I miss the Democrats being a thing that mattered and Natasha Stott-Despoja popping up on Good News Week all the time.
Man they really shit the bed with the GST and then kept failing the saving throws.
The Greens just ain't it for me.
The Democrats were in an awful position in a lot of ways, and the GST thing fed them to the Greens who'd been lurking around the edges for years at that point.
The Democrats were sort of a Liberal equivalent of the Democratic Labor Party originally, started by a defector and gave a chunk of one major party voters a validation for voting for the other party, by the time the party destructed it was split between a centrist block (right of Labor) and a left wing block (left of Labor) that were almost indistinguishable from the Greens (there's a few noticeable Greens who were Democrats).
The GST deal put a dent in their "Keeping the bastards honest" image and fed the left wing section to the Greens , after which the Democrats lacked the presence necessary to rebuild themselves (unless you at least have the potential to hold the balance of power the media ignores you*).
If the Greens hadn't been a thing they might have recovered (though I suspect the only difference between the party that would have resulted after that and the modern Greens would have been the name, they were already drifting that way pretty fast).
*eg all those anti-Islam parties that were getting attention before the Federal election have been completely ignored since it was demonstrated that PHON had stolen their thunder. And the SFF have been getting actual attention since they won Orange. This is a tactic that minor parties use too, PHON and the Greens both talk up their chances of winning anywhere there's a chance, because getting the media talking about it can literally make it happen (if you just need an extra 2% of the vote to win somewhere , then media coverage saying it's possible can get enough people to vote for you to make it happen). Xenophon is good at it too, drawing the maximum controversy out of things who already has a position on sometimes and other times deliberate raising a media furor to see where popular opinion is.
I'm not saying I'm personally turned off by stuff like that (though I have been by some of them, my biggest complaint with the Greens is their flopping between pragmatism and idealism seemingly randomly when they have the balance of power), but many are boneheaded politically for a party that has no chance governing but assumedly wants to appeal to more of the population, and like I said their core platform could have great appeal to rural electorates if they can just shut up on items they will not be able to control anyway.
The Greens are screwed there, historically they've been idealistic with the occasional pragmatic move (some of the "pragmatic" things they've been raked over the coals on are actual Greens policy (which means they've been working with a generally opposed party (or opposing a generally closer party) to realize their ideals)). They get raked over the coals either way (if they are idealistic they are a "party of protest", if they are pragmatic "in bed with the Liberals").
The Greens can't really shut up on some of those things either. That inner city vote concentration is gradually getting them State House Seats, losing it at the moment would cause them to lose so many seats that the media would call them dead (even more so right now with conservative parties sucking up the rural oxygen).