The question is whether he now has the courage to stare down a battered and bruised party. Liberals now have additional reasons for distrusting his judgment, and any number of old personal and ideological enemies have no new reason to cut him any slack. But if he is the nimble and agile gambler that he has pretended to be, he might well judge that the party has no appetite for further leadership instability and turmoil (and no obvious replacement for him). And he would do well to wonder if he has any choice if he is not to become a complete prisoner of his circumstances, lurching inevitably to defeat and destruction.

Turnbull went into the election aligned with the conservative wing of the party, even the faith people had in him turned on his being regarded as a moderate and a liberal. He explicitly committed himself to the maintenance of key achievements and legacies, if they can be so called, of Tony Abbott, not least with boats and inaction on climate change. To this he added some vague mantras about a plan involving jobs, and, after Brexit, some soothing words about stability.

One might be forgiven for thinking that his only purpose for being there was to save us from the risk of a return to the supposed social and economic nightmare of a Gillard government, and the return of asylum-seeking boat people, as well as some soothing stability from unexpected world events such as the British decision to leave the European Union. The Coalition was not on a crusade that had the people talking.

Whatever it all was, it failed to excite and inspire voters. There had been ample evidence that they preferred the Coalition (at least under his leadership), and that they did not fear, but did not love, the Opposition. But an effective and courageous campaign by Labor almost upset a tightly disciplined, but very small target strategy by Turnbull. He had wanted to keep his policy options open, even if he seemed to be explicitly rejecting the opportunity to be his own man, rather than the creature and servant of his party, particular its most truculent and embittered conservative wing.

It was nearly fatal. He has no mandate for anything. Even if he claimed such a mandate, he now has no more power, indeed probably less, to force legislation through the Senate than he did before he called the double dissolution. He has energised and empowered a resurgent Labor. It may not play the bastard as thoroughly as did Abbott (and the whole Coalition, including Turnbull) during the Gillard government. But the Coalition could hardly complain if it did, the more so since it achieved what Abbott didn't – a higher proportion of the two-party-preferred votes, if not a majority of the seats.

Mandates aside, the new government has little in the way of pet projects reflecting either ideological or personal predilection. Turnbull adopted the idea of a plebiscite on same-sex marriage but without any personal enthusiasm whatever. If the Coalition (and for that matter Labor) is committed to its boat interception policy, it is mostly for pragmatic purposes and conviction that it is the only policy that can work. The differences between Labor and the Coalition on deficits, government debt and the level of government spending are relatively minor. For the immediate moment, the task is of ordinary government, of keeping things ticking along rather than responding to any developing crises.

What the very narrow escape means is that Turnbull now has an excuse to resurvey the world, to refocus, and to reconsider the budget and the plan he put to the people. For all intents and purposes it did not deliver for him. One could almost say that it was not endorsed by voters. In any event, it seems unlikely to go through Parliament in its present form, least of all with its cuts in company tax and concessions for high-income earners.

Just as dangerously, the so-called "zombie" cuts to government expenditure made for far-away forward years in the 2014 Abbott-Hockey budget will soon have to be properly placed into the accounts, and, most likely, cannot be. The Coalition's pretence that these cuts could be a part of its strategy to achieve budget balance, even as everyone knew they could not pass even a new Senate, was as much a lie as anything Labor advanced as Medicare scares. As he has by now admitted, the potency of the scares was that it fell on fertile ground, among people who had regularly seen Coalition ministers break promises about preserving and protecting the hospital and health insurance scheme.

Turnbull has an opportunity to dump bad policy and lose unpopular programs and plans while making a public virtue of having heard the message from voters. He can justify a radical turnaround by saying that he has faced the reality of voters' choices about the composition of the new House of Representatives and the Senate, and adapted to circumstances. He can, in short, be agile, nimble, innovative, perhaps audacious and risk-taking. He can seize upon some "fact" – for example, the downgrading of Australia's credit rating – as an occasion for a completely new look at issues of revenue and expenditure. He can in the process adopt some of Labor's proposals and dump some of his own.

That also gives him some scope to contemplate some fresh expenditure, for example to address political problems in health and education. He probably must do this, if only in the form of acknowledgement that Labor's electoral platforms were a package of both cuts and expenditure. And that gives him some opportunity to make some running, even if he cheerfully admits that he has freely borrowed policy and budget ideas from the Opposition. It ought to go without saying that Labor ought to be at least partially compromised in their capacity to resist measures they had themselves proposed, particularly if the reinvented Turnbull was giving as well as taking.

The model for this could be, at least in part, Robert Menzies in 1962, just after he had his own near-death experience at the end of 1961. As with other close elections, the agony of 1961 was prolonged by a long period of waiting for postal and section votes. The last seat determined was Moreton, won by Jim Killen. Most of the legends about this, such as that he ultimately scraped in on Communist Party preferences, or that Menzies told him he was magnificent, are not true, but it was genuinely a close-run thing.

