This week I have been up on the Gold Coast doing a story about Schoolies, that great Australian rite of passage where thousands of teenagers descend on Surfers Paradise in search of a booze-fuelled nirvana.

Had I wanted to experience some really chaotic party action, however, I should have stayed in Canberra. The Liberal Party has offered much better entertainment and been far worse behaved.

If I had a dollar for every time a drunken teenager ran up to our camera and shouted "Schoooooollllllieeees 09", I would almost be as rich as Malcolm Turnbull - whom I dare say might have been happy to swap places. Better to have drunken teenagers shouting at you than a party room of Liberal rebels baying for your head.

At the time of writing, Malcolm Turnbull's support for the government's revised emissions trading scheme (ETS) appears to have cost him the leadership of his party. With a series of mass frontbench resignations on Thursday, and an open challenge from Tony Abbott, a senior party figure, even his supporters now concede that he is political roadkill.

Turnbull's support or the government emissions trading scheme was founded on four broad strands of thought.

• First, like the former Prime Minister John Howard who proposed an ETS at the last election, he thinks that Australia has to reduce its emissions by attaching a price tag to carbon.

• Second, he thinks the Liberal Party could disappear off the map, like a low-lying atoll, if it positions itself as the party of climate change sceptics and deniers.

• Third, he felt the need to assert his leadership over the climate change rebels to demonstrate that he is still in control of his fractious party - although that tactic has clearly boomeranged.

• Fourth, if the Senate does not pass the government's emissions trading scheme - remember, the Rudd government does not have a majority in the upper house - it would provide the trigger for a double dissolution election, where every Senator and MP would have to seek re-election. Given Kevin Rudd's enduring popularity, an election would be ugly for the Liberals.

But the climate change sceptics reject the Turnbull policy, along with the political pragmatism which underpins it. This, for them, is a matter of high principle. They do not accept the scientific case that man is contributing to global warming, and think the emissions trading scheme would be unnecessarily ruinous for a resources-based economy.

Climate change for the Liberals has become like Europe once was for the Conservative Party in Britain - a polarising and emblematic issue involving unshakable principles. Given that, party discipline has gone out of the window, as it did for the Tories in Britain during their own wilderness years.

There's also a strong personal element to the Liberal rebellion. Within the party, there is an instinctive distrust of Malcolm Turnbull's great wealth, cosmopolitanism and metropolitan polish. And many backbenchers resent his over-weaning ambition - which is something that it hard to disown when you are trying to become the prime minister. Under John Howard, the Liberals became a party of battlers, and it hasn't warmed to a bluebood like Turnbull (even though, ironically, he is essentially a self-made man).

I've written before that Turnbull's obvious talents have not easily been transferred into the political realm. His business background makes him act sometimes like a domineering CEO who does not have much regard for his company's shareholders. His legal background makes him sound like a blustery barrister - although having started off in that vain at the national apology to the Forgotten Australians in Canberra last week, his speech became highly personal, highly emotional and highly effective.

Yet for all his faults, Turnbull has the "plausibility factor". It does not require a great leap of imagination to picture him occupying The Lodge.

That cannot be said for the two men vying now for the leadership. Tony Abbott is widely seen a highly erratic figure, sometimes referred to as the "Mad Monk" because of his devout Catholicism. Joe Hockey is a bulky, jocular individual who still has the feel of a political lightweight. He owes much of his popularity to his early morning duels on breakfast television with Kevin Rudd, and were he to win the leadership it would set up what observers are already calling a "Sunrise election", because of the name of Channel Seven's brekkie show. But while nobody doubts his likeability, you surely have to wonder about his electability.

As for Malcolm Turnbull, he is the man with the gold-plated CV. But surely it will not now be embellished with the job title he has made the target of his life - that of prime minister of Australia. It will be an abrupt end for a political career so rich with promise.

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In a room adorned by paintings by Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, I interviewed Kevin Rudd this morning on the prospects for the Copenhagen summit. Along with the Mexican President Felipe Calderon, he's been appointed a "friend of the chair", and is therefore set to play a leading role in the negotiations. He says that there will not be a legally-binding treaty at Copenhagen, but there will be what he calls an operational framework agreement - the hope being that a political agreement will be codified into an international treaty sometime in 2010.

