Victoria's fledgling crossbench MPs watched quietly, no doubt wondering at the irony of it all as Labor and Liberal MPs spent several hours hurling abuse across the chamber.

Among them was Australian Sex Party MP Fiona Patten. She was unimpressed with the cacophony of question time. "Certainly it's great theatre but it achieves nothing," she says.

And the prolonged debates in the chamber did little to win her over either.

"I guess coming from a small business background it seemed quite insane ... I've sat in enough board meetings that if anybody speaks on a matter for more than 10 minutes we start to wind them up."

Despite their political inexperience, these novice MPs with their disparate and sometimes conflicting pet interests - they include fervent reformists, libertarians and social conservatives - will be crucial to the Government's ability to successfully govern the state. Whether this variety will prove a strength or fatal weakness for Labor's agenda is a question that hangs ominously over the upper house.

The make-up of the Victorian upper house is unprecedented in recent history. Although the Greens held the balance of power in the Legislative Council from 2006 to 2010, rarely have so many parties and interests been represented.

Labor holds just 14 out of 40 Legislative Council seats. That means it will need to wrangle an extra seven votes to pass any legislation not supported by the Coalition - including, necessarily, the Greens, and at least two out of a remaining five MPs.

The relationship between those five crossbenchers, from the Sex Party, the Shooters and Fishers Party, the Democratic Labour Party and Vote 1 Local Jobs, has been civil so far. But as previous state and federal parliaments have shown (including the current Senate), dysfunction can quickly take hold, particularly when there are MPs with strongly opposing priorities and competing interests.

Coaxing the magic seven votes from a group as diverse as this will be no small task for Labor.

The sheer range of their views was on display in the crossbenchers' inaugural speeches.

The Democratic Labour Party's Rachel Carling-Jenkins spoke out about the enslavement of women in prostitution, while Patten, who worked briefly as a sex worker, looked on.

"It was really well done and I respect that," Patten said of Carling-Jenkins' speech. "I didn't agree with much of what she said but I thought she gave a good speech."

Patten and Carling-Jenkins have voiced opposing views about buffer zones for protesters around abortion clinics, illustrating the difficulty the government faces in securing the votes of these MPs.

But while policy skirmishes continue, some crossbenchers are already wielding their legislative clout.

The Age revealed this month that Shooters and Fishers MPs Jeff Bourman and Daniel Young had successfully intervened to stop a Parks Victoria plan to remove about 120 brumbies from the Barmah National Park.

Bourman and Young, both knock-about blokes who love shooting and other outdoor pursuits, insist they will take a reasonable, pragmatic approach to legislation.

"Common sense is a big thing with us," Young says. "That's the way we look at everything."

Yet the pair hold views that will trouble some people, including the Greens. Among their top priorities is a "comprehensive" review of firearms laws; they have previously voiced concerns that gun control has gone too far.

Bourman, 48, says such a review should be conducted with "no hysteria".

The laws governing gun ownership motivated both MPs to enter politics although the decision to contest their first election came only about 18 months ago.

Bourman, who was a policeman and later worked as an IT contractor, had watched with rising indignation as gun control became increasingly tight since he started shooting as a teenager. "It just occurred to me basically it's never going to stop," Bourman says. "I never really entertained the possibility of doing something about it. Then something clicked."

Young, 26, arrived at a career in politics after unsuccessfully attempting to join the air force as a pilot. Years of shooting and his other "passion of loud cars" had damaged his hearing. Instead, he went on to do an apprenticeship in sheet-metal fabrication and then worked for a construction company.

But he insists he had always been interested in politics.

"I was one of the odd people in my generation, I'd start talking about politics and all my mates would tell me to shut up," Young says.

Both Young and Bourman believe in more access to national parks for trail bikes and four-wheel-drives as well as shooters and fishers, and disagree with camping fees.

Patten - in the rabbit warren of parliamentary offices, next door to the Shooters and Fishers - had a similarly slow-burning political passion and unorthodox path to electoral success.

She had worked as a lobbyist for the Eros Association, which represents adult-only businesses, and had campaigned for reform of sex work and censorship laws, but decided she wanted to influence politics "from the floor" of Parliament.

She plans to push a socially progressive agenda but insists she will not be "holding the government to ransom" in passing its legislative agenda.

Voluntary euthanasia is among her priorities. She argues her support for euthanasia is shared by most people in the community but politicians lack the will to make the necessary changes.

"I believe that privately, the majority of the members of the Legislative Council or members of parliament privately would agree that the conversation should be had," she says.

Patten is also outspoken in her belief that making drugs illegal "makes them even more dangerous".

"The number of people who take ice or methamphetamines or speed has not significantly grown in our community but the product that they're taking has changed significantly," she says. "We could help people more if we weren't putting them through a criminal justice system."

