“TO IMAGINE politics without parties is like trying to imagine Australian football without teams,” wrote the political scientist Geoffrey Brennan in 1996. “Politics just is the game played out by rival parties, and anyone who tries to play politics in some way entirely independent of parties consigns herself to irrelevance.” A decade and a half later, those words describe a political world that might never return.

But the political game that Brennan described had already changed by the time of the 2001 federal election, which was contested by no fewer than 29 registered political parties – only three of whom secured representation in the House of Representatives – but which saw three independents elected, the largest number to succeed at a single federal poll for decades. Of the three, Peter Andren remained the member for Calare until his death in 2007 and Tony Windsor and Bob Katter are still MPs – both with a dramatically increased national profile following this weekend’s election. The three were joined in 2008 by Rob Oakeshott, a former state member who had left the National Party in 2002…