He comes from Australia’s largest state, New South Wales, and Australia’s biggest and most cosmopolitan city, Sydney. He shares his origins with the previous three Liberal prime ministers, John Howard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, as well as Brendan Nelson, the other federal Liberal leader during this time.

There are important Liberal players from other states, including the conservative Queenslander Peter Dutton, who undermined Turnbull, and the former deputy leader, Julie Bishop, from Western Australia. But in a world where the culture of the state Liberal parties varies considerably, the NSW Liberals really do own the nation’s conservative leadership.

That makes the Liberal leadership and the conservative side of Australia’s prime ministerial coups quite different from those on the Labor side where Kevin Rudd from Queensland deposed Kim Beazley from Western Australia and was in turn overthrown by Julia Gillard from Victoria before returning the favour. The Labor leadership now rests with another Victorian, Bill Shorten. Labor exhibits a much more national look than a succession of Sydney Liberal leaders.

Morrison’s state of origin matters because while these recent Liberal leaders are very different individuals from different parts of a very big city they are all creatures of the small world that is the NSW Liberal Party. They are part of the Sydney Liberal ‘bubble’.

The NSW Liberal dynasty is headed by Howard, Australia’s second-longest serving prime minister. His imprimatur is regarded as priceless by his younger colleagues because of his record of success and he has stood determinedly by all three of them as each has had their short moment in the sun.

But his support comes at a cost to them because, at the age of 79, he now regularly offers sage media comments about Liberal Party affairs and wider national issues. His reputation is growing rather than fading as comparisons are made between the apparent stability of his era and the national leadership instability since 2010. He has been an unintended beneficiary of the current leadership chaos.

The Howard years were undoubtedly stable, given that the three senior Liberal leaders, Howard, treasurer Peter Costello and foreign minister Alexander Downer, held the same portfolios for the whole 11 years. But there was also constant leadership tension between Howard and Costello and deep party divisions over the monarchy-republic question which are now glossed over.

The cost extracted for his support is that Howard, who is firmly on the conservative centre-right of the party, has strong opinions on policy matters which he is not afraid to voice loudly. They can either help or hinder a prime minister. He supported Morrison in the dangerous recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and campaigned for the losing "no" case against Turnbull’s preference for the introduction of same-sex marriage.

The New South Wales Liberal Party has several notable characteristics. It has been extremely faction-ridden for many years and the battles between well-organised conservatives and moderates are bitter. The right-wing of the party contains a strong religious element, including a Catholic and an Evangelical right.

The NSW Liberal religious right is nurtured by a strongly conservative evangelical strain within Sydney Anglicanism, which puts it at odds with Anglicanism elsewhere in Australia, and by one of the more conservative dioceses in the Catholic Church, led now by Archbishop Anthony Fisher and previously by Cardinal George Pell. Neither Sydney Anglicans nor Sydney Catholics are known for encouraging inclusivity and/or female leadership.

The Liberal right also has the loud support of conservative secular shock jocks like Alan Jones and Ray Hadley and conservative newspaper columnists. Despite national voting trends it is a challenging environment for a moderate Liberal like Turnbull but a very supportive one for conservatives like Abbott and Morrison, giving them a ready outlet through their regular appearances with Hadley and Jones.

All prime ministers bring their own values and prejudices. One of these is that they fall back on known-quantity friends and colleagues from their own state when making appointments. Rudd, for example, appointed a fellow Queenslander, Quentin Bryce, who had been governor of Queensland, as governor-general. When Turnbull was looking for a safe pair of hands to review religious freedom he chose Sydney-sider Philip Ruddock, the long-serving Howard-era minister who had become state Liberal party president.

An unwillingness to move outside his personal comfort zone is one explanation for Morrison’s captain’s pick of NSW Governor and former general and defence force chief, David Hurley, as Australia’s next Governor-General. It is a pick which accords with Morrison’s own values which he expanded on in his remarkably effusive justification which drew on the model family values exhibited by David and Linda Hurley.

But it is also an illustration that we all live in our own bubble, in Morrison’s case a conservative Christian/white male/Liberal/Sydney bubble. For some time, in his random comments on education, gender, religious freedom and other matters he has demonstrated that that bubble is his comfort zone. It is a narrow view of the world, reinforced by Sydney media and church leaders, one in which traditional values are perpetually under siege, but which is not shared by large parts of the wider Australian community. His vision will be tested at the next federal election.

John Warhurst is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University