Dominic Perrottet, Gladys Berejiklian and Matt Kean (Images: AAP)

The NSW Liberal Party is the best of times and the worst of times. It counts Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison in its ranks — the two worst prime ministers since Billy McMahon. It produced reactionary Craig Kelly, now departed for sunnier political climes, and Gladys Berejiklian, queen of the pork-barrel and spectacular misjudgment, as well as a string of MPs who have engaged in misconduct or outright corruption.

It’s also produced a successful state government that has lifted New South Wales from the mire Labor left it in in 2011, has led the country with ambitious climate policies that are driving investment and jobs in renewables, and in Dominic Perrottet has the only leader outside the Labor-Greens government in the ACT genuinely interested in economic reform.

It’s a government that has relatively successfully balanced moderates and conservatives and their factional conflicts — something it hasn’t always managed to do in the past.

Perrottet proposes that the states effectively lead Australia with an energised Council for the Australian Federation treating the Commonwealth as an obstructive bystander to progressing key reforms, and speaks of having more in common with his Labor counterparts than with his federal counterparts.

It all raises the question of how the same party can produce a successful, moderate, high-achieving government and also hold a high degree of responsibility for the grotesque clown show that is the Morrison government.

Partly it’s down to personnel. While NSW state moderates include Matt Kean, one of the best political talents of his generation, and Deputy Premier Stuart Ayres, the federal NSW moderates are an array of low-wattage time servers. Ayres’ partner, Marise Payne, is the invisible woman, with an act of Parliament required to get a word out of her beyond the latest diplomatic appointment, and dullard Communications Minister Paul Fletcher’s best days were spent carrying Richard Alston’s bags. Backbenchers Trent Zimmerman and Jason Falinski dwell in northern Sydney obscurity, and Dave Sharma purports to be a moderate but has a long history of doing whatever it takes to promote himself.

The poor quality of the NSW moderates carries through to their internal political tactics. While right-wing extremists and climate denialists in the Coalition have no qualms about crossing the floor, undermining prime ministers and generally behaving, in Malcolm Turnbull’s words, like terrorists — and get what they want — their Coalition colleagues know that the worst the NSW moderates will ever do is call a journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald and whinge. That’s why they’ve been signally ineffective in achieving change on issues like climate and energy.

There’s also a structural limitation on what even a talented federal moderate can do. The federal Liberals and Nationals, and particularly the LNP in Queensland and Liberals in Western Australia, rely heavily on fossil fuel industries for donations. Although it generates significant coal exports, the NSW economy is a modern, globalised economy, which isn’t dominated by the business of digging stuff up and shipping it overseas. Whereas the federal Nationals are primarily a party of fossil fuel donors and aggressively represent their interests, the NSW Nationals are fully on board with Kean’s ambitious climate policies.

The NSW federal moderates are in an important sense a waste of political space. They are incapable of effecting change within the federal Coalition because of the weight of fossil fuel donations and the power exerted by fossil fuel companies, even before dealing with the opposition of climate denialists and anti-science extremists in the Coalition.

The voters they represent are effectively disenfranchised due to this. The only remedy is either for those moderates to adopt the same tactics as the climate denialist terrorists among their colleagues — something they seem genetically incapable of doing — or of being replaced with independents who will leverage their position in Parliament to deliver policies demanded by their electorates.

In the interim, the NSW government can get on with leading — showing an alternative world where Liberal governments can be reformist and successful.