I asked him about the prospects for a political agreement, since two years of negotiations have so far failed to produce one, and he was upbeat. I also probed him on what, to many international observers, is his highly anomalous position: urging others to sign up to an agreement while at the same time leading a country with the highest per capita emissions of any developed nation and the world's biggest exports of coal. Moreover, he's committed his government to an unconditional emissions target of just a 5% cut by 2020 - rising possibly to 15%, depending on what other countries do - which by international standards is small. He's also piling a lot of federal infrastructure money into the expansion of the coal export facilities in New South Wales and Queensland.

I was asked by Justin Webb on the Today programme whether Mr Rudd was a good man for the job. His friendship with Barack Obama certainly helps, I said - a senior administration official is on record as saying that Mr Obama feels more comfortable with Kevin Rudd than any other leader. His Mandarin might help him sway the Chinese - although it has not translated into warm relations between Beijing and Canberra. Quite the opposite, in recent months.

But three other things might stand him in good stead. First, his round-the-clock work ethic (he's been staying up late for video hook-ups with other key negotiators ahead of Copenhagen). Second, his fluency in, and enthusiasm for, jargon (there will be a lot of it at Copenhagen). And finally, his love of detail. Most people find it rather devilish. For Mr Rudd, it is something almost heavenly.

Here is an excerpt of the interview, so you can make up your own mind on what he had to say at the beginning of a week in which the Rudd government is hoping to push its emissions trading scheme through parliament...

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If you were to compile an Australian power list - we must do that sometime - I wonder where you would insert John Coates, the pit-bull of a man who runs the Australian Olympic Committee?

Like Australia at the Olympics, I reckon he might just get in the top six. But, like Australia at the Olympics, he might struggle to maintain his lofty perch over the coming years.

Always a man for a headline-grabbing soundbite - remember his jibe at the Brits in Beijing that the UK medal haul was impressive for a country with so very few swimming pools and such poor standards of personal hygiene? Mr Coates this week flashed his teeth at the businessman David Crawford, the author of a new report on sports funding, who argued that it is not "sensible" for Australia to aim for a top five finish at the Olympics.

Crawford also recommended that more money should be spent on popular, high participation sports rather than being targeted at the elite Olympic sports.

In a rip-snorter of a press conference hours after the report had been released, this is how Mr Coates greeted reporters: "Good afternoon. Obviously this is going to be one of the last occasions I see you. The Olympic Games will not be important enough for your editors to bother sending you in future, if Mr Crawford is correct."

He then went nuclear, describing the report as "un-Australian".

Here is his quote, in full: 'It just seems un-Australian for me to settle something for second best. We gain tremendously in terms of international reputation by our performance at the Olympic Games. I thought that was recognised, it hasn't been by this panel."

You can hear a report on the press conference here, and it is well worth a listen and read an editorial from John Coates here.

With Britain devoting squillions to winning more golds at the London games, and rich club nations like France and Italy following suit, David Crawford says it is unrealistic for Australia to try to match them.

He's proposing that Olympic funding remain at its present level, rather than giving it the $100m boost that the Australian Olympic Committee is seeking.

As David Crawford points out, a niche sport like water polo actually receives more money than golf, tennis and bowls combined.

Having married into an Aussie family which can boast an Olympic gold medal, I know the value attached to that sporting bullion.

At my relative's 50th birthday party, we even got to relive the famed commentary from Norman May: "GOLD, GOLD for Australia, GOLD" - which described his medal-winning race at the Moscow Games, and which still to this day sends shivers down Australian spines (it's the Aussie equivalent of "They Think It's All Over").

Clearly, this has long been a country which has projected itself internationally by flaunting its sporting prowess - a statement repeated to the point of sporting cliche.

And remember, the Australian Institute of Sports was set up after the country returned from Montreal - horror or horrors! - without a single gold, when Malcolm Fraser, the then prime minister, hit the panic button.

But could the money, as Mr Crawford suggests, be better spent on grassroots, high-participation sports?

The government will deliver its verdict on the report later in the year.

With the Australian newspaper already calling the Crawford report "a national tragedy" would Kevin Rudd risk offending the great Australian sporting public by giving its findings the rubber stamp?

PS: A further example of the Ozification of world sport: Thierry Henry appears to have become proficient in the skills of Aussie Rules Football.

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