Good luck with all that! And don't hold your breath waiting for enthusiastic community support. The fossil fuel and or white shoe brigade, replete with large brown paper bags or climate change agnostics perhaps?

It'd be different if any of these folk/head buriers, were genuinely interested in representing the best interests of the electorate, rather than the maximised best interests of the ( please ex-plane) elected!?

A whole 450 people turned up? Wow, so much monumentally massive support!

Cory must be over the moon by now? Or maybe trying to communicate from the dark side?

Driving out of town the other day, saw three of his supporters buried up to their necks in sand. When I enquired of another nearby resident holding a wide mouth sand shovel, as to the the cause of this unusual event? the laconic reply was, a severe shortage of sand.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, etc/etc.
Alan B.

"A major problem with third parties is there is only so many protest votes to go around. Once the protest has been made and the major parties shift their policies to suite, the emergency is over and people go back to their comfortable voting patterns. For any third party to succeed long term they need penetration way beyond any protest vote" [from the article].

This is the crux of the issue. Hanson, in her first foray, was ultimately out-flanked by a much smarter politician (Howard) with her policies absorbed and made more palatable to mainstream voters. And this goes all the way back to the Australian Democrats or even the DLP. Ultimately the two majors are able to offer enough diversity of views to attract enough of the vote to keep the others out.

But the times may well be changing. In the past, the majors could offer a new project here, a few more bucks there and blunt the third party advance. However,what if we really do run into severe economic headwinds in the next decade. Interest rates rising, deficit spending rampant, the ability to fund new projects and splash bribes around blunted, housing prices stagnant or falling, inflation unleashed, dollar falling, unemployment rising. What then? Will the majors, who could (and should) be held responsible for that situation, be able to hold back a rising new idea?

My view is that the next decade or so is going to see real economic hardship for Australia and a well placed third force offering a new (or discarded old) way of doing things may outflank those whose only concern is their career.

I don't think Bernardi is that man - he's too decent. You need to be an bastard like Trump to shake it up and by-pass the protective media. But someone will arise (maybe is already in parliament) and, building on the platform laid by Bernardi et al, decisively move the national trajectory in a new direction.

Yeah, it is kinda strange how 'conservatives' in most western countries are by far the largest political group but seem to have little, if any, legislative success.
Who knows, maybe they need to change their tactics, and how they interact with the wider cultural atmosphere if they want a better outcome given that social norms appear to have changed so much over the last 50-60 years.

Turnbull has changed the game by turning the coalition into the new minor party - lefty greenies who don't vote ALP or Green. Don Chipp was honest about it, whereas Turnbull's hijacked the conservative wagon with sly and cynical assistance from greenie lefty journos especially Leigh Sales and the Green Bee Cee. They've succeeded in handing it to Boring Bill on a plate. No thinking conservative could help to return Slippery Malcolm as Prime Minister, nor any of his supporters while ever they're happy to ruin Australia with Climate Crazy Crap, just cos they think it'll get them up. Pretty dumb - the Climate Crazies aren't gunna vote for em anyway.

you sum it up pretty well Little. Cory had far to much integrity to remain part of the Turnbull brigade.