If John Howard wins the coming election, manuals on election campaigning will need to be rewritten. The new manual will say it is good to trail your opponent by around ten percentage points throughout the ten months leading up to the election. It is good to test your leadership status among colleagues in the middle of what is meant to be a diplomatic triumph, find out that most want you to quit, and then stay on. And it is good to have a major leak during a campaign, exposing a Cabinet split on one of the principal issues in dispute between the parties.

On Saturday 27 October Lenore Taylor revealed in the Financial Review that the environment minister, Malcolm Turnbull, had unsuccessfully recommended to Cabinet that the government ratify the Kyoto Protocol. This is the biggest leak in any campaign I can remember. Although federal election campaigns are times of saturation media coverage and frenzied media activity, leaks are rare.

In 1996, the unfortunate Ralph Willis claimed he had a leak from the Liberal opposition, but it turned out to be a forgery and gave opposition leader John Howard an opportunity to express righteous indignation, leaving Labor reeling. Very occasionally, especially when there is about to be a change of government, there are helpful leaks from the public service to the opposition. The Hawke Labor opposition benefited from two such small leaks in 1983, and orchestrated their release to the media.

But a leak revealing a division inside the cabinet on a major policy issue is something new. It put the prime minister on the defensive during his interview with Laurie Oakes on the Sunday program and led to a rash of comment in opinion columns. Turnbull vigorously denied he had been the leaker and refused to confirm or deny the substance of the leak, as did the prime minister. Effectively, according to Michelle Grattan, the ministers confirmed the story.

Apart from these defensive public statements the leak led to a flurry of other government ministers speaking anonymously, almost all denouncing Turnbull for not being a team player, for putting individual survival in his own seat ahead of the government’s. In Monday’s Australian, Glenn Milne, reliable conduit for the views of the Costello forces - an attribute which may be in declining demand - pounded Turnbull for these failings, but then very mysteriously also attributed the leak to two other unnamed ministers (acting alone or together?) who did it for unknown reasons. So that settles that.

But the bulk of the following week’s Kyoto coverage was prompted not by the leak over present policy but by a statement about how a future Labor government would handle negotiations over a post-Kyoto treaty. The Australian devoted most of its front page, several commentary articles and an editorial to what it considered a major gaffe by Peter Garrett about the ALP’s negotiating position for post-Kyoto agreement.

This excited the Australian, far, far more than, for example, deputy prime minister Mark Vaile’s comment a couple of days later, still expressing scepticism about climate change. “There is conflicting scientific evidence,” he claimed. But this did not provoke the heavy coverage given to Garrett, the commentary or the editorialising.

It is astounding how the News Limited papers still dance to the government’s tune on Kyoto. Its major somersaults and divisions pass with little notice and even less probing. For example, there was no curiosity about what the government’s position on “developing countries” (as if they would all act together) would entail. According to the World Resources Institute, Indonesia and Australia emit almost the same amount of greenhouse gases, both contributing about 1.5 per cent of the global total. But Indonesia has around twelve times Australia’s population. In other words, one Indonesian produces one twelfth the greenhouse gases emitted by one Australian. What might a negotiating position that has some chance of mutual agreement be in relation to Indonesia? The government never seems to have to answer such questions because journalists do not pose them. Rather, the media allows the parties to frame the debate, and it comes down to reporting clashing claims with little attention to the substance of the problem.

This lack of curiosity about the diplomatic dimensions of Australia’s stance has long puzzled me. Ten years ago while the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated I was living in Tokyo. As the talks progressed, the Japanese media reported each day’s developments with a strong sense of the historic occasion that was building. Day after day, the main report included a footnote with some reference to Australia engaging in special pleading and playing a spoiling role.

The Europeans, Japanese and North Americans were united in the view that global warming was a great threat, and while they differed on specific policy proposals, all made speeches outlining the dimension of the problem. Few if any such speeches were heard from the leader of the Australian delegation, Robert Hill.

While the major powers moved towards an historic agreement, Australia kept insisting that it needed special treatment. Because Australia is such a minor player on a global scale, the major players were prepared to overlook its intransigence in order to achieve such agreement. All the other developed countries signed on to move towards a reduction in their greenhouse levels compared to the 1990 benchmark year. Australia was one of three countries allowed an increase.

Then, at the eleventh hour, Australia said it would only sign after it got a special concession to include land clearing. As 1990 had been a year of extraordinary land clearing in Queensland, this late inclusion, dubbed “the Australia clause” by some, meant that Australia could meet its already generous Kyoto targets with far less adjustment than the other countries. The Australian government hailed the outcome as a triumph.

A few years later, America withdrew, and Australia followed suit. Whereas the Americans had the excuse of a change of presidency and congressional opposition for its backsliding, it was the same Australian government which had been part of the negotiations that then resiled from the agreements.

Since then the Howard government’s rhetoric and policies have gone through several contradictory stages, and the government has started to prepare for a world in which carbon trading and other measures will become more economically central.

One of the planks of its recent defences, for example, often uttered by Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull is that unlike many other countries Australia is meeting or close to meeting its Kyoto targets. It is true that many of the countries are lagging well behind their targets, but this is a great one-liner for misleading the uninformed. It conceals the fact that among the Annex One countries, Australia has had among the largest increases since 1990, and according to the World Resources Institute, has the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions of any developed country.

In short, in Kyoto the Howard government failed to recognise the dimensions of the global warming crisis and played a largely negative role, almost certainly creating frictions and resentments among the other signatories. Then a couple of years later, it refused to sign the agreement on which the other countries had made so many concessions to include it. A superpower such as the United States may be able to indulge in such behaviour, but for a middle level power this is not a good way to enhance one’s influence. The diplomatic downsides of the Howard government’s behaviour on Kyoto are minor compared with the substantial importance of the environmental issue, but it is likely that one legacy of the Howard government will be that future Australian negotiators have a tougher time because Australia has already drained any reservoir of good will towards it - and for what benefit?