Take that self-contradictory quartet in the first Assembly in 1989 who represented the "No Self Government” and “Abolish Self Government” parties (one of whom which lasted through two terms in the parliament he wanted gone). Or the Residents Rally cohort (which gave Michael Moore his entree entry into a successful few terms as an enormously a powerful Independent), and the Paul Osborne's conservatives.

If your interest in ACT politics is shallow enough to be based on this sort of rollicking madness (guilty) you might well be disappointed by the decision of Labor and the Liberals this week to move to a new format – five electorates of five members each.

The change is substantial and the scale historic. Eight new members on top of the existing 17 is nearly a 50 per cent increase in size, and is, as the Proportional Representation Society points out, the biggest change by any state or territory in Australia, surpassed only by a 63 per cent jump in the size of the federal Parliament in 1949.

The addition will require the building of a new ministerial wing as the current building is too small to fit all the members and also substantial increases in staff, salaries and funding.

There are, nevertheless, good arguments for the increase in size (chiefly the most simple one: how can a modern parliament function sensibly with 17 members, only half of them on the government benches?) and it's fair to say there has not been a public outcry against the move.

Perhaps the public has accepted it as inevitable, even worthy and valid, or perhaps people simply do not care enough to complain. Most submissions to the expert review group that investigated the issue supported an increase (almost two to one in favour). The support came largely from groups and opposition largely from individuals.

The scale and the cost of the move aside, the biggest change heralded with this week’s Assembly decision is the entrenching of more solid blocs of Labor and Liberal politicians.

These two parties will have a pretty much guaranteed 10 seats apiece, creating a core of political experience and safe careers, which is probably a good thing for democracy and collective wisdom (with the caveat that in the Western democratic system entrenchment can be dangerous and corrupting), but is a bad thing for the Greens and independents.

Diversity was not the winner this week, the establishment was.

The ACT now has two electorates of five members and one electorate of seven. You need a higher proportion of the vote in the five-member electorates to get elected, 16.7 per cent of the vote, than in the seven-member electorate, where 12.5 per cent will get you over the line.

Seven-member electorates deliver a more proportional result (more closely aligned with the actual vote) and it is for this reason that the expert group preferred seven-member electorates (and recommended the city move to them within a couple of elections, a recommendation unsurprisingly utterly ignored by the major parties).

The seven-member electorate of Molonglo is where the Greens have always had a seat, even when reduced to just one seat in the Assembly. This is partly because the city voters are their core constituency, but also because the quota is lower. Molonglo also gave Moore his foothold.

The five-member electorates have not proved an unsurpassable barrier to the Greens – they won the fifth seat in both in 2008 (plus two seats in Molonglo) and took one seat in 1995, but they do not deliver the certainty of Molonglo and they have not to date elected an independent other than Osborne and his offsider.

All of which is not to say the Greens will not continue to hold the balance of power. The apparatchiks who count numbers are already busy working out where they want the new electorate boundaries drawn to maximise their chances in 2016, and their submissions to the ACT Electoral Commission when it begins reviewing boundaries this year will be telling.

Most groups are assuming a carve-up that has the five electorates based around town centres: Tuggeranong; Woden and Weston Creek, which might need to include Kambah; Belconnen; and Gungahlin, which might need to swipe parts of Belconnen including Kaleen, or even in one suggestion take in Lyneham, to get the necessary numbers.

That would leave the inner north and inner south making up the central electorate, and the Greens would be expecting to retain a seat there. Whether it will be their only seat, as Labor and Liberal snaffle the other 24, is a question for November 2016.