Some of it is about the frequent disunity to be found in minor parties. Such tension also often involves the role of political staffers, such as Lambie's chief of staff, Rob Messenger, who has been expelled from PUP and accused of using the senator as his mouthpiece against the party.

But there is another element that goes to the tension between independence and party discipline. Each has costs and benefits. Life as an independent can be lonely. Already there is talk of Lambie entering a loose new alliance with the other crossbench senators, David Leyonhjelm (NSW) and Bob Day (SA). Both of them are themselves quasi-independents as the former represents the Liberal Democratic Party and the latter the Family First Party, while giving every indication of thinking of themselves as independents.

Lambie's probable departure will not be the first break of a senator from their political party in this Parliament. John Madigan left the Democratic Labour Party to become an independent in September, four years into his term. Indeed, if you take out the names Madigan and DLP from that story of Madigan's split it is remarkably resonant of the Lambie-PUP conflict.

In the case of Madigan it was reported that political infighting led to a bitter divorce. At the heart of the dispute allegedly was his former chief of staff, Dr Rachel Carling-Jenkins, who was also Victorian state president of the DLP. The national president, Paul Funnell, alleged that after her departure, the new chief of staff, Brendan Gullifer "had poisoned Madigan's mind against the party". All of this sounds very familiar.

PUP is bigger than micro-parties like the DLP. Minor parties like the Greens are considerably bigger again. The established parties, Labor, Liberal and National, are giants by comparison. There are just as many personal and ideological disputes within the very big parties as there are within the smaller ones, but they are generally better contained. However, there have been several big Labor splits in the past and smaller ones in the Liberal Party, such as the one which contributed to the creation of the Australian Democrats.

Putting the regular problems of the bigger parties to one side for the moment there are common factors in disunity among minor parties.

Minor parties generally lack the glue that makes it easier for bigger parties to hold together. They often have a shorter history and fewer shared ideological underpinnings to bind the party's parliamentary members together. They also have less of a balance between the different elements that make up a party: parliamentarians, organisation and membership. In particular there are fewer activists to go around. So that party staffers, like the DLP's Carling-Jenkins, are often drawn from the party organisation not the general membership. Wearing multiple hats makes for an unstable mixture.

Furthermore in many cases the party organisation is threadbare. This seems to be the case for PUP, which is dominated by Palmer, who not only gives his name to the party and is overwhelmingly the major donor but also the parliamentary leader. Day, another wealthy businessman, is also the FFP's major donor and largely paid for his own campaign in South Australia.

Minor party parliamentarians frequently get more media publicity than their counterparts on the backbenches of the major parties. Pauline Hanson was a striking case in point. It takes an extra dose of humility for this not to go to their heads and to prevent them from thinking that they are more important than the party organisation. When minor parties hold the balance of power from the crossbenches this problem of celebrity media status is exacerbated. Lambie is certainly in this category.

Even when a minor party is much larger, like the Australian Democrats, they are subject to some of these inherent flaws. The Democrats were plagued by disunity not just at the federal level but in their state organisations as well. Their splits, especially in their later years, played an influential part in their demise as voters just got sick of it. Disunity really is death.

That is why considerable attention has been given to potential disunity among the Greens, especially after they gained the balance of power from 2008 in the Senate onwards (not to mention their role in sustaining Julia Gillard's minority government). Many expected the Greens to quickly fall victim to disunity, the so-called "Democrats disease".

But notably this has not happened so far. Instead we are talking about PUP and the DLP. The Greens have held together, first under Bob Brown and, since his retirement in April 2012, Christine Milne. There has been plenty of talk of leadership challenges, personality clashes and policy differences during this time, involving some of the highest profile and most controversial Greens, including senators Lee Rhiannon and Sarah Hanson-Young and yet another former chief of staff, Ben Oquist. Nothing has yet eventuated.

The balance of power opportunities for any Green senator who went it alone as an independent would be similar to those for Lambie and Madigan. The difference, as well as undoubted greater party loyalty, may be that the Green senators need their party more than it needs them. The Greens brand is strong enough to keep them in Parliament. Lambie, on the other hand, apparently likes her chances of survival as a Tasmanian independent in the tradition of Senator Brian Harradine.

John Warhurst is an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University.

John.Warhurst@anu.edu.au