "have the power to hurt people financially in a way that most of our social movements don't…it has that different quality, that capacity to actually do something in business". The state secretary of the Fire Brigades Employees' Union, Mr Casey has a long history of posting on social media on the need for class war and the overthrow of capitalism. A spokeswoman for Mr Casey said that the candidate was currently unavailable as he was working a firefighting shift. However, she said he believed "he stood by his views as expressed in the video". "And of course the more extreme the government, as the Abbott government was – the more likely it is community groups who care about violence against women, the environment, refugees, fair and safe conditions for workers, will get organised."

Mr Albanese said on Wednesday that he faced a tough fight with Mr Casey to hang on to Grayndler following a change in the electoral boundaries earlier this year. "The redistribution has made it much more difficult . . . on the state figures, Labor doesn't win the seat. There's two Greens Party state MPs [within the federal seat]," he told the Nine Network. "One of the issues in my seat, of course, is potentially the Liberals giving preferences to the Greens' candidate in return for the Greens issuing open tickets in other seats, other marginal seats where the Liberals hope to win." The federal Liberal Party said on Tuesday it had not yet made a decision on preference deals, but both Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten ruled out forming a coalition government with the Greens in the event of a close election, as the polls currently predict. While the Greens candidate in Grayndler came third in the 2013 election, allowing Mr Albanese to easily retain the seat from the Liberals, in the 2010 election the Greens candidate came second, which meant the Labor MP only scraped home by 4.2 per cent, after preferences.

The video emerged after Fairfax Media revealed on Wednesday the office of Greens' candidate Alex Bhathal, who hopes to win Batman in Melbourne from Labor's David Feeney, had asked for polling to be conducted in the seat. The request directly contradicted party leader Richard Di Natale's declaration that his party did not conduct polling. Mr Casey also lamented the election of Kevin Rudd after John Howard because "the last Labor government was considerably to the right of the government of [former Liberal Prime Minister] Malcolm Fraser" and despite all the legislative achievements of the Greens in the hung parliament, singled out Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle heckling George Bush during a parliamentary address in 2003. "When you think about that, that was an act that turned the entire convention of Parliament on its head." Follow James Massola on Facebook.