Coalition turmoil has handed Anthony Albanese political space few prime ministers enjoy. Whether he uses it to govern with purpose – or continues to drift – is now the central question.

The Coalition leadership changes and tumults have given Anthony Albanese a potential boon that few of his predecessors, Labor or Liberal have ever enjoyed. Over the next six months voters will reassess him from scratch. That’s primarily because he is now facing, in Angus Taylor, an opponent from nowhere desperately trying to invent a persona that does not much fit the character he has, and a party likewise trying to squeeze itself into an ever-narrowing space.

Albanese’s character and reputation have been largely based so far on his performance against Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton and Sussan Ley, each, in his or her own way, part of a Coalition history that the current leadership team would like voters to forget.

Strictly, Angus Taylor, a senior frontbencher and recognised future leader for each of these former leaders, ought to be seen as a part of that history, but he has left few fingerprints for many to remember. His policy contribution was minor, and unmemorable, even when he was minister for energy, shadow treasurer or minister for defence. He has left no legacies, other than slapstick presentational blunders, poor skills at prevarication and evidence of abiding vanity.

He is said to be a philosophical leader of his tribe – and on that account alone a person of greater potential for his party than the hapless Sussan Ley. No speech he has made in parliament has ever galvanised or shifted a debate over policy or programs. No insight has changed the way others, even his supporters, see the status quo. Few of his colleagues, and even fewer among the public could remember an original idea for which he has argued, a memorable phrase he has used in debate, or a perfectly characteristic ideal, purpose or end for which he could be said to stand and do no other. He is perhaps the marketer’s dream: the blank canvas to be presented as having an attractive but confected and entirely plastic persona.

He cannot succeed with that. In short order his first task is to introduce himself to voters, and to explain what the Coalition he now leads now stands for. He must invent for himself a past and sell the idea that he has long been on a crusade to benefit his nation, its population and his side of politics around policies and programs that are in their best interests. Although he can hardly ignore the scale of popular rejection that the last election, and the latest opinion polls show, he must demonstrate why the decline is now over and the revival starts now. He must do that while facing derision from the Labor Party and the contempt of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, who claims that he has tried to steal policies closely associated with her, and that he lacks the ability and courage to carry them out. On the evidence, many disillusioned former Coalition voters suspect she is right.

But Angus Taylor is not the only leader that voters will be looking at anew. Anthony Albanese may have been in politics for a long time. He may have been prime minister for longer than any of his predecessors since Bob Hawke 40 years ago. He may have been re-elected in a landslide of a scale not seen for 60 years. He must, by any account, be regarded as a success, a wily and skilful politician, and one with a strong feel for what the public wants.

Yet he has been prime minister during a period in which many of the public have become turned off by politics, and, particularly by both major political parties. It is by no means only his fault, but he must wear his share of the blame. Once about 90 per cent of voters gave their first preference votes to either the Labor Party or one of the Coalition parties. Last time about only one in every two voters gave their first preference to either. On all the polling evidence, the mainstream parties will score an even smaller percentage at the next election.

Voters have chosen alternatives and independents of both the left and the right, and, in recent times, the Liberal Party has lost voters to moderates such as the teals and community parties, focused on climate change action, integrity reforms and human rights, and to One Nation, a populist party of grievance blaming their woes on immigration, multiculturalism, and wokeness.

The last election and recent opinion polls show that Albanese is the clearly preferred candidate as against the Liberal Party, and probably the Nationals. Labor is getting the preferences of the Greens and some independents, however much Labor campaigns against them almost as strongly as it does against the Coalition.

But Labor, like the Coalition, is bleeding first preference votes, and, over the years, Labor’s first preference vote has usually been a declining proportion of its two-party preferred vote. It does not appear, to say the least, that Albanese’s style and personality has been a factor that has been slowing this trend, however successful Albanese has been in being preferred to the Coalition.

Polls and commentaries suggest why. Voters generally, but particularly voters who prefer Labor to the Coalition, think that Labor has been timid in government. They have criticised its small ambition and its failure to push change hard enough. The criticism is stronger now that Labor seems to have an overwhelming mandate. The size of the majority may also be a reward of sorts for not going mad in government, or going too far, but the size of the swing and the nature of the campaign shows that the election was primarily a rejection of Dutton’s personality rather than Labor’s getting a tick for its record.

Despite the best efforts of the Murdoch, and, increasingly the Nine media, Labor’s standing does not seem to have been much affected by the Bondi massacre, or by Albanese’s initial flailing about the nature of the inquiry he should hold. Nor strictly did Albanese’s own standing with voters seem to change much. But it was quite clear that it shook his confidence, and that it shook the confidence of many of his supporters, including intimates. The hit was to his judgment, and not, as it has usually been, to his caution, his refusal to be rushed or to give in to mere public pressure, or to extend to outsiders any sort of explanation of what he had been doing or thinking.

