It is hard to look past the spectacle of Michaelia Cash and her tantrum at taxpayer expense, followed by the undignified crouching behind a whiteboard, or Peter Dutton “not moralising” while moralising about Bill Shorten. But we do have to train our eyes this weekend on something more consequential.



While the Turnbull government was thrashing about with its inept and downright nasty efforts to wound the Labor leader – reactivating its morale-boosting “Kill Bill” strategy, because apparently that’s what politics is now about, constant carping and corrosion – someone outside politics fronted up calmly to a television network and showed the mewling Canberra toddlers what a precision demolition looks like.

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But before we reach the point in our story where Geoff Cousins, the businessman and environmentalist, is sitting on the 7.30 Report on Tuesday night like a coiled spring, waiting to run down Shorten on live television – we need first to roll back to last December.

Just before Christmas, Shorten rang the former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and asked if they could travel to Queensland together to ponder options on Adani.

Shorten lined up the sensitive sortie without telling colleagues, and flew north in late January with a handful of staff. A number of people who you would think would be in the know in the opposition and around the Labor fraternity found out about the field trip only after it had happened.

Now we can roll forward to Tuesday night when Cousins provided a live action recount of their joint expedition on national television – a bit like David Attenborough narrating a nature documentary.

Shorten wanted to examine what was going on with the Great Barrier Reef and elsewhere, and think about what options Labor might have to take a stronger stand against a project that has mobilised the most substantial civil society campaign in this country since the Franklin.

Cousins says Shorten signalled at the conclusion of the trip that he would go as far as telegraphing his preparedness to revoke Adani’s licence based on concern about the impact of the project on the reef, on groundwater and endangered species.

The businessman, who is as tough as they come, says Shorten also gave him a precise timetable for a public announcement to this effect, before beginning to equivocate, noting internal opposition, then vanishing entirely last weekend.

The full recount was delivered by Cousins over the two interviews, blow by blow, right down to the footnotes. To describe his public calling out of Shorten as a flip-flopper on Adani as bold doesn’t really do it justice. Nuclear is more like it.

It’s interesting to note that Cousins, just like Shorten, was on his own version of a solo flight this week.

While the environment movement is engaged in intricate coordination on matters Adani in order to run a disciplined national campaign – most of the movement found out what Cousins was doing only when they saw the former ACF president on the ABC on Tuesday night, and then read his extensive interview in Guardian Australia the next day.

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Mouths fell open. Phones lit up. To say people are shocked is an understatement.

Some believe it was important to call out Shorten’s equivocation, and entirely justified in the circumstances given the Labor leader’s prevarication and tendency to walk all sides of the street. But others argue the public intervention has tipped Shorten out of the probable stop Adani column into the “maybe, I’ll get back to you after I’ve calmed down in about a decade” column – which in practical terms is a set back for the Stop Adani movement, which needs a party of government to take a stand.

As the kids say – life comes at you fast.

Also coming fast is a byelection in the Melbourne seat of Batman.

Cousins’ foray is like a small bomb exploding in that metropolitan contest where Labor is currently facing off against the Greens.

From the moment Cousins opened his mouth, Labor braced itself for the negative impact on the ground in Batman. How bad might this get?

While environment groups are already deployed in the contest, with anti-Adani messaging as their focal point, GetUp – the group with the ground game grunt to make a serious impact in political contests – has made a decision to sit it out.

GetUp’s national director Paul Oosting says his group fully supports the anti-Adani activist groups in Batman campaigning in the contest, and he says all political parties should oppose the project, but his organisation won’t “be throwing our weight into campaigning in Batman”.

Again, it’s worthwhile pointing out something interesting.

On Cousins’ account of his conversations with Shorten, he asked the Labor leader to give him his definitive position on Adani this past weekend – was Labor committed to revoking the licence or not?

The definitive position Cousins sought from Shorten never arrived, and Shorten has thrown his position into reverse this week – but the Labor leader was, however, definitive on another red hot issue in progressive circles.

On Sunday, the Labor leader gave his strongest public undertaking that the opposition would not support controversial changes the Turnbull government is currently proposing to third party campaigners, including GetUp, charities, and not-for-profits.

Oosting says GetUp won’t deploy on the ground in Batman because it wants to stay focussed on blocking the foreign donations bill. That bill, he says, “represents a seismic attack on civil society, charities and GetUp [and] is our organisation’s number one priority. Right now we’re pouring our resources into the biggest campaign in our history to stop that bill.”

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So Labor has caught a break with GetUp electing to sit Batman out. It has also caught a break with the Greens battling internal issues in a seat it should be in the box seat to win.

This week it emerged that the Batman candidate, Alex Bhathal was the subject of a 101-page internal complaint by 18 party volunteers.

Third party groups active in the contest report the Greens ground operation is not functioning as it should, with little signs of deployment beyond their Northcote stronghold, and little evidence of messaging to swinging progressive voters beyond Labor is bad on Adani and bad on refugees.

The message from activists is Labor’s ground operation is deployed right across the footprint of the electorate, from end to end and top to bottom.

While the Greens have been regarded as the favourites, some insiders report their Batman campaign is struggling because talented people aren’t working on the contest because of the lingering controversy behind the scenes.

How will this story end? We’ll all find out on March 17.

• Katharine Murphy is Guardian Australia’s political editor