Last time I was near the local Parliament, former chief minister Trevor Kaine was in the final, and in parts bitter, phase of his political career: a Liberal in exile on the crossbench out to destroy and confound.

Independent Paul Osborne was also on the crossbench, striding the halls (albeit not frequently) with that distinctive footballer gait, where as much energy goes into sideways space as forward momentum, and well in control of his agenda given he had the Carnell Liberal government happily needy.

His agenda, quite loopily given the circumstances of Carnell as leader and the ACT as his constituency, included an attempt to rewrite abortion laws by surprise, working late into the night one evening to prepare his morning bombshell.

Keeping us on our toes with equally difficult issues of drug reform and legalised euthanasia, unpopular across the political spectrum, Independent Michael Moore was a quite thrilling distraction on the crossbench. But too many years in that wilderness and he decided it was time to run the place.

In the end he pretty much did, when partly through his close working relationship with Carnell and partly through her government's desperation for numbers, he became a minister in her government, in the process annulling himself as a voice of independence. Ah, they disappear so quietly into the ranks of power. Surely Shane Rattenbury, the sole Green so firmly ensconsed in the Labor cabinet, has learned from that experiment.

And Carnell? Well, she went a trick too far with her unusual funding scheme for Bruce Stadium.

That was the end of her. But perhaps even so, Labor would have been unelectable driven as it was by self-absorbed warring between left and right made more ludicrous by the smallness of its numbers.

In rode Jon Stanhope, with his own brand of brazen self-assured conviction and an idealism that meant lots of talk about Things That Mattered.

A dedicated indigenous seat in the local parliament was one of his early fancies, and it was perplexing that he never brought that near a result.

Stanhope took over his party burdened with that Labor albatross of no factional affiliation, so that even when he led Labor back to power after the Carnell years, he might still have been knifed by the ambitious and blinkered in his own ranks but for the unexpected descent of commonsense.

Where did that come from?

This was a puzzle for which I never found a solution.

Could it have been unfathomable loyalty from Ted Quinlan, that cheerful easygoing deputy from the right, so different to his leader?

Stanhope stayed long enough to set things up for a smooth transition to his preferred successor, Katy Gallagher, before disappearing to Christmas Island, popping up occasionally with wordy idealism.

His idea for a kind of boat people memorial in the form of one of the leaky boats that bring them from Indonesia, salvaged and mounted somewhere, seems so typical of the quirky former leader.

You have got to hope he steers this one to fruition.

But now, in the eighth Parliament, the place has finally rid itself of crossbenchers, those highly idiosyncratic figures, some of whose depths and motivations could be so difficult to plumb and who so often brought a surprising pet issue that would eventually confound and entertain the entire city.

Are they really gone?

Do we finally have a stable, two-party local Parliament where the government gets to do stuff without pesky interference and negotiation other than from the sole Green who is so handily ensconsed in the Gallagher cabinet?

And have we really had 13 straight years of Labor government?

Say it isn't so.