Key to the political fight is a recent decision by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to block a dam that would help establish a gold mine in NSW based on protecting Indigenous heritage. Plibersek has accused the company behind the project of talking “nonsense”.

Plibersek is also struggling to win support for a new environment protection agency that the Coalition worries would be used to block projects and the Greens fear is too weak, underscoring the difficulty for Labor in balancing economic and environmental costs.

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BHP has claimed Labor’s “same job, same pay laws”, which require labour-hire workers to be paid as much as standard employees, would cost the company $1.3 billion a year. BHP reported an underlying profit of $20 billion in the past financial year.

Resources Minister Madeleine King, who is seen inside the government as relatively friendly towards the mining firms, admonished BHP late last month.

“They’ve always railed against Labor policy, whether in opposition or in government, and they’re the first to go to the Murdoch press to do a story around what they don’t like about what a Labor government chooses to do, and it wouldn’t matter what it is,” she said.

Albanese this week told mining executives “the world will go right past us” if co-operation was abandoned in favour of conflict, prompting Minerals Council chief Tania Constable to fire back at Albanese in a speech he attended.

“Under these new workplace laws, conflict has been brought upon us. It is a deliberate design feature of these laws,” Constable said.

Miners other than BHP have also raised the alarm on new industrial relations laws that make it easier for unions to bring firms into negotiations over workplace-wide enterprise agreements, even though most of their workers are not union members.

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