Jon J,
Exactly !

From my recollection of the times, Malcolm Fraser was a decent and fair man and middle of the road Liberal who stepped up and put Gough Whitlam out of office as a way of stopping an accumulative interest loan deal via Khemlani.
It was the Labor loan dealing that brought down the Whitlam led Labor government.

http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs239.aspx

I think it would be good for Australia to return to Malcolm Fraser Liberal Party and Ralph Hunt Country Party - integrity type of politics.

The Liberal Party stopped being a traditional Conservative party with Howard.

It's since become a Neo-Conservative Party infected with and the prisoner of extremists and interest groups, each with their individual agendas.

Their sole purpose is to create an environment of unregulated free-market capitalism in the belief that it will solve all problems and their strategy is to divide society into internal warring groups.

If the Labor Party is controlled by Unions then the Liberals are likewise the puppet of corporate interests and lobbyists.

The perpetual myth of "good economic management" has been disproven many times. Our global economic ranking has fallen with successive Liberal governments and the alleged success of the Howard-Costello years were not what they are reported to be with several examples of gross waste, mismanagement and lost opportunities.

The only way they can survive is to split off the extremists into another party and rebuild their base in the middle ground.

Australian politics has a definite cycle.
Liberals run the economy responsibly and get
our economy in the black. They do this by
cutting back funding on whatever has to be cut,
whenever the Labor dominated Senate allow
them to do so. If this means cutting back
on things that will make them unpopular,
then they know it is the responsible thing to do.

Labor is then elected in and spends
like there is no tomorrow.
They know how to buy votes using
other people's money. Oddly, like
socialists everywhere, they hate
the very institutions that create the
wealth they need to buy people's votes.
So, they soon run out of other people's money
to spend, and start borrowing.

Dept levels go through the roof.
Sooner or later, the electorate figures
out that they are all idiots,
the Libs get in and fix the mess,
and round and round we go.

The fear campaign that the Libs used in
Victoria was not as strong a message as
the Labor "we will give you everything for free",
and the "we have no idea where
the money will come from, but we will work
that out later."

Did the Liberal Party learn anything from this?
Yair, there are those "wets" who think
that they should emulate Labor's success tactic
and tell the electorate that they will give
them everything for free. And that they should
also emulate the ethnic sucking policies of Labor.
Especially reassuring immigrants that their
entire countries can immigrate to Australia, en masse.
There is plenty of money in Centrelink,
and diversity bollards are relatively cheap.

We need to remember that there are politicians
who think more about holding onto their
seats than telling the electorate what they
don't want to hear. But there are still
responsible Liberal Party members who are
economically responsible, and who appeal
to smart, responsible people. The Liberal
Party needs to go back to it's base.

Well said and true, Lego.

The same old tactics will not work.
There are lessons to be learned from
Victoria. It would help both parties if
they opened up preselections for the coming
federal election. MPs should be answerable to
the judgement of the members before every election.
Perhaps that way they can get rid of the "old guard,"
that's no longer relevant.

Just a thought.