As an ex Democrat member, I would like to see the Band get back together, but...
They'd need a major re branding... Perhaps to the point of changing the very name and effectively being a new party.
Or, keeping the name and living up to it.
Despite being a member for more than a decade, it was a little galling to have friends ask “what's up with the Democrats?” and have no more info than they did.
There was a brief movement to have a semi-public forum, where members could have discussions on policy past and future, but the Upper Echelons shut it down. And the big names in the party -with the exception of one, President Aron Paul- weren't interested in participating.
Too Democratic?
The proud Democrat claim that:
"there should be no hierarchical structure ... by which a carefully engineered elite could make decisions for the members"
Was neither apparent or real, in my experience.
I think a large proportion of Aussies would like to see a new alternative, as evidenced by the strong dissatisfaction expressed for all politicians at the moment. But that new player would have to offer some very real and very different alternatives to the existing players.
Trying to squeeze in between the majors when they are already rubbing shoulders didn't work, and still won't.

@ Grim

That other site was not a party operated site and wasn't a healthy place - aside from the fact that it created a competing brand and was a discussion place only for a little clique and which the vast majority of members were completely unaware of - most of the people on the site weren't financial members of the party, and most of what they discussed there was party bashing, not building and certainly not policy. 90% of the content was personal attacks of people in the executive or myself.

And then, when the URL was pulled because the operators of the site - who were at the time not members of the party - wouldn't negotiate with the party who held the URL on things like moderation of the site - I got blamed for it on Crikey! I wasn't even on the National Executive call when that decision was made and had nothing to do with the technical implementation of the redirection, other than insisting on a pop-up so that when people went to newdemocrats and landed at democrats.org.au they had some explanation of what happened.

It's not about trying to squeeze in anywhere - it's about being who you are.

-KC

This article reads like one long sales pitch. (Hey, guys. Give us the funds we need to rise again and we'll get those Greens off your back!)

Look, I'm ex-Democrat as well, and I was sad to see them go. However, I had switched to the Greens long before the former's decline. The Dems had become just a warm, fuzzy mini-version of the majors, with almost nothing to distinguish them.

However, the sales pitch might work. Certainly, the increasingly out-of-control anti-Greens hysterics of the media and the majors doesn't seem to be working (as the increased Greens vote in the Melbourne by-election showed). I'm sure the born-to-rule oligarchs are getting desperate enough to consider doing a triple by-pass Lazarus on the Dems.

Any party can 'recover' if they're prepared to sacrifice their principles and leap on to an accelerating bandwagon -- like AGW, for instance. Unfortunately such 'recoveries' tend to be short-lived; either the wheels fall off the bandwagon when (like AGW) it makes contact with reality or -- worse still -- the minority party actually gets into a position of power, demonstrates how embarrassingly bad it is at actually putting its theories into practice, and gets clobbered at the subsequent polls.

The reason we have only two main parties is because people in general don't vote parties they like into power; they vote out the ones they don't like. All you need is one alternative. Others are merely a distraction.

Yes, when you offer people freedom of speech in a 'Democratic' environment, you are likely to hear things you may not like.
Go figgur.
I think the Dems faded away because they just stopped being sufficiently different.
In the public eye, they were just more bastards.
Not trying to squeeze in anywhere? Not 'small l Liberal'? Not 'centrist'?
One of the things that drew me to the Dems was that they were Neo Keynesian, rather than Neo Liberal. That's something they should get more credit for, and something they should continue to push, particularly post '08.
That and more of the 'grass roots democracy' they were so famous for -but never actually tried.

'...the minority party actually gets into a position of power, demonstrates how embarrassingly bad it is at actually putting its theories into practice'

No prize for guessing that you are referring to the Greens. But where is the actual proof of all this 'embarrassingly bad' performance, other than the empty and 'embarrassingly' hysterical anti-Greens mantra of the media and majors? The reality is that, in the short time they’ve helped the ALP to remain in government, the Greens have dragged Australia kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

They've stood firm in their resolve that Australia has to think generations ahead, instead of the horserace odds of the next election. They've been instrumental in introducing a carbon policy that, for once, allows Australia to catch up with international practice - instead of remaining 'embarrassingly' behind as usual. And they refused to be intimidated into endorsing any of the offshore refugee policies of this and the previous government, which have been soundly discredited by every international human rights agency.

It's not the Greens performance that is embarrassingly bad. It's the tired track record of the majors, whose only real strength is convincing a terminally apathetic voting public that there is no alternative.