But it is not just Malcolm Turnbull and the government that are the losers in this latest political spat, it also signals the end of any hope for a national interest-focused political consensus emerging to address a range of critical issues, of which climate change is just one.

And the greatest enemy of consensus politics in Australia is the key figure behind yesterday’s leadership challenge, former prime minister Tony Abbott. While Peter Dutton was the challenger, it was Abbott, deposed by Turnbull in 2015, who prepared the ground, publicly criticising Turnbull’s leadership and policy.

It needs to be remembered that it was Tony Abbott who triggered a revolt in 2009 that ended Malcolm Turnbull’s first term as party leader over Turnbull’s bipartisan support for the Rudd government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

And it has been Abbott the prime mover in opposing any and every attempt to cap greenhouse gas emissions, promote renewable energy and phase out coal-fired power generations – not so much on the policy arguments, but on the basis that these initiatives come from the other side and are therefore to be opposed.

It has been a hallmark of Abbott’s entire political career to view the world in Manichean terms.

His own life has been defined and circumscribed by unquestioned beliefs that would admit no subtleties nor entertain doubts. From his Catholic seminarian days, through his anti-left crusades as a student politician, to the culture wars of the 1990s and the New South Wales Liberal Party’s own potent brand of anti-Labor tribalism, Tony Abbott has been the captive of inflexible dogma.

In his first speech to parliament, back in 1994, Abbott assailed the very idea of doubt, asserting that loss of faith was “a social problem extending far beyond politics and far beyond Australia.” The entire Western world was enveloped in “a pandemic of doubt and introspection in which people are questioning their God, their country and even themselves.”

In a controversial speech in London last year, in which he asserted that global warming was doing more good than harm, he called climate change a “post-Christian theology” and said the decline of religion in society had left a hole in which other forms of “dogma” could take root.

Intellectually, Abbott has never wavered from the conviction that his real political enemies are secular and progressive Australians, and in a 2007 speech, he celebrated the fact that conservative Catholics in the last Howard government were instrumental in overturning the Northern Territory’s euthanasia law, banning gay marriage, stopping the ACT heroin safe injecting room trial and reducing abortion numbers through pregnancy support counselling.

To Abbott, the Labor Party was a haven for secular progressives; the whole notion of climate change and attempts to address it were simply just other examples of these values. To even consider them as valid, much less than meeting them half way, was in his view tantamount to treason.

In 1997, I recorded a series of interviews with Abbott’s professed political hero, the late Bob Santamaria, the veteran Catholic political activist and key figure in bringing about the Labor split in the 1950s. I asked him how he saw Abbott, then beginning his political rise in the Howard government, and Santamaria smiled and shook his head.

“Tony, I’m afraid, has never left student politics behind. The world is not black and white; indeed, the older I get the more shades of grey I see. I’m not sure he will change.”

The most successful prime minister in recent years in terms of pushing through long-range reform policies was Labor’s Bob Hawke, who was essentially a believer in consensus. Malcolm Turnbull is also, by nature and inclination, a consensus operator, who paid the price for it once and looks like doing so again. Bill Shorten, similarly, works on the consensus principle, but what this latest battle tells him is that, should he win the next election, forget any idea of consensus because the other side is not interested.

It is ironic that the so-called conservatives in the Liberal Party, led by Tony Abbott, blithely ignore the sage words of Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism, who warned that the task of statesmen was to maintain equilibrium between “the two principles of conservation and correction.” To govern, he wrote, was to engage in perpetual compromise – “sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil.” In other words, ideological purism had no place.

Political consensus is the big loser after yesterday; if it was already in feeble health, it is now dead.

Dr Norman Abjorensen is the author of The Manner of Their Going: Prime Ministerial Exits from Lyne to Abbott.