It’s been profoundly obvious since the news of Bob Hawke’s death late on Thursday night that Australians are not only mourning the passing of a larger-than-life national figure, they are also mourning a lost political era.

The Hawke brand in Australian politics is a powerful bit of shorthand. Hawke was a political leader with the self-confidence to transform a country, and to execute that transformation by decanting the talent of his cabinet colleagues while remaining in full command of his institution.

It feels a long time since we’ve enjoyed that kind of steadiness, consistency, collegiality and resolution in our politics. Measured by the range of emotions I’ve seen expressed in the farewell to Hawke, Australians are mourning the loss of coherence in their politics as well.

As voters head to the polls on Saturday, it’s worth noting the underlying conditions are comparable to the conditions that existed when Hawke took office in 1983. It’s comparable in the sense that there is significant work to do to get Australia where it needs to be for the next few decades.

Greg Combet described Hawke’s great project as Australian prime minister as the “unshackling of the economy from the past” and the time has come for us to face up to that task once again. While Hawke had to open the Australian economy to the world, and boost domestic productivity and competitiveness in tandem with a social contract (universal healthcare, public education, superannuation and the like), there is a different project now.

The contemporary challenge is transforming the economy to deal with the inevitability of decarbonisation, which is what the climate science tells us must happen if we are to manage the effects of global warming.

We view climate change through a number of lenses in Australia, and much of the domestic discussion ranges from incoherently truthy to deeply stupid.

There is a conversation of sorts around what the science tells us needs to happen, but there is less of a conversation about the negative impact on the Australian economy if we keep pretending there isn’t a huge transformation to execute in a comparative short period of time – particularly as we have now lost a decade to squabbling and hyperpartisan short-termism – political behaviour that can be fairly categorised as obscene.

Out of respect for Hawke, and his passing, let’s examine this issue through that materialist lens. (Yes, I know Hawke is lauded for being a prime minister sufficiently concerned about the environment to take political risks, but I suspect if he was with us today and trying to make the political case for action, he’d be talking about the economy, and the risks for working people if Australia doesn’t take meaningful climate action).

Emissions are rising in Australia, and that’s of course a worrying trajectory, but the fact is we make up a very small proportion of the global problem. What Australia does with respect to curbing emissions domestically will not tip the balance of the global problem.

So the policy rationale for constraining emissions domestically is twofold. Firstly, we take action because that’s what responsible internationalists do, because if everyone shirks action on the basis their individual contribution doesn’t move the dial then no one acts. Secondly, we take action to further our interests, specifically by creating economic opportunities in the new growth industries for this country, which, if we are smart, will centre on renewables and low-emissions technologies.

Scott Morrison has spent a lot of this campaign focused on the short-term costs of taking climate action – the costs imposed on businesses if there’s a higher emissions reduction target, and if there’s a safeguard mechanism that actually safeguards something, forcing heavy emitters to curb their pollution or buy offsets. This extended pearl-clutching exercise has generated heat but absolutely no light.

The Liberal leader has spent no time at all over the past five weeks contemplating what the cost to Australia will be when the rest of the world decarbonises, and we keep pretending it’s business as usual.

Let me spell this out, step by step. Australia is a carbon-intensive economy. Just one metric. We rely on coal exports for our prosperity. In 2018, Australia’s coal exports were worth about $67bn.

That prosperity is at risk of being stranded in a carbon constrained world – if the world no longer wants our coal, and we have not taken steps to diversify our economy because we pretend nothing needs to change because we don’t want to upset voters in marginal seats in central Queensland. The risks to Australia’s prosperity increase the longer governments go on telling voters we can defer meaningful action to another day; that this can be another government’s problem.

In his rush to present his political opponents as the risk during this campaign, Morrison has neglected to own or engage with the risks associated with his own suboptimal stance on climate action. The risks I’m referencing here are to Australia’s long-term prosperity, and its capacity to generate wealth. It’s about more than just what happens about coal. As a deputy governor of Australia’s central bank said starkly earlier this year: climate change poses risks to our financial stability.

So to borrow Combet’s locution, Australia’s pressing task right now (if our political leaders think truth-telling is a core part of the job description) is to unshackle itself from a carbon intensive economy, and create the conditions to build new low-emissions industries. We need to transform the Australian economy, and do it in a way that seeks to minimise economic shocks and societal dislocation associated with the disruption.

To put it simply, we need to do what, historically, Australia has done well: face the future with resolve and planning and purpose. But it’s harder for Australian voters to trust contemporary governments to do what we used to do well because of the infantile behaviour we’ve witnessed over the past decade. Trust in institutions is low, and voters are defecting to support independents and minor parties in significant numbers because they aren’t sure major parties serve their interests anymore.

As the sun rises on polling day, strategists aren’t entirely sure whether Bill Shorten will win this contest, whether we will see another hung parliament, or whether Scott Morrison can claw back. The last opinion poll in the field, the Newspoll, suggests the contest has shifted in Labor’s favour in the closing days, and senior figures are daring to hope Shorten will land a working majority.

Labor has campaigned on a platform of climate action, pointing out (correctly in my view) that what is broken in Australian politics won’t be fixed until the parliament faces up with some maturity to what needs to be done. If Shorten wins on Saturday night, he needs to make good that promise. He needs to be the prime minister who gets this transformation done.

If voters return Morrison, on climate, there will be more of the same denial and drift until the right wing of the Liberal party and the Nationals wake up from the strange trance they have been in for 10 years.

If there’s to be a minority government, then Australians can look to some of the climate-focused independents to make good on their campaign promises to make climate action their make-or-break issue.

In a conversation with a Liberal this week, I flagged a scenario where Morrison might need to give ground on climate policy if he was dealing with an independent member for Warringah, Zali Steggall, and perhaps some others, in a post-election penalty shootout after the verdict on Saturday night.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if they saved us from ourselves,” was the droll response.