If you ever feel the need to view some live action footage of a prime minister, rammed, uncomfortably, in a metaphorical box, then chase up Scott Morrison’s press conference from Thursday.

Morrison evidently senses a palpable shift in the national mood, and the prime minister fronted the cameras at lunchtime to advise Australians caught up in the coastal exodus triggered by the bushfires to be patient.

Be patient.

Please.

Being patient was a specific request to help manage the practicalities of the next 24 hours. Services are stretched. Roads are closed. There is confusion, anxiety and distress on the ground in fire affected communities.

But the virtue of patience also had some general applicability for a prime minister who seems to have lost his Midas touch after a series of misjudgments that began with the Angus Taylor imbroglio in the closing weeks of parliament, intensified with an ill-timed family holiday in Hawaii, and has now settled into generalised dissatisfaction with his recessed performance during the bushfire catastrophe.

The country has been treated to the discomfiting spectacle of Scott Morrison, slayer of strawberry saboteurs, master of the maximised crisis, reduced to a prime ministerial hologram in an actual one.

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Be patient, Morrison told Australians on Thursday. On the roads. With emergency services workers. And, implicitly, with me, because I’m doing my best, and I’m doing it by the book.

Morrison informed us he was not managing this disaster for the optics. He was not seeking political self aggrandisement by stepping arbitrarily over the premiers, making disjointed made-for-TV-news commands. Lest anyone be even remotely interested as they are choking in thick smoke, or contemplating the ash and rubble of their homes, or being evacuated off a beach by the military, Morrison reported his government was following the “headquarters model” of disaster management.

The striking thing about Thursday’s performance was not so much a prime minister on the defensive. That’s to be expected.

Morrison has copped a barrage of criticism in recent weeks, both entirely fair and gratuitous, and this guy really doesn’t like criticism. Of any type. When I say “really doesn’t like criticism”, I mean Morrison really doesn’t like it. Just so we are clear.

So defensive and barely masked displeasure I expected.

The surprise for me on Thursday was the clear sense Morrison projected of being almost entirely hemmed in, of having to weigh every single word.

This was quite revealing.

Some political leaders find their natural authority in a crisis. They use events to help propel their recalcitrant institutions into doing what needs to be done. But Morrison is behaving like a leader who thinks his piece of string is not very long.

Morrison knows the country is standing at a crossroads as we pass from one decade to the next. Terrible cliche that, but it’s true. He knows how big this challenge is; the impact of heating on the driest inhabited continent on earth. He has all the information, all the experts, all the diagnostics.

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The prime minister knows full well what’s happening now in a policy sense isn’t adequate. What Morrison clearly doesn’t know is how much he can get away with in terms of a pivot. The hesitancy is quite the shape shift from the defiant solo act of the May election, or even the self-appointed saviour of Angus Taylor of a month ago.

Pressed repeatedly by reporters on the Coalition’s indefensible record on climate change, the canker sitting underneath the current summer catastrophe, Morrison tentatively pointed to perhaps something else being done, “additional measures, where they can be put in place”. The emissions reduction minister was already looking at improvements, Morrison said, without specifying what that might mean.

Play Video 2:03 Australia bushfires: Scott Morrison defends his government's climate policies – video

As well as cautiously referencing additional, unspecified, mitigation efforts, he also pointed to the inevitability of comprehensive adaptation, without calling it that, possibly because that language – an artefact of climate scientists – might be considered a thoughtcrime of some type.

Morrison said the inevitable review undertaken after this current emergency would need to consider the management of hazard reduction, given climate change had “a pronounced effect on the length of the fire season”. Governments would need to look at management in national parks, zoning and planning issues, looking at where properties “can be built in countries like Australia, up and down the coast”.

The language, generally clear with Morrison, ran to sludge as he weighed the words. “That being the case with the climatic effects of what we are seeing, there are many restrictions around those effects that have to be reviewed on the basis on the broader climatic effect we are seeing in this country”.

Just in case these tiny, hedged, heavily obscured signposts were too rash for Craig Kelly, or Rupert Murdoch, or Paul Murray, or whomever might cause a ruckus, Morrison cleaned himself up before departing the press room in the Commonwealth offices in Sydney.

The government of course would ensure “our policies remain sensible, that they don’t move towards either extreme, and stay focused on what Australians need for a vibrant and viable economy, as well as a vibrant and sustainable environment. Getting the balance right is what Australia has always been able to achieve”.

We were back, implicitly, to the costs of action.

Again.

When what is clearly arrayed before us in this terrible summer is the costs of inaction. The costs of the lost decade.

Morrison defaulted by rote to the costs of action, when the costs of inaction – both economic and human – now run as far as the eye can see.

You’d say unbelievable, but seriously, what would be the point?