The death of the Democrats?

That's what Crikey is claiming following the little contre temps the party is having in SA. They also picked up on an Oz editorial.

It is hard to really make the call, given that sensible voters need somewhere to go and surely people have noticed that the Greens are half made up of unreconstructed Trots. Family First and the whole religion thing doesn't look like the emergence of a Christian Democrat tradition, no matter how much Fred Nile might like the name.

But Crikey is right that the Dems need to look more like what they originally were as offshoots of the Australia Party and the Liberal Movement. That is, believers in economic progrsss with a human face. Unfortunately they have allowed their economic credentials to rest exclusivley with the dour and fractious Andrew Murray, and they haven't really recovered from the disappointment of those voters who thought the way they voted in 1999 would give them John Howard PM but no GST.

So as a consequence they do come across as a bit of an odd collection of schizoid single issues rather than what they really are - great liberal democrats, more in the tradition of Deakin and Menzies that John Winston Howard (who truly is the first "conservative" this country has ever seen).

We need a "Save the Democrats" campaign - our nation needs them.