Keep an eye on it as it gets close to departure date -- Virgin Australia often releases LAX-Australia business class awards a week or two before departure, and as a PM/DM you would be able to change your award ticket for free, so worth checking. VA would be a more direct routing, and arguably a better product (certainly at least as good of a product).
Of course it may be hard (almost certainly will be hard) to find cheap awards to LAX so close to departure, though. And if you are buying a revenue ticket for part of the journey then you wouldn't be able to get out of that either so I guess it may not work after all.