Should every TV and radio weather presenter in Australia call prime minister Tony Abbott and his advisors for their daily forecast? According to Abbott’s advisor Maurice Newman last week, the Bureau of Meteorology was wrong about, well, the weather. Abbott should have defended our national weather agency against his advisor’s harmful overreach. Instead the attack was allowed to stand.

But the besmirching of Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is far from an isolated incident. In their first year of government, Abbott and his closest advisors have been leading radical attacks on some of Australia’s most important institutions.

In his 2009 book Battlelines, Abbott argued that the Liberal party of Australia is Australia’s party of conservatism. Indeed for many, Abbott is “the archetypal Australian conservative”.

But one of the central tenets of conservatism is supposed to be respect for inherited institutions. In Battlelines, Abbott quotes a 1980 statement from Malcolm Fraser with approval, that “[o]nce liberal institutions are installed in a society, a government which wishes to preserve them must be in some sense conservative”. Traditional conservatives mistrust the arrogance of political actors in the present who would reconstruct institutions in accordance with fashionable thinking or petty partisan advantage. As Abbott wrote, the “conservative appreciates that judgement is essentially provisional, wisdom relative, and success transient.”

Yet in its one year in power, the government that Abbott leads has amassed a dismal record of bulling, belittling and meddling with some of Australia’s most venerable institutions.

The CSIRO, founded in 1926, has been the subject of unprecedented budget cuts and political interference. The high court, established by the constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia and founded in 1903, became so threatened by budget cuts that chief justice Robert French had to take the extraordinary step of writing to the prime minister to remind him of the court’s constitutional independence.

Australia’s university system has been subject to enormous interference, as the government seeks to overturn practices that have been in place since the 1940’s Menzies era by complete deregulation of fees. The ABC, established in 1932, is the subject of constant belittlement and denigration by the Abbott government and faces budgetary evisceration.

And of course the most venerable national institution of all is Australia’s physical environment. Conservatives should, at base, have a predisposition for conserving the environment. Nothing could be more profoundly radical than Abbott’s de facto denial of climate change and wilful negligence towards the national natural estate.

In addition to the overt political assaults on our institutions, the Abbott government is also conspicuous in its unwillingness to think or act institutionally.

In his short book On Thinking Institutionally, the American academic Hugh Heclo defines thinking institutionally as a kind of “respect-in-depth” for the rules of the game rather than mere preoccupation with winning. According to Heclo, this “respect entails a deferential regard for something beyond one’s self”.

While noting that a failure to think institutionally might be intuitively expected to be more common on the radical left, Heclo acerbically observes that when “results-oriented ‘conservatives’ are not getting the partisan results they want, you can expect that you and your institutional values will be thrown overboard”. In other words, if the political right is not getting the best within liberal institutions, they will abandon conservative principle and attack the rules of the game which they are no longer winning.

In recent Australian political history, Abbott and his pack have made an art of putting short term political gain ahead of the greater good of the system. Whether it is the confected budget emergency that even treasurer Joe Hockey has effectively admitted is not real; or bad faith appointments like climate sceptic Dick Warburton reviewing the Renewable Energy Target or Janet Albrechtsen being appointed to the panel that oversees nominations to the ABC Board; the use of royal Commissions to pursue petty political vendettas; or the absurd extension of doctrines of secrecy to keep Operation Sovereign Borders from being subject to reasonable public scrutiny, this is a government that values ephemeral advantage above custodianship of our institutions.

As institutional economists, historians, sociologists – and plain old common sense – will tell us, a big part of what makes a country peaceful and prosperous is having stable institutions. From an environmental perspective, strong and durable institutions are crucial to lasting sustainability. Our national institutions bind us together; they are the source of our sense of community, common obligation, and nationhood.

None of this is to say that institutions do not need to reform, adapt and change to meet the needs of the times. But nobody could seriously argue that this is what the Abbott gang has in mind if they attack, say, the ABC or the Bureau of Meteorology.

Our institutions should embody the spirit of our shared life and be above the petty ruckus of day to day political advantage. Attacking Australia’s institutions spreads mistrust, erodes cohesion and gives life to an ethic of ‘anything goes’ in the name of winning among our political class. These are all outcomes that conservatives should deplore.

In their 2008 work, The Times Will Suit Them: Post-Modern Conservatism in Australia, political scientists Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe diagnosed the contemporary Liberal Party as having “jettisoned their belief in the liberal institutions and democratic ideals that founded modern Australia”. It is a book worth dusting off to help understand the Abbott government.

In seeking to achieve narrow political advantage, the Abbott government is happy to denigrate and damage decades of accumulated institutional wisdom and practice. Far from being conservative, in its anti-institutionalism, Abbott is running a radical government that is attempting to pull up the root and branch of our national life.