Victorian Labor, in the run-up to last weekend’s state election that saw Daniel Andrews returned to government, did the conventional field research political parties always do. Labor’s track poll charted the movements in voting intention by looking at a range of marginal seats on both sides of the pendulum.

When undecided voters began shifting decisively to Andrews in the final days of the campaign, the backroom started to exhale. But Labor strategists underestimated the extent of the voter backlash against the Liberal party because they weren’t looking at Liberal-held seats on margins between 5% and 10%.

Why would you waste your scarce resources looking there? So Labor (and everyone else, apart from the door-knockers) missed the rusted-on Liberal voters fuming in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, waiting for polling day armed with their baseball bats.

The shellacking in Victoria has chilled the federal Liberal party to its core.

Some in Canberra remain delusional, trapped in the (alleged) base-worshipping bubble that has slowly suffocated the government over two bitterly contested terms.

But most now comprehend the political fight they are in – a contest where their core supporters are angry enough to walk into a polling booth, and vote Labor. As one Liberal put it to me this week: “Every seat with a concentration of Liberals is now under threat”.

Just let that thought roll around in your mind for a moment: the political universe where your rusted-ons are looking to give you a kicking by voting for a political movement they have never, ever, supported. Safe seats in play, in a looming wipeout, is enough to induce panic.

It’s also very hard for the government to hit reset. The first problem is there is no popular Peter Beattie-like figure who can stand above the fray and declare with authority that his own political movement needs a bloody good thrashing, and he’s just the bloke to give it to them.

The second is Scott Morrison is weak structurally on two fronts.

He now governs in minority, which saps the benefits of incumbency; and the people sitting behind him, ever more grimly, in the House of Representatives, have struggled to agree on anything over two terms in government, because there is no consensus about what the Liberal party is in 2018. That’s the gaping hole at the centre of the Liberal party universe.

Devoid of a stable core of philosophy, purpose and mission, and with supposedly helpful rightwing media life coaches only heightening the sense of encroaching doom by settling their ever more arcane factional scores on television and on the front page of newspapers, backlighting the whole operation with their unhinged quarterbacking – how can Morrison achieve a course correction?

The reactionary wing of the Liberal party also gives every impression that the objective is to campaign fiercely for opposition. How else do you explain the absurdity of Tony Abbott, posing with Craig Kelly, in a Menzies T-shirt, banging on about “real” Liberals, as if this were a matter of pressing public interest? The indulgence of that trolling is truly staggering.

Always good to be with a real Liberal! pic.twitter.com/ngdMJbvF1L — Tony Abbott (@TonyAbbottMHR) November 28, 2018

If the disease killing the government with the voting public is disunity, then it’s hard to see a cure when people don’t want to settle the war, and worse, appear to conceive of war as a purifying activity.

The parlous state of affairs can also create a pernicious practical dynamic: well-intentioned people stop saying things that need to be said.

Let’s just take one example. People following the political debate closely know that a majority in the Liberal party attempted – within the constraints of trying to achieve consensus inside a divided house – to put together a mechanism to settle the decade-long climate and energy wars.

That mechanism was the national energy guarantee. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was a distance short of insane. It was some policy architecture that could be built on. As I said a moment ago, a majority of the government actually supported that policy. But a minority blew it up, and Malcolm Turnbull with it.

That policy has now been replaced, in haste and political desperation, by a grab bag of truly extraordinary measures, and I don’t invoke the word lightly.

The Liberal party, that would be the party of free markets, is now proposing an energy policy fix involving massive government intervention.

In train is the following: underwriting new coal generation in a time where the necessity for carbon constraint is blindingly obvious; and indemnifying projects from the risk of a future carbon price. The Ai Group says the cost of that mind-bending doozy, to you the taxpayers, could run into billions. Yes, I did say billions. With a B.

There are price controls normally championed by the left. Then there’s a divestiture power to break up companies who don’t deliver what the government desperately needs – a short-term fix on power prices.

Bear in mind this is not a divestiture power that a government has thought deeply about in an economy-wide sense as a policy lever to promote more competition, or something recommended by the competition watchdog (it wasn’t) – it’s a bit of crude ad hocery to do two things.

The first is frighten energy companies into offering up out-of-cycle price reductions, which some are slowly doing; and the second is to create a soundbite (the mildly ludicrous “big stick”) that Alan Jones and Ray Hadley might approve of.

That’s some nadir to reach.

The legislation giving effect to all this will, on current indications, reach the parliament next week, the final sitting week of the year – which means the government will cap off a truly horrendous 12 months with a policy that feels for all the world like it has been drafted up on the back of a beer coaster.

Some government MPs think that some or all of this package is several bridges too far. The dissidents are already on the march, which, I suspect, is one of the reasons why the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, pulled out of the G20 meeting this weekend: to try and contain that particular brush fire.

There are plenty of sound reasons to object when you fear ministers are now drafting up policy on beer coasters. In fact you’d hope with all your being that there were still people inside the government prepared to be an automatic stabiliser when things are running way too fast and loose to be defensible.

But adversity creates a chill effect. Raising objections, however valid, only generates more crude headlines about disunity and division, and you can understand why government MPs with sufficient esprit de corps to understand that avoiding mortality is ultimately a collective endeavour would hesitate before speaking up.

Parliament will likely save the government from itself on this package. There are not many sitting weeks between now and the election. Labor is opposed to divestiture (which is the focal point of the objections inside government), the Greens might support it, but very likely with conditions that would prove unacceptable.

But right now, truly, as we enter the final parliamentary week of the year, the Morrison government is mired in trouble.