And, that last week's belated muzzling of a Coalition foghorn undermining official COVID-19 health advice, was driven by public health considerations alone.

But alas, it is probably the chill wind of electoral politics that the Prime Minister can feel right now.

Survival rather than science.

The give-away is Morrison's characteristic latency period - his studied reluctance to censure hard line Coalition MPs even when they undermine the government on matters such as climate action, and COVID-19.

What's less clear is why. Presumably when it comes to maintaining vaccine confidence, the PM would want to double-down on pandemic success to date?

And on global warming, it's a bit of no-brainer too - voters are already convinced so where's the risk?

It's not just that there is no future in fossil fuels, it's that there are no new votes either.

Future generations will hardly say "he tried to do too much, acted too soon".

No, the charge against successive Coalition governments will be ignoring clear evidence at the time.

A few election wins in the twenty-teens won't explain that away.

This though, hints at the other dimension of politics which has been holding Morrison back.

Think back to the Coalition's pointlessly harsh negation of marriage equality through 2015-17.

Culminating in total capitulation, this produced a world of pain over a reform about which ordinary Australians were simply not fussed.

The greatest resistance came from government itself. It's a similar story on greening the economy.

What's more, the government's minority position is only set to worsen.

Demographic change (influx of new voters) and the ever-mounting body of evidence (such as last summer's bushfire catastrophe) will ensure that past fear-mongering over soaring electricity prices will lose its potency.

Denialists won't admit it, but this fight is already lost. Morrison knows this which is why he now talks with Joe Biden about a "pathway" to net-zero by 2050 which he calls "preferable".

He also says, somewhat confusingly, that it will be achieved through technology not taxes and that this is why he will not stipulate the 2050 as a target.

Figure that out. If technology is the best way to decarbonise - as he insists - why does that preclude a target towards which this supposedly superior policy mechanism can strive?

Answer: because it's about Coalition internals.

Yet even here, his prescriptions lack consistency. Only last September the Coalition outlined its Technology Investment Roadmap which aims to corral some $18 billion of future government investments into five priority technologies with big emissions cutting potential: carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, soil carbon, batteries, and "green" steel and aluminium production.

Some of these will deliver and some won't but either way, businesses and consumers have been getting around government inaction already.

Almost one in four homes now has solar PV - a fact right there that suggests Australians need no further convincing.

Within the Coalition however, an asymmetric climate war rages between an essentially agnostic majority, and a committed rump of hardliners threatening chaos. It is cultural.

Morrison may be less vulnerable to this rump's ire than his moderate predecessor Malcolm Turnbull, but with a similar wafer-thin majority, he is not impervious.

So hyper-aware was Turnbull that even when he secured the party room's support for his national energy guarantee (twice), he still blinked, never putting it to parliament.

Morrison's mystifying reluctance to directly contradict or admonish the climate-sceptic MP Craig Kelly for spreading false information on the coronavirus betrays his sensitivity to this threat.

Asked about spending taxpayers' dollars to encourage vaccine take-up while one of his own raises doubts and spruiks unproven medicines, Morrison parried.

"He's not my doctor and he's not yours. But he does a great job in Hughes," he told the National Press Club on country-wide TV.

Two days later he did act but only when media coverage became so extensive as to be harming his leadership. Months of attacks on state chief health officers, state governments, medical authorities, the TGA, and vaccines, had not been sufficient.

Reconciling these divergent climate positions is Morrison's challenge now. On the one hand he has the country, which holds his future in its hands at the ballot box.

It wants him to lead as he has on coronavirus.

On the other is his partyroom, which holds his leadership in its hands in a much more direct sense. It wants him to resist.

Both options portend a breach of trust, but they are hardly equal. Only one will matter in the long run of history.

The right answer is obvious. A central key to Australia's success through the pandemic has been unity of purpose.

Australian social cohesion it is not merely the dividend of governments respecting experts, but rather, it is the compound effect of public interest science and national interest policy working in hand-in-glove.

That is, politicians, health regulators, physicians, researchers, all pulling in the same direction - each reinforcing the role and legitimate motives of the other.

While comparable nations have descended into pandemic pandemonium, surveys show public trust has actually climbed appreciably in Australia - reaching 55 per cent in November according to the Scanlon Foundation's Mapping Social Cohesion report, unveiled on Thursday.

The negative parallel with climate becomes all the more obvious. Here, expert consensus has been pilloried, universities attacked, objective data portrayed as opinion, and scientists politically tagged so as to diminish their credibility.

Uncertainty - consistently present through the COVID-19 learning-curve also - has been depicted as weakness, weaponised by recalcitrant governments to ratchet-up fear and divide constituencies for electoral gain.

Morrison likes to say emissions are already 16 per cent lower than they were in 2005.

But past emissions don't just disappear. This climatic alteration is cumulative.

That the Paris commitment is already inadequate will be confirmed in the lead-up to three climate-dominated international meetings this year.

Within months we will learn if Australia is to be a participant in global problem-solving, or further marginalised as an international pariah.