What gives?

Well, the site was largely unpatronised and wasn't doing what it should have been doing.

What was wanted was a site to discuss public policy in Australia. Frankly, 
it's clear to me that people generally aren't interested. perhpas it was a dumb site - who knows. 
There were a few people who actively participated and to those people thank you. 
Unfortunately the vast bulk of people who interacted with this site were, as much 
as i could tell, forum spam artists - evident by the casino/viagra rubbish 
or the fact that they just registered and never participated.

In any event, hopefully someone else will come up with a site that people want to use.

For the record, these sites don't pay for themselves so I was hoping that there would 
be some form of ad revenue generated. Commensurate with the low traffic, not one cent was generated. 
Time to move on and do other things!

one of the problems with any forum site is the fear of litigation through publishing posts 
of other people. The internet may be very good at generating communities but it isn't effective 
at distributing the community risk.

hence, at the end of the day I decided to take the site down. All the best!