Quite a transformation. From leather jacket Malcolm warning voters against being conned by fig leaf Coalition policies that do little in the way of carbon reduction, to what ... Old King Coal, Captain Reliable, Chief Power Ranger?
Malcolm Turnbull hopes the take out will be more nuanced than that.
That said, he is now banking his entire political account on selling this shift to energy security which simultaneously, if we take the government at its word, offers an end to summer blackouts, cuts household and business power bills, provides new investment certainty, and yet still drives down overall emissions to meet the Paris Agreement.
Details of this blueprint remain to be explained, including most critically, the modelling that (presumably) supports these worthy, if heroic assertions.
But some things are apparent. The party room loves that the government has binned the Chief Scientist's clean energy target in favour of a system that essentially swings the government's market intervention from providing a leg-up to wind and solar, all the way across to ensuring that this "greening" of the electricity sector goes no further if it comes at the expense of decreased stability and less dispatchable electricity.
In other words, a bipartisan regulatory framework which through the renewable energy target, had sought to tilt the playing field towards clean energy to drive an economy-wide transformation, has now swung the other way.
The mandating of a minimum amount of traditional or fossil fuel-generated electricity - plus hydro - amounts to a giant handbrake on the subsidised shift to renewables that had brought with it steadily lowering generation costs through technological advances and economies of scale, but also a new risk element, intermittency.
The Coalition's view is that this regime has crowded out investment in baseload generation because (a) there is a finite amount of capital, (b) the unit price for renewable power when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing is so much lower than coal and gas as to make building new generators uneconomic and render even existing plants unviable for handling shortfalls of renewable energy or summer peak demand, and (c) rising prices and declining reliability cannot be tolerated.
Big questions remain. By taking this dramatic path, does this policy actually ensure that the prospect of political bipartisanship is lost, thus killing investment certainty anyway?
How does mandating more coal and gas-fired power drive down costs - even if it is clear it will improve dispatchable supply and thus, reliability?
Does this policy, coupled with the insistence that Australia will still meet its Paris targets put the country on a mediocre path?
More importantly, does it require that sectors other than electricity generation, do more to cut carbon emissions - namely heavy industry, agriculture, and transport - which will be even more costly and disruptive to the economy?
Tony Abbott recently called for Labor to be the party of renewables and for the Coalition to be the party of reliables. Seems that's how it has shaken out.