This time around, he caved in to public pressure about having a royal commission into the tragedy, even after he was aware that the steady drumbeat of regular calls for such an inquiry was being organised and orchestrated by Josh Frydenberg, the former Liberal Treasurer who has personally blamed him for the massacre.

He was right to hold a royal commission. It was an error of judgment not to have announced it almost immediately after the events, as everyone, including the security agencies plainly expected. But Albanese has made that sort of political error before and resisted all pressure to reverse his position. This time he responded, to cues given him by The Australian, in full hysterical mode, seeming to think it might topple him over the issue.

Directly blamed for the shootings, on the basis that he had neglected to act quickly enough to deal with complaints of an upsurge of antisemitism, he was soon apologising profusely for his tin ear. He made repeated apologies, taking the criticism as read. There was certainly evidence enough of a dramatic upsurge of criticism of the actions of the Israeli state over its actions in Gaza, but very little evidence that, for most Australians, it had led to a conflation of the actions of the Jewish state with prejudice against individual Jews because of their religion or ethnicity. Most seemed to understand the difference.

The government swiftly enacted laws criminalising incitements to racial hatred, and, typically made a mash of it, even if they were saved from the full consequences of its errors of judgment by the antics of the opposition and their split. That the legislation contained serious infringements of the right of freedom of speech has since become obvious by the ham-fisted actions of the Australian Federal Police in attempting to seize satirical cartoons portraying Trump and various others, including Benjamin Netanyahu as Nazi soldiers.

Perhaps Albanese cannot be blamed for the overreactions of NSW Premier Chris Minns, or the predictable actions of the NSW Police, though he certainly should have anticipated the problems that the reflex actions stopping demonstrations would cause. One of the legacies of the war on Gaza is that the rights of all Australians to express their opinions, to assemble and to protest government action, including by marching is now considerably reduced. And Albanese himself sometimes seems to give the impression that he thinks that the right to hold a demonstration is a privilege within the gift of a Commissioner of Police or a Supreme Court judge, rather than a constitutional freedom.

Albanese further compounded his misjudgements by inviting a visit to Australia by the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog. Ostensibly this was to comfort the entirely innocent victims of the Bondi massacre and to express solidarity over an attack that has all the hallmarks of an attack on Jews because they were Jews.

But Herzog made no bones about his being on a propaganda mission selling the actions of the Israeli state and conflating any criticisms of its actions over Gaza with antisemitism. This may have impressed some disposed to see things that way. But it did not increase social harmony, nor did it serve to lower the temperature on matters about which many Australians were already sharply divided.

Under Albanese, it seems, it is only critics of Israel who need to calm down.

One might hope or expect that the intensity of the issue will progressively drop. But it is unlikely to go away soon. Passions caused by the police and political mismanagement of the Sydney demonstration will continue for some time, particularly, as is inevitable, when it becomes clear that the “context” does not explain or justify a pattern of police assaults on participants.

The royal commission, and the associated reports into the actions of government to rising antisemitism, as well as any failing by police and security agencies will also be in the headlines for months, almost inevitably producing material capable of embarrassing the federal government, and its agencies. And little is settled in the Middle East, least of all about Gaza. These are matters of intense interest to an Australian population much bigger than the nation’s million or so people of the Muslim religion. (Nor are they going to go away if Angus Taylor and Pauline Hanson get their way and “bad Muslims” are excluded from the immigration system.)

It is Israel’s behaviour that is in the spotlight, and for many Jewish Australians, many Muslim Australians and many ordinary Australians who recognise indiscriminate slaughter when they see it. Efforts to “explain” the slaughter, or to justify it, or to see its wickedness as being the result of some crafty actions by Hamas are only likely to keep the cause alive.

Albanese can consider himself very lucky that he has, for the moment, an opposition scarcely able to hold him to account for his disconnect from reality. He might even consider that he can continue to make mistakes galore, confident that the opposition will continue to make itself, not him, the issue. An incompetent, ineffective and suicidal opposition is an opportunity for serious misgovernment, free from public scrutiny and government caution.

But it could also be an opportunity for a complete change of style by a prime minister who cannot feel himself under too much pressure. Who need not chase after every opposition distraction, or allow Taylor, or Hanson, to set the agenda of government. Who has the room for serious policy work, including with public consultation and discussion of options. Who can show the public the difference between being serious, whether about the state of the economy, the size of the nation’s population, or major public policy problems such as housing, health care, education and prudent budgeting. Which could be a model government, governing for the long-term and in the public interest, rather than by reflex to fresh events, and with an eye to looking after its mates.

Too much to hope for? Perhaps.

If Albanese cannot remake himself over coming months, he’s never going to. If Albanese cannot now level with the Australian public about what he wants and how he is going to go about it, his failure will not be a quirk of circumstance but a profound, and ultimately fatal character flaw. Dealing with Angus should be a doddle. It is dealing with himself that is the challenge.