Her progressive policies will mostly likely put her at odds with Carling-Jenkins who generally takes a much more conservative stance on social issues.

Carling-Jenkins has already created headlines with her inaugural speech, in which she promised to fight gender-selection abortions and thanked controversial preacher Danny Nalliah.

But the former academic and disability support worker is keen to promote her broader views and use her profile to lobby for increased disability respite and dementia care.

She also wants to use her influence to promote independent and alternative schooling models.

Her son was home-schooled for a substantial part of his education and she believes parents who decide to teach their children at home are entitled to government funding.

"Home-schooling families are taking quite a bit of that expense burden off the state and yet they don't get any funding at all," she says.

Although she contested a previous federal election, Carling-Jenkins is another relative newcomer to politics. She joined the Democratic Labour Party just two years ago.

"I guess I began to get discouraged with the major parties," she says. "There didn't seem to be a lot of candidates standing up for the values that I would be aspiring to, not openly anyway. I decided I shouldn't criticise from the outside, I should try and make a difference from within."

In contrast to his fellow independents, Vote 1 Local Jobs MP James Purcell followed a more well-worn path into politics, having served as a councillor in the Moyne Shire. He has also worked as an accountant.

The Port Fairy local's inaugural speech covered issues that would be dear to many residents of regional Victoria, including support for TAFE, "stressed roads" and unemployment.

Purcell's speech also indicated that hyperlocal matters are also at the top of his agenda. He used the speech to raise an adverse possession claim in Port Fairy by a "Melbourne-based individual", suggesting he may use his parliamentary influence to resolve local issues.

"I will be seeking to have this horrible adverse possession decision overturned and the land returned to the community as public open space," he told Parliament.

Managing crossbenchers with such disparate interests will require deft negotiation skills, Monash University politics associate professor Paul Strangio says.

"When you analyse the members of the crossbench there's obviously people pulling in opposite directions," he says. "It's a complex jigsaw."

But he warns against comparisons with the federal Senate, where crossbench MPs have obstructed government efforts to pass contentious legislation. Strangio says some of the Victorian crossbenchers, including the Shooters and Fishers, have said they will respect the government's mandate.

"It is a test for the government. But I don't think we should necessarily assume it's an impossible scenario."

The unenviable job of wrangling votes from this diverse bunch falls to Labor's leader in the upper house, Gavin Jennings. He reckons despite the relative inexperience and often conflicting views of the five crossbenchers, the bigger challenge for Labor will be managing the Greens.

The thinking in Labor circles is that the crossbenchers have strong views about certain issues, but are broadly supportive of the government's overarching agenda. On the other hand, the Greens are determined to overlay their own broad agenda for the state, and will be using their position in the upper house to maximise their influence.

"Primarily most of them [the crossbenchers] are respectful of the government's mandate and are quite unassuming about the way they pursue their policy agenda," Jennings says.

On the other hand, he accuses the Greens and the Coalition of acting as a "bloc" by colluding to control the chamber.

Indeed, on the very first day of the new parliament, the new government lost its first vote: Labor's candidate for the Legislative Council president, Gayle Tierney, was defeated 21 votes to 17, with the five Greens and Patten voting for the Coalition's candidate Bruce Atkinson.

More recently, the Greens have voted with the Coalition to pass a motion demanding Labor table the contract for the East West Link (a demand which Labor defied) and have also acted to heavily amend the aforementioned changes to the "sessional orders". In a further annoyance for Labor, the Greens also voted with the Coalition to pass a motion ordering Labor table the Grand Prix contract (which again Labor defied).

"The Liberals and the Greens have been very keen to use their numerical strength to position themselves to say that it is their intention to run the upper house," Jennings says. "We think our challenge therefore is to try ... to convince the Liberal Party and the National Party and the crossbench of our mandate to introduce legislation and reforms."

Victorian Greens leader Greg Barber insists this is just democracy working as voters intended it to, saying many voters clearly did not want either of the major parties to dominate the upper house. Each piece of legislation will be considered on a case-by-case basis, Barber insists. Not that this means the Greens will provide a rubber stamp, with better public transport and improved integrity and transparency key priorities that it may be prepared to barter in other policy areas to deliver.

"Every vote in the upper house is an opportunity to implement our policy," Barber says.

Exactly how this will manifest itself is unclear, given the Greens have a broad policy agenda that includes business and economic as well as social and environmental goals.

The fear is that Labor's legislative agenda will become bogged down in debate, horse trading and finger pointing, mimicking the experience of the Abbott government in Canberra.

For now, there is hope that the Parliament will be workable, that good policy and commonsense will prevail, despite the hodgepodge of views. If recent history and the chaos and clamour of recent days is anything to go by, this could be optimistic.