It's extraordinarily difficult to disrupt a two-party system, since the party that is out of power invariably adapts to absorb the majority of the disaffected groups. The only thing that can prevent this is a short-sighted attachment to 'ideology' at the expense of power. The Liberal Party has learnt to drop its ideologies the moment they become toxic to potential voters; the ALP appeared to have learnt the same lesson under Hawke, but seems to have unlearnt it again under Rudd and Gillard -- possibly because of their perceived need to placate the Greens.

Minor parties like the UAP, the DLP, the Democrats, One Nation and now the Greens have to walk a fine line between representing their disgruntled constituents and achieving compromise with the majority in order to actually get things done. Sooner or later they all fall off.

The point of departure for the Greens is that they are not integrated into the principle-free zone which encompasses the Coalition and Labor. But LibLab's politics are shams in which the only interests either component party serves are the interests of their party's financial sponsors, the 1%. This is why representative government is not democracy - the 99% elect them, the 1% buy them. As for the Greens, it is hard to remain forever a voice in the wilderness before degenerating into part of the wilderness as the Democrats did. The Greens could hold out for longer if they committed themselves to democracy (which they have not done). The more voices inject principle into the wilderness, no matter how cacophonous the media commentariat consider them, the better-served are the 99% by the parliamentary process.

The Greens and Labor support this communist agenda 21 of the UN that will totally enslave us.This New World Order concept of one world Govt controlled by the Banking Military Industrial Complex,is not on.

Global warming is BS.The Greens are also controlled by big business.The Greens along with Labor are finished.

Man made global warming is rubbish as this new cooling period will attest. The left better find some other solace to warm their cockles before being burnt on the political stake. Those who still want to rob the public and treat them with contempt pumping global warming should loose their stipends and banished to the urban wilderness.

Good synopsis Peter.

'the dominance of political debate by ever more powerful media interests, and the concurrent spread of new technologies that enable greater information flows and interaction.' Very true but there are encouraging signs that the independent web-based free newsmedia / blogs setup in the last 5 years or so are winning this one. Newspaper sales are going down and the corruption and right wing bias/ news censorship of the News Ltd media is now well known; polls clearly show this increasing distrust.

Re the electoral system, we'd be better off with the Mixed Member Proportional Representation system now used and recently endorsed in NZ. It enables the more diverse views and debates that occur in modern society to be represented in parliament.

To the 'flat earther' bloggers who chime in with their monotonous 'global warming is BS', whether its relates to the subject or not: Do you believe that spacecraft have landed on the Moon and Mars?. Have you seen the photos? NASA is the body that achieved all that. Check out their website http://climate.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/ and observe the melting of the poles, increasing CO2 and increasing temperatures.

@Roses: Here are two official graphs from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, showing current sea ice coverage at the North and South Poles:

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png

The south pole figure is above the long-term average by about the same proportion as the north pole figure is below it. Now check the scale at the side. The South Pole chart is drawn to a smaller scale, which means that distance above the average line actually represents a larger amount of ice than the amount by which the North Pole chart is below the line. Your supposed 'global warming' is more than made up for by cooling in the Southern Hemisphere, and this has been recognised by everyone but AGW diehards for some fifteen years.

NASA's ability to get hardware to Mars has no bearing on their -- very successful -- attempts to gain funding and political power by pushing global warming alarmism; why on earth should you think it does? But if you're going to spread their lies, then you should find some which are harder to refute -- if you can.