The Greens will use Labor’s failure to make an unequivocal statement on whether it will oppose the Adani coalmine to ramp up campaign efforts in the Melbourne electorate of Batman.



With the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, this week telling Queensland voters that coal had a future and that scepticism about the Adani project did not equate to scepticism about the coal industry as a whole – the Greens and activist groups are ramping up their Batman field efforts ahead of the byelection on 17 March.

Greens sources have told Guardian Australia the apparent equivocation from Labor had been added to scripts for voter contacts, both through door knocking and phone banking. Shorten’s positive line on coal has also been added to the Greens’ social media campaign in Batman.

What’s the difference between the Greens and Labor? Labor believes “there is a role for coal in Australia”; we have a plan to phase out coal and move Australia to renewables. pic.twitter.com/OioJz6NGWl — Richard Di Natale (@RichardDiNatale) February 21, 2018

Local environmental groups have also used various Labor statements this week to launch a call to action, recruiting activists for a door-knocking effort over the coming weekend.

In an email to supporters, the group 350 Australia says: “Bill Shorten needs to stop sitting on the fence and stand with the two-thirds of Australians who want to see Adani stopped. We know that conversations can shift politics, just as we know that the majority of Australians – including Batman voters – want to see Adani stopped.”

The call to action also points out that Shorten’s positive statements on coal contradict the core argument this week of Labor’s climate change spokesman, Mark Butler, “who ... said the mine would displace jobs and sabotage the Paris climate targets”.

In a speech to the Sydney Institute on Monday, Butler warned the development of the Galilee basin was not in Australia’s national interest, because it would displace mining and jobs in existing coal regions and would not help the world meet its obligations under the Paris climate agreement.

GetUp, which can have a significant impact on the outcome of campaigns due to its capacity to mobilise field resources quickly, is yet to decide whether it will ramp up in Batman.

The activist group’s national director, Paul Oosting, told Guardian Australia in early February one of the factors influencing his decision would be where Labor ultimately lined up on Adani. A GetUp spokesman confirmed on Wednesday the group was still mulling its options in the contest.

Shorten has been signalling since the end of January that Labor will take a tougher line on the Adani project and internal work has been done on potential legal options that could be used to stop the project.

But the powerful CFMEU mining union has argued Labor should not take a stronger stand against the project, because that would open up a divisive debate within Labor about the future of the coal industry in Australia and it will also damage the ALP’s political fortunes in Queensland.

Shorten is spending the week in Queensland coastal electorates and has been attempting to reassure blue-collar voters that a negative view of Adani did not mean Labor would adopt a no-coal stance. In Rockhampton on Wednesday, Shorten said, “Adani is not the whole coal industry, for goodness sake”.

“There’s nothing wrong with demanding that Adani stack up commercially and environmentally, and no amount of pressure from Adani is going to make me back off standing up to make sure that the deals actually add up financially and add up environmentally,” the Labor leader said.

“But I want to make this point very clear, that when the boosters of the Adani deal say somehow, if you are sceptical about Adani, that makes you sceptical about the coal industry, that’s just not right.

“I have spent my life representing miners, I understand the importance of mining. I have spent my life representing resource construction workers. I have spent my life standing up for blue-collar engineering workers.”

With the Batman contest in progress and no definitive statement from Shorten about whether scepticism about Adani meant Labor would ultimately adopt a stance of blocking the project, Labor’s influential internal environmental lobby group on Tuesday called on the federal party to clarify its stance, arguing the Adani project was not in the national interest.

The national convener of the Labor environment action network, Felicity Wade, said: “As Labor people, we understand why economically vulnerable communities object to the sense that post-materialist elites in the south want to decide their futures, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Adani mine will be bad for the global climate.”