Federal Labor feels the heat over Adani, and Coalition is sweating too

Extract from The Guardian

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Carmichael coalmine

Katharine Murphy on politics

Katharine Murphy

The biggest environmental campaign seen in Australia since the 80s is causing bumps in the road for both sides of politics

‘One Labor figure puts the problem for his party this way: It is talismanic; It’s the litmus test.’ Photograph: Julian Drape/AAP

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Saturday 27 May 2017 08.03 AEST

When it comes to the Adani Carmichael coalmine, the spotlight this week has been trained on Queensland as the state government battled an internal split on whether to give the project a royalties holiday. There have also been murmurings in Canberra, where Labor MPs are starting to express public opposition to a project many have been privately wringing their hands about.
But to fathom the next phase in the political battle against the project, we need to train our eyes a bit further south.
Over this past week in Victoria, the Greens have launched a new fundraising drive to produce placards which will begin appearing shortly around the electorates of Melbourne, Batman, Wills and Melbourne Ports.

The placards have a simple message, easily consumed from a passing car or tram. They say: Stop Labor’s Adani Mine. It won’t stop with some signage. The Greens are planning to door knock the inner urban electorates where they now slug it out with Labor in hand-to-hand combat during federal elections.
While a couple of Labor MPs, David Feeney and Peter Khalil, have got out ahead of the new onslaught by outing themselves as opponents of Adani, the Greens are telling their supporters the objective is to force the federal Labor leader, Bill Shorten, to rule out supporting the Adani coalmine.

“Here’s our strategy,” the pitch for donations reads. “We know that if Bill Shorten changes Labor’s position and commits to reviewing commonwealth approval, Adani’s plans will be dead. Labor are already starting to feel the heat, and it’s working, with some MPs saying they don’t personally support the plan. But now we need to ramp things up and force a formal change in Labor policy.”
Right now the Greens are focused on Labor in Victoria. But this campaign could easily flow on to other states, and to the seats where the Greens now also face off against Liberals in the inner cities.
If we view the electoral contest through an inner-city lens, Labor is already under acute political pressure on Adani, and the new Greens campaign won’t help. But it would also be a mistake to think Labor is the only major party feeling the heat on Adani. More of that story shortly.

The Greens’ placards have a simple message but it won’t stop there: the party is planning to door knock inner-urban electorates. Photograph: Greens

First we need to take a moment to comprehend the scale of what’s going on. #StopAdani is the biggest environmental campaign seen in this country since the Franklin campaign in the 1980s.
It is well-organised, rolling out in communities (there have been 320 events nationally over the past few months, and another 60 are in the calendar). The issue thunders through social media and reverberates through mainstream press coverage.
The campaign is also very well-funded. One seasoned environmental campaigner told me this week “there is more money in this campaign than in any campaign I’ve seen, anywhere” and noted it wasn’t entirely clear where the money was coming from.
The anti-Adani effort links in to coordinated global efforts by the environment movement to stop new coalmines. #StopAdani (and the associated activities) is the environmental movement’s equivalent of a multinational corporation – with Queensland the local frontline of a global, anti-coal offensive.
Whatever the intrinsic policy merits of constraining new coal development to help the world meet its pressing and existential challenge with climate change (and those merits are blindingly obvious to anyone who accepts the science – if you accept the science, a steady transition away from coal isn’t optional) the major parties remain highly sensitised to the fate of the project.
There’s the enduring Australian bipartisan tradition: the economic exploitation of resources means local employment and export dollars. And the Carmichael project sits, literally, at the epicentre of the political battle, in a region where disaffection has significantly altered the contours of the political contest.
The Coalition and Labor are eyeing off a group of marginal seats in Queensland that could easily decide the outcome of the next federal election. Both are also cognisant of the looming state election campaign. A recent ReachTel poll of 1,600 Queenslanders has the two major parties currently deadlocked 50-50 on the two party preferred measure.

On the politics of this development, Labor is caught uncomfortably between its blue-collar constituency and its progressive, inner-urban support base.
Federally, it articulates a formulation which attempts to placate both camps: Adani should proceed if it meets all relevant approvals because jobs are good – but not at the expense of the Great Barrier Reef, and it shouldn’t get a cent of taxpayer support.
The new Greens campaign, apart from the obvious objective of trying to gain political traction in targeted seats, is about pushing Labor off their hedged formulation into an overtly anti-coal position – which is not a decision the party as a collective is yet ready to take.
Triggering that debate is, in fact, a fast train to splitsville.

So that’s the challenging state of affairs in progressive politics. Now we need to consider the Coalition.
The Turnbull government doesn’t have to straddle the barbed wire fence quite so inelegantly but Adani is causing it grief as well.
Government MPs in north Queensland, where regional unemployment is high, are champions of the project. The chief cheerleader of Adani in Canberra is the resources minister, Matt Canavan, who is also responsible for the development of northern Australia. Canavan sometimes does several media interviews a day extolling the benefits of the project, creating an impression the Coalition is monolithic on Adani.
Canavan is so assiduous in his occupation of the airwaves you can fail to notice that he, and his party leader Barnaby Joyce, are really the only government people out there consistently banging the Adani drum.
In fact if you look and listen closely, apart from a moment of pure, mind-numbing idiocy where the treasurer, Scott Morrison, brandished a lump of coal in the parliament, you’ll notice the Liberal party has dialled the pro-coal rhetoric down in recent months.

Why would this be? Well, if you ask around, you get the feedback that evangelising about coal works in some pockets of the country but it isn’t that politically helpful for Liberal MPs in Sydney and Melbourne with either mixed constituencies – seats such as the prime minister’s electorate of Wentworth in Sydney, or Kelly O’Dwyer’s electorate of Higgins – or even in more blue-ribbon areas, with the sorts of constituencies that were once characterised patronisingly as “doctor’s wives”.
The rolling civil society campaign against the Adani mine – which includes environment groups and GetUp! – means Liberal MPs are getting regular anti-Adani traffic through their doors and inboxes and social media accounts.
MPs around the country are being put on the spot by either GetUp! or local #StopAdani groups who are asking them point-blank whether they support the mine or not.
Two Liberal backbenchers have already come out in opposition to the idea that the project will be given a $1bn concessional loan to fund a rail line linking the mine to Abbot Point: Bert Van Manen and Sarah Henderson.
Apart from what’s playing on out on the ground, there are other bumps in the Coalition road.
There is also strong opposition inside the cabinet to the idea of the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility granting the loan, despite Canavan regularly arguing the case for a positive decision. One senior government figure is blunt in putting the counter-case. “That is not happening.”

Even if Canavan somehow prevails in a looming internal government battle over concessional support for the development, it’s unlikely to be the end of the story. On that issue, the anti-Adani forces are preparing for a legal fight.
Single issue, negative, “stop the ..” campaigns are always the easiest campaigns to run – just ask Tony Abbott.
They are simple, and they resonate.
All the polling I’ve seen indicates #StopAdani has been enormously effective in influencing public opinion.
Even if people have not yet crossed over into overt anti-coal consciousness because of their concern about climate change, Australians are highly sensitised about the fate of the Great Barrier Reef. Very few people will want a mine project that they fear will damage the reef.
One Liberal said to me forcefully this week when I asked how Adani was playing out on home turf: “Christ, I wish it would just go away.”
One Labor figure puts the problem for his party this way: “It is talismanic. It’s the litmus test. Adani has become shorthand for ‘are you serious about climate change?’.”