Amid the partisan battle over renewable energy, blackouts, and soaring power prices, there was a sense on Tuesday that it was Malcolm Turnbull who was more effectively honing his lines, and isolating his opponents' weaknesses.
This is despite the likelihood that the formerly green-tinged PM has probably surrendered more of his own reputation in the conduct of this debate than Bill Shorten.
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The Liberal Party has been accused by Labor of lying about the reason for South Australia's blackouts by blaming renewable energy, something Malcolm Turnbull rejects. Courtesy ABC News 24.
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Renewable blame game
The Liberal Party has been accused by Labor of lying about the reason for South Australia's blackouts by blaming renewable energy, something Malcolm Turnbull rejects. Courtesy ABC News 24.
And it is despite Scott Morrison unhelpfully brandishing a dirty great lump of coal in the chamber last week - a visual so egregiously contrary to Turnbull's former image, and so deliberate in its old-economy belligerence, as to suggest that was its point.
Few doubt that Turnbull has been bleeding progressives. His standing has declined sharply since his promotion to the top job.
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Voter disillusionment over his indifference to causes he once championed - forward-leaning positions on climate policy, marriage equality, the republic - is usually cited.
But Turnbull has had an epiphany. Faced with the fight of his political life, he has concluded that retaining the shallow affections of the browned-off Turnbull "likers" is a luxury he cannot afford. Many were never Coalition voters any way.
This realisation has freed the PM to target what he argues is Labor's ideological commitment to renewables and what he maintains is the Left's cold indifference to the practical results of dysfunctional policy, on households and businesses.
Like the best political arguments, Turnbull aims to reduce a complex argument to a basic equation: South Australia has the most expensive, least reliable electricity supply in the country - and it also has the highest level of non-synchronous wind-solar energy.
You do the maths.
By citing examples such as Haigh's Chocolates and large fisheries whose businesses have been pushed to the wall by sky-rocketing power bills and then slammed by calamitous outages, the PM is combating Labor's virtuous, future-focused policy, with tangible real-world consequences now.
This explains why Turnbull seized on Mark Butler's description of the situation in SA as a series of small and large hiccups in the power supply.
Butler, Labor's energy and climate spokesman, had been complaining about the government's shameless politicisation of the blackouts.
He had a point. But in South Australia, the debate is beyond politics now. There it is about energy security and it is annoyingly real.
Having read this clearly, Turnbull is now shaping to make it real beyond the central state's parched borders.