Can things get any worse for the Liberal party? It’s lost voters and members, and recent leaders have failed to reinvigorate its grass-roots. Out of power across much of the country, the party of Robert Menzies is dazed, deeply divided and drifting to its doom. At party functions, there is ill-concealed dismay among shadow ministers and party grandees. Andrew Hastie’s departure from the front bench has produced real disturbance and alarm.

Mark Kenny reflected the media conventional wisdom after the May 3 election when he warned the Liberals are ‘risking terminal contraction’ unless they ‘rediscover their progressive urban liberalism and own it very strongly’. Translation: move left or face extinction. Never mind that on the battlefields of border protection, national sovereignty and constitutional change, conservative and classical liberal ideas always compete and often prevail.

Not so long ago, voters easily rejected the indigenous Voice to parliament, which was part of the identity politics that has been a pre-occupation of global progressive movements. The referendum lost in all six states by a national margin of 60 to 40 per cent, even though the Yes campaign, with the whole establishment on its side, spent more than twice as much as the No campaign.

The Canberra press gallery discourse about the Liberal party reminds one of the media mind-meld just after John Howard lost power to a nerd from Nambour, who had dined on his own earwax. Back then, the media consensus then was that Kevin Rudd would consign conservatives to exile for a very long time. And for a while, things did indeed look dire for the Coalition; so dire that some people were asking whether the party could survive at all.

In the 2008-09 period, the climate debate had been conducted in a heretic-hunting and illiberal environment. Rudd claimed that climate change was the ‘great moral challenge’ of our time and denounced critics of his keynote emissions trading scheme legislation as ‘deniers’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’. With opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, Rudd hammered out legislation to put in place an emissions trading scheme (ETS), but the Coalition was bitterly divided.

The media mantra was that opposition to Labor’s ETS would badly burn the Liberals. Here’s a sample. Laurie Oakes: ‘The Liberals will face humiliation at the polls.’ Paul Kelly: They will be ‘signing their own political death warrant’. Michelle Grattan: They need to ‘get the climate change issue as much off the election agenda as possible’. Peter Hartcher: ‘The party faces electoral oblivion.’

Then, in December of 2009, the political landscape changed profoundly. Tony Abbott, whom critics denounced as a right-wing throwback to a bygone era, narrowly defeated Turnbull in the party room. His strong opposition to the ETS meant that he would be ‘electoral poison’ and lead to ‘the destruction of the Liberal party’ (Oakes). According to historian Judith Brett, ‘The Liberals risk becoming a down-market protest party of angry old men in the outer suburbs.’ Sound familiar?

At the same time, the Copenhagen climate summit spectacularly failed to reach a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable global pact. Suddenly, Rudd was forced to explain how his ETS would work in a world where strategic competitors like China were chugging along the smoky path to prosperity.  Rudd imploded, his stratospheric poll figures cratered and, without missing a beat, the same media pundits – yes, the very experts who had denounced Abbott as unelectable — changed their tune.

Opposition to Rudd’s ETS was now a political godsend for the Liberals. Oakes: The government was ‘very worried’, it’s in a ‘mess’ and on the ‘defensive’ over its ETS. Kelly: Abbott had ‘stolen the march’ and ‘Labor’s policy is in trouble’. Grattan: For Labor’s marginal seat holders, the ETS was ‘becoming something of a nightmare’. Hartcher: a poll in early February 2010 ‘vindicated the politics of the Coalition’s decision to argue with Rudd rather than agree with him’. Within a few months, Rudd ditched his signature legislation.

It was only a matter of time before he, Rudd, was knifed by his deputy Julia Gillard (Lady Macbeth) in a ruthless coup that had all the hallmarks of a Shakespearean tragedy – though without the satisfaction of its literary qualities. But Rudd tormented his successor persistently like Banquo’s ghost. Gillard’s approval ratings fell to unprecedented levels. The result was that the assassin herself was fatally knifed – by the very bloke she backstabbed a few years earlier –and Abbott handed the ALP one of its biggest defeats in 2013.

Bear this history in mind when you read the pundits’ script that the Liberal party’s redemption lies in the ‘political centre’. By that, they mean it should stop waging culture wars and ape Labor’s net zero climate agenda. But the shift to renewables needs to be approached with far greater caution, especially when the rest of the world is not drastically reducing its carbon footprint. It is (of all people) Tony Blair who recently said that politicians should face the ‘inconvenient facts’, which show that any policy based on phasing out fossil fuels was ‘doomed to fail’. It’s wrong, he warns, that people are ‘being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal’.

As for Liberals ‘waging a culture war’, what the pundits mean here is that it’s fine when progressive elites advance their cultural agenda with new ideas and rules – often via the least representative and accountable institutions (such as diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies) – but resisting this agenda is an act of aggression. Many on the left shout ‘culture war’ to avoid debate. They don’t wish to engage in what is another way of saying the battle of ideas, because they sense, rightly, that the Australian people would not support their views on values and culture.

So the Liberal party can bounce back: it just needs ideas and someone bold to articulate them, and the Labor government needs to mess up. Governments make mistakes, and when they do – and they always do – capable centre-right opponents, with a sound conservative public policy agenda, can exploit the moment. The worst thing defeated parties can do, even after a humiliating election loss, is to wallow in despair. If the Liberals get off their knees, say what they believe in, and await events to take their inevitable toll on the government, things can change rapidly.