For many journalists, the past – specifically the past before 1945 – is a foreign country.

Election coverage is replete with references to “firsts” or “milestones” that assume that Australian history began in the post-war period.

But a longer view would help us better understand the political processes around us.

Journalists described the 2010 federal election result as “Australia’s first hung parliament in 70 years”.

You could alternatively say that the 2010 election produced Australia’s seventh hung parliament.

No party or existing coalition won majorities in 1901, 1903, 1906, 1919, 1922 or 1940.

Minority governments depended on negotiation and collaboration for success and, indeed, survival.

As with those earlier elections, the 2010 result ensured that parliament played a role in keeping governments accountable.

Similarly, journalists said that the 2022 election produced a “record crossbench of at least 16”. But it is only a record in the post-war era.

Large crossbenches in the lower house were a core feature of the early federal period.

In 1906, crossbenchers outnumbered the governing and opposition parties, and in 1934 the crossbench (comprised of MPs loyal to former NSW Labor leader Jack Lang) held 12% of lower house seats to Labor’s 24% (although since the House of Representatives was half as large, that 12% represents just 9 MPs).

In 2022, Antony Green remarked that “[w]e’ve never seen support for the major parties drop so low at a federal level before”.

That is true of current major parties. But minor parties can become major parties and vice versa.

In 1901, the Labor Party was a ‘balance of power’ crossbench party with weak claims to the status of major party, having spent a grand total of one week in power (in Queensland, two years earlier).

The major parties were the protectionists and the free traders, who won 79% of the primary vote between them at the first federal election. That fell to just 64% at the 1903 election, with Labor winning nearly a third of the vote on its own.

Labor would go on to briefly form the world’s first labour government in 1904, and by 1909 in the face of Labor’s success the free traders and protectionists merged to form the country’s first majority government.

The Country Party emerged at the 1919 election, and supported a minority government of the centre-right. While the government was only a few seats short of a majority in 1919, the gap was much bigger three years later, giving rise to a new power-sharing agreement that was quickly formalised as the Coalition.

The Coalition marked its centenary in 2023, and many times in the intervening 100 years it has only been thanks to the Country/National Party that the Liberals could form majority government.