CANBERRA - AUSTRALIA'S richest politician, Malcolm Turnbull, was elected leader of the conservative opposition on Tuesday, bringing guarded support for the government's emissions trading scheme planned to start in 2010.

The move aims to end destabilising speculation about the leadership of the Liberal Party, which has struggled to gain in opinion polls since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Labor won power last November, ending almost 12 years of conservative rule.

'Our support is for an emissions trading scheme properly designed, brought in at an appropriate time. We nominated 2011-12,' Mr Turnbull told journalists after his party dumped Ms Brendan Nelson, a former doctor blamed for a string of strategy blunders and slumping popularity.

A former merchant banker and ex-leader of the republican movement, Mr Turnbull won 45 votes to 41 in a secret party ballot, party officials said. He is likely to re-cast his team to combat Mr Rudd's popularity, which has been at record levels in the 10 months since his election.

The next election is not due until late 2010, but betting agencies said the odds of a conservative victory had shortened after Mr Turnbull's win.

Mr Turnbull said the emissions regime planned by Mr Rudd's Labor would sacrifice Australian jobs and industry, coming ahead of concerted international action on global warming to be agreed at a climate conference next year in Copenhagen.

Delay urged
The conservatives, backed by big business, have urged Mr Rudd to delay carbon trading by at least a year, and wait for major emitters China, India and the United States to agree on action.

Mr Turnbull is best known at home for leading the republican movement into the failed 1999 vote for Australia to break its ties with Britain's monarchy. When that failed, Mr Turnbull famously called former conservative leader John Howard 'the prime minister who broke a nation's heart'.

He is also a millionaire banker and lawyer who rose to prominence when he defeated Britain's Thatcher government in a court case over the Spycatcher memoirs of a former British intelligence officer.

Mr Turnbull has also been a Rhodes scholar, grazier, former managing director of Goldman Sachs Australia and worked as a journalist for The Times in London while studying at Oxford.

Before entering parliament in 2004, he was courted by both Liberal and Labor Party heavyweights keen to harness his formidable intellect and public appeal.

Mr Turnbull is seen as charismatic, progressive and ideas-driven, and with his support for signing the Kyoto pact and saying 'sorry' for past injustices to Australia's Aborigines, has distanced himself from Mr Howard's dryer brand of conservatism.

But critics say he must also counter widespread public perception that he is arrogant and aloof. To convince people he is just a regular guy, Mr Turnbull used to catch a public bus around his diverse Sydney electorate, which embraces everything from Bondi Beach to millionaire harbourside suburbs.