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Ah yes, good points. Many people (well Australians anyway) have been noticing the recent changes in the face of Australian politics, the relavant points to this thread I guess can be summed up as follows:

1. Australian's bi-partisan system had essentially become a kind of checks-and-balance system in that one major party controlled the federal parliament, and the senate majority belonged to the other major party, so that legislative progress was very slow, even though both parties were almost exactly the same.
2. Also, in a general sense, I'm not sure whether it's just me or whether the practice of politics itself has been dropping further away from the ideal, or whether we are as a whole becoming more aware of the discrepancy between using socially oriented tactics (scandal and dirt digging) as leverage as opposed to actual policy debate. Isn't government meant to be about running a country?
3. As of the last major elections, incumbent John Howard's coalition secured a majority in both the federal parliament and senate, which was an indication that they could steamroll legislation through. John Howard promised this would not be the case but common experience with his previous 2 terms in government is that he simply lies when it suits him. It was no surprise when he attempted to force draconian security measures and foreign policy through both houses. This in itself was noted as a shining example of the decline of democracy, so I suppose that my question is that is this indicative of a larger trend.
4. More tellingly, I'm not sure just how much people care. On one hand, people as a whole only care about money in their pockets and because they do not keep a close eye on the bigger picture, it is usually strategic last-minute temporary fiscal plays that allow John Howard back into government despite the fact that the people have been played for fools multiple times (GST and the children-overboard to name two...) and on the other, the people that do appear to care form a scraggly group of ineffectual protesting voices whom I suspect are more in it for the sake of fulfilling some personal dream of activism i.e. it's an ineffectual state of democratic process.
5. Add to this that the current climate is such that we must ask the question, as I believe applied in the US in 2004- whether we must stick with the evil we know, or the imcompetence we don't know. "We must choose between a turd sandwich and a douche-bag."

The picture this gives me is one where while our freedoms are emphasised more than ever, we are approaching a self-perpetuating cycle of locking ourselves into an ever deepening rut. People being the way they are, I do not think that this century will pass without some kind of seriously major revolutionary social shift or collapse, but that's wild speculation.