Malcolm Turnbull did two things on Monday.

Turnbull walked into the blue room of Parliament House and told reporters he could not carry forward his signature energy policy to the parliament because he lacked the requisite internal support to deliver it.

The prime minister of Australia declared himself a hostage of a group of wreckers from the Liberal party’s conservative wing. That’s the first thing he did. He showed his opponents and the voters his weakness. He called a press conference to confirm his own capitulation.

In the process of declaring himself their captive, the prime minister willingly unveiled Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton’s energy policy for them. That was the second thing he did. If we were at a tennis tournament, the umpire would be declaring game, set and match.

The conservative wreckers have pursued the following objectives over recent weeks: kill the national energy guarantee, train the government’s focus on reducing power prices through whatever heavy-handed measures that takes, and construct a partisan fight with Labor at the next federal election.

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Turnbull has now delivered them all three – although the prime minister would claim the Neg is still alive, waiting patiently for that fantasy moment when the wreckers suddenly decide to stop wrecking, when human voices wake them, and reason makes an appearance.

As fig leaves go, that one is not even close to being convincing.

So what are the practical results of all this?

In serving their wish list up to them, in choosing flight over fight, Turnbull has allowed his internal enemies to gut a critical component of his legacy as prime minister. By willingly unveiling his own capitulation, he’s weakened his internal authority still further.

Unlike in 2009, when Turnbull stood his ground when the enemies came knocking, roll forward a decade and the same man finds himself at the very same juncture in the very same fight, but this time, he’s collaborating in their two-stage kill.

In fairness to the prime minister, there were no good options. None at all. No rabbits in any hats.

But doing the right thing was an option. Dignity was an option. Turnbull could have called a party room meeting first up, thrashed out the position once and for all, and let the winner be the winner, rather than choosing the ignominy of bargaining for your life in full public view.

We’ll never know now, because it’s done, but it is possible Turnbull could have prevailed if he’d rolled the dice internally. Perhaps some colleagues would have rallied to his cause, and stared down the wreckers in their own ranks.

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Right now, it doesn’t much matter whether Turnbull stays, having bought himself time, or whether he gets run down this week or before the end of the year, because he’s removed one of the key differences between what he stands for as prime minister, and what the alternatives do.

Beyond Turnbull’s fate, beyond Canberra’s never-ending soap opera – the internecine warfare that erupted a decade ago, the ruinous violence that the political class, egged on by the unhinged conflict merchants in the shrinking media bubble, seem powerless to stop – there’s a bigger problem.

The problems in climate and energy are not the result of bipartisan failure.

Let’s lay the blame where it belongs. The Liberal party has demonstrated that it is completely incapable of being constructive on an issue Australians want and need solved. One of the parties of government in Australia has succumbed to the great unreason, to truthiness, to mindless, reactive short-termism, to governing by feelings.

What’s now lost, beyond what remains of Turnbull’s authority, is a chance to combine the two policy challenges of climate and energy, and inch towards a major party truce that could have given Australia’s energy sector some of the investment certainty it needs to drive the transformation the country needs in something approximating orderly fashion.

That’s what the Neg was. It was that chance.

It was the fourth-worst policy, proffered because the great unreason meant the Liberal party had run out of viable alternative options, but the mechanism offered a chance to try and rebuild, step by step, after a decade-long debacle that has resulted in emissions rising across the economy, and high power prices.

That’s why, as a government, you take the pain of trying to land a policy in this area. You take the pain because you’ve caused the crisis, and you bear some responsibility for solving it.

Instead, we now have no settled policy framework, and the government roaming around threatening a bunch of heavy-handed interventions in the energy market if it doesn’t like the cut of the power companies’ jib.

Call me crazy, but that doesn’t sound like certainty.

A bunch of stakeholders lined up in support of the Neg not because they loved it, but because, fundamentally, this isn’t a game. It’s not a satisfying culture war prosecuted by student politicians chugging last drinks at the university bar. This is the future of the country.

The deranged circus in Canberra is writing the future of the country, and some of them don’t seem to realise that’s the responsibility the voters have given them.