About a week before Bill Shorten led the Labor Party to defeat at the 2019 election, he got a call from Joel Fitzgibbon, the opposition’s agriculture spokesman and self-appointed coal-industry champion.

Fitzgibbon, who had been campaigning in northern Queensland, desperately tried to convince the Labor leader to offer support for one of the most controversial resources projects in Australia since the 1998 Jabiluka uranium mine blockade: Adani’s Carmichael coal mine in the Galilee Basin.