Here’s the thing about being an addict. There are actually no surprises. You know what you are doing is no good for you; you know the people around you will inevitably get hurt by your indulgences. But in that moment none of it matters because the high is so damn good.

As the Liberal party surveys the wreckage of their weeklong binge of leadership blood-letting, the madness at the centre of their lust for power is becoming clear. The government has been hit hard in both support and reputation, more in anger than in sadness, by a jaded electorate sick of playing the role of enabler.

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Like all the major opinion polls, this week’s Guardian Essential shows a sharp drop in primary support for the Coalition, much of it flowing across the partisan divide to a Labor party that, at least for now, appears to have got its own demons under control.

If anything, this is a more destructive meltdown than is the political norm. In recent times, political executions have at least provided a short-term sugar hit as the brutalised carcass is removed from the building before the recriminations are felt. But this time, the removal of a prime minister still well ahead as preferred leader has not even offered the perpetrators of said violence this short-term hit.

After a bender like last week’s it’s not just a case of a few mea culpas and “we’ve put it all behind us”. There’s a long-term damage to reputation that needs to be contended with as well. In just a month, the key party indicators have been king-hit, with perceptions on division at epic levels and perceptions of clarity and leadership quality nosediving. In fact, all positive attributes have headed south, while all the negatives are on the rise.

To make matters worse for the Coalition, Labor has benefited by being the sensible party in the house. By merely staying sober, its brand attributes have improved.

As the Coalition nurses its industrial-scale hangover, what little hope on offer is that the man now running the show was not personally responsible for smuggling in the contraband and organising the knees-up. He’s merely taking the rap. Indeed, if politics was merely a beauty context, our figures on preferred PM show he would be leading the opposition leader, who continues to struggle to generate enthusiasm within his own ranks.

But the brutal reality for Scott Morrison is that this is not about individuals anymore; it’s about collective responsibility and collective retribution too. The public has had enough and the majority want a federal election sooner rather than later – 57% of them agreeing that “the Liberal party is divided and no longer fit to govern Australia”.

These are the consequences of losing control in an environment where you are paid to act like grown-ups. These are the same people who watched and profited from the drug haze in the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years. At the time they sat there and sniggered and couldn’t believe their own luck. Now they are in the same predicament. They knew where it would end and they did it anyway.

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They will support each other, one day at a time. They will say the right things, pretend it’s all happy families again and hope the public will find a way to forgive and forget.

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But the truth is they won’t because once you have played this card, you are marked and it will take some serious time in rehab, or at least some party rule changes, to convince people otherwise. Because the bottom line is the public thinks it’s their job to elect the nation’s leader; that’s what election night is all about. You can point to the small print of the constitution and claim we are not a presidential system, but if that’s the way you run your show, you better get your story straight.

The truth is that once you start indulging in removing elected leaders it’s all over. To bastardise the great Neil Young’s classic ode to the junky: they’ve moved the needle, now the damage is done.

• Peter Lewis is the executive director of Essential and a Guardian Australia columnist

