Was it when Gough Whitlam's effervescent "It's time" phenomenon shook the nation from its long post-war torpor?

Was it when Labor's Bob Hawke swept the unhappy Fraser government from power, the first of five consecutive Liberal losses?

Or was it when Kevin Rudd's bizarrely folksy Kevin07 presentation jolted the indomitable house of Howard off its foundations?

The Liberals' woes in 1983 steepened in dramatic fashion (exactly 40 years ago last Friday, incidentally) when Malcolm Fraser called a snap March 5 election, only to have Labor steal the initiative by switching from Bill Hayden to Hawke.

A freshly deposed Hayden lamented that "a drover's dog could lead the Labor Party to victory" which was probably right. But Hawke was a force majeure and the Coalition's reversal six weeks later was 24 seats.

Whitlam's breakthrough in 1972 was comparatively close with the Coalition dropping just eight seats.

Rudd sent it backwards by 22.

By these standards, last year was bad for the conservatives with a 19-seat setback. But even these numbers understate the crisis.

Beyond its threshold failure to retain a majority, the story of 2022 was about which seats fell and why.

And since then it is about how conservatism responds. The signs are not promising. They reveal a philosophy that has been severed from its traditional support, lost the capacity to assimilate new information, and thus lost the will to regain mainstream status.

Currently, the Liberals hold just four of 44 inner-city seats nationwide - the seats where the most educated and affluent reside. The leafy parliamentary strongholds of erstwhile Liberal heavyweights, Menzies, Turnbull, Howard, Abbott, Bishop (both Julie and Bronwyn) as well as Costello and Frydenberg, are all in enemy hands.

That Peter Dutton needs these seats back is obvious, yet he is more inclined to attack lost voters than to court their return.

Why? Because he knows that leaders who grasp the poisoned chalice straight off an election loss rarely prevail. It's not the voters he fears but his parliamentary "friends".

It is this sobering reality that puts visionless opposition leaders on the defensive making them look inwards first.

The paradox is that the party room's views are generally the ones the electorate has most recently rejected.

True leadership involves resisting this cheap internal allure and focusing on the electorate. It calls for contrition and adjustment. For framing new policy solutions, plotting a path back to a majority.

Perhaps though Dutton hopes to retrace Abbott's steps whose jaw-jutting oppositionism required two shots at the prize (2010 and 2013).

But two-election strategies are more fickle still. Kim Beazley, who like Hayden, is sometimes tagged as the best prime minister Australia never had, was said to have pursued this "realistic" approach after Labor's drubbing in 1996, only to secure a swing back to Labor of 4.6 per cent in 1998 bringing it 51 per cent of the vote.

With a more targeted (read expensive) marginal seats campaign, Labor might just have tripped the Howard era at its first hurdle.

Dutton's plan, such as can be discerned, seems to thrive on the narrow index of keeping the SAD happy. SAD by the way, stands for "Sky after dark" and its fellow right-wing carnival barkers. They think everything new is "woke", any reflection on the past is a kind of treason, and that all social change is mere fad except for reforms already made like say, federation and universal suffrage (which they would have vigorously opposed had they been around at the time).

Technically, Dutton, who slammed Labor's emissions targets in arrogant defiance of voter sentiment, still has time to support the constitutional referendum on First Peoples' recognition. Doing so would go a long way to demonstrating that he is (a) not an inflexible ideologue, and (b) prepared to 'lead' his party room, rather than simply 'read' it.

Given that Liberals often quote the Irish-born British MP Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Dutton might remember what the founder of philosophical conservatism said about MPs who parrot their support base: "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion".

MORE OPINION:

On the question of First Peoples' recognition, Australians should be under no illusion. If the referendum goes down, Australia will no longer be a country that had not got around to updating a constitution which ignored First Peoples. It will have become a nation that in the 21st century, will have actively decided against just recognition when offered the chance. That is an appalling prospect. One inviting global infamy.

Were Dutton to so lead, he might also see the uncontroversial sense in committing his party to female quotas, thus reflecting a clear community expectation.

The Liberals' blue-ribbon jewels went red, green, and teal, precisely on these kinds of issues - respect, historical truth-telling, constructive problem-solving politics, and environmental progress.

Whitlam, Hawke, and Rudd transitioned from opposition by promising modernisation.

MORE MARK KENNY:

What's Dutton got? A return to Morrisonian vacuity? To climate resistance and an escalating war on woke? This prospect will frighten voters way more than removing the King's likeness from the $5 note.

Dutton can either try to lead a mainstream party of government or resign himself to leading a minority show in which nostalgia and resentment concentrate.

What he does on the referendum will reveal his choice.