Menzies, more properly Harold Holt, his Treasurer, had alienated voters (and Sir Warwick Fairfax) with a sharp contraction of credit from financial institutions. This had sent some lenders and borrowers to the wall and caused what was in those days regarded as an unemployment crisis. Labor proposed to deal with the problem (caused by monetary policy) with fiscal policy: by government spending programs. During the election campaign Menzies declared the Labor program to be wildly inflationary, and asked where the money was coming from. Labor won more than 50 per cent of the vote, and took 17 seats from the Coalition. But it ended up with 60 seats to the Coalition's 62.

When the new Cabinet was formed, a number of spending proposals came quickly up before it. One minister said, "We can't do that. It's straight out of the Labor platform that we so strongly attacked".

Menzies is said to have replied that if the policies were good enough for half the population they were good enough for him.

(Two years later, at a time of his choosing, and during a somewhat confected security crisis with Indonesia, the Menzies government was back with a comfortable majority. Those looking for 2016 parallels might remember that 1963 involved a major purchase of defence equipment, in that case, aircraft. The Menzies decision to buy the F111 (then called the TFX) instead of the British TSR2 pretty much took out the British aircraft industry, a pre-emptive strike which could have been retaliation for Harold Macmillan's application, in 1962 to join what was then called the Common Market. Australia was stunned by Britain's betrayal, though it did not, in any event, succeed. France vetoed Britain's entry, and Brentry did not occur until 1973).

In normal circumstances abrupt changes of policy, and abandonment of some of the set-piece rhetoric about the profligacy of Labor ideas, might seem a difficult message to sell to voters, the party, and the parliamentary party. The party is still dominated by conservative voices.

But there are some arguments for a reboot. First, despite the efforts to pretend a massive gap between Labor and Coalition ambitions for the budget bottom lines, the differences are relatively trivial. And the slightly more conservative Coalition figures are bedeviled by the zombie cuts, which must probably be, at some stage abandoned. In the new Parliament no mainstream party, Labor, Liberal or National is going to be too pure about money.

It may be that the Coalition still wants to foster the legend that the economy went to hell under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to pretend that the Coalition has proven more virtuous or has seriously addressed public spending in a way that has been better than Labor.

There are other problems or circumstances which can be said to require a complete review of economic policy. Coping with Nick Xenophon, with the interests of South Australian Liberals and, at least to some extent, with Pauline Hanson means that the Coalition must formally abandon some of its pure-market, no-subsidy rhetoric, if only to cope with demands for preferences for Australian steel, controls over foreign investment and so on.

Just how any measures designed to appease these interests can fit in with our so-called much-boasted free-trade agreements is not clear. But it does seem clear that the benefits such deals promise are likely to be realised in the short term, while world trade and growth are so much in the doldrums.

None of this requires that the Liberal Party must abandon claims to greater fiscal rectitude and prudence, of being less inclined to regulate than Labor, and less attracted to policies and programs which interfere with the operations of the market. Nor does it require that Turnbull abandon the claim that he, as a successful businessman, is more fey and sound on the state of the economy, or that interest rates and government debt and deficits will always be lower under the Coalition. For that matter, Labor (which has, over the past few decades, moved sharply to the right on economic issues, can always comfortably admit it is rather more inclined to use the collective resources of society to the public good, even as it seeks approximately the same fiscal outcomes.

At the moment most of the would-be conservative leaders are primping themselves for the same-sex marriage debates, rather than death-in-the-ditch struggles about small government or economic libertarianism. There is no shortage of economic libertarians (including ones who couldn't care less about moral issues, or gay marriage), but there is no senior standard bearer, and, given the realities, no percentage in a major brawl on the subject in the parliamentary party. Even those who hate Turnbull by reflex are likely to recognise that they will get little advantage by trying to bring him down. Better that he, rather than they, get hands dirty. If failure is likely, as some would expect (or hope), better that it be failure by him.

But if Turnbull is, in this sense, in a fairly comfortable position, why should he not think at least a little about being Turnbull, rather than some idealised Coalition leader, leaning heavily towards economic liberalism and moral conservatism?

Last week, I wrote of the risk that a re-elected Turnbull would have even less "mandate" to be himself – the political moderate – than he had through the first nine months of his prime ministership. He had, after all, campaigned hard on conservative issues, and denied he would shift. But that was when I was expecting that he would have a comfortable, if reduced, majority. In his present situation he has some reason for arguing that he needs a freedom to manoeuvre that he would not need if he were simply presiding over business as usual.

Could this give him scope to "discover" some new technology or argument for a super-duper, rather than a second-rate NBN? Could some sense of crisis about the Great Barrier Reef suggest fresh needs to look at government policies on climate change or carbon emissions? Could the "success" of boat interceptions provide some occasion for humanising our treatment of asylum seekers, here or abroad? Might we see good Malcolm rather than robot Malcolm?

Put another way, can, or will, Turnbull lead, rather than follow? He's unlikely to persist just by muddling along.