Such generalisations have their limitations.

Yet initiative-resistance uncannily captures the 2019 election, in which Labor outlined an unwieldy manifesto and the sitting government reacted with little more than a negative scare campaign and some tax cuts.

The choice was deliberately reduced to one of change or stasis.

With some notable exceptions, the transformative developments in Australia's political economy have come mostly from centre-left governments, yet conservatives can lay claim to be the more natural party of power.

The numbers don't lie.

For all its governing intent, Labor has held power for just six of the last 25 years, and has secured a parliamentary majority just once since 1993 - approaching three decades ago.

If nothing else, this speaks to a certain electoral cautiousness - and, to be frank, several dud Labor campaigns.

While the left views reform as a moral good, traditional conservatives are not uncomfortable with their brand as prime defenders of the current order, eschewing a big state, economic redistribution, social reform and the rest of it.

But what does defence of the status quo mean when the challenge comes not from your opponents' radical social engineering ambitions, but from something far bigger - something exogenous and unstoppable?

If the core purpose of conservatism is protecting our way of life from forces that would destroy it, then it behoves its adherents to be clear-eyed about the origin of any threat.

Yet conservatives in Australia attack not the causes of carbon emissions, but those advocating measures necessary to address it.

Elsewhere, more sophisticated conservatives can see the difference.

Speaking to the Global Investment Summit in London on Tuesday, Britain's Tory PM Boris Johnson conspicuously reworked the iconic Gordon Gekko line from Wall Street, to declare, "Green is good, green is right, green works".

He could have added, "lunch is for Whigs" but probably figured a room full of hedge-fund tycoons would miss the joke.

What he did announce, though, was an $AU18 billion private investment fund for clean energy, in a meeting designed to unlock what he called "the trillions of the markets" to further accelerate this "green revolution".

Imagine a Coalition politician in Australia spruiking the opportunities of a "green revolution".

Britain will corner much of this finite pool. This is modern conservatism in the face of a threat that Johnson acknowledges will happen whether we like it or not.

In Australia to date, the forces of a much dumber resistance have dominated, moving mountains to move nowhere.

First from opposition, the Coalition's dozen-year negation has exhibited denial, abuse, brazen fossil-fuel boosterism, and a disingenuous torrent of double-speak.

From wrecking balls, python squeezes, and hundred-dollar roasts, to the end of the weekend, the Coalition's approach has been a cynical exercise in electoral profiteering.

Now, at one minute to midnight, a grudging conversion has laid bare the results of a decade of faux activity.

The suddenness has revealed a government colossally unprepared, and the Coalition's own regional base betrayed.

Always looking for the trick shot, Scott Morrison has succeeded only in snookering himself.

He will now attend global climate crisis talks with nothing convincing to say, precisely because he has done none of the political spadework required to bring his constituency along.

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The pattern of Morrison's buck-passing is well recognised, but it customarily comes after things go awry, rather than in real time.

Running out of time, he tasked the government's in-house lobby for big coal (the party which once represented farmers) to perform the U-turn.

The result of this negligence is that critical economic policy has been surrendered to the Nationals' famously mercurial party room - a collection of old-time conservative ward heelers, a smattering of wiser heads, and the odd carnival barker.

Note it was Joyce, not Morrison, who first revealed last Monday there would be no 2030 target put forward in Glasgow (the central purpose for the summit) because "we just don't agree with it".

In Parliament, Joyce then claimed the Nationals would determine the government's final position, only for Morrison to declare it would be cabinet - in which, by the way, Joyce and other Nationals sit. Go figure.

Australia's wasted decade now invites an uncomfortable question: can the Coalition be trusted to govern when crucial reform collides with self-interest?