Teals and murmurs: who are the next independent candidates sweeping Victoria?

In November’s Victorian election, will the “teal wave” that severely shifted the make-up of federal Parliament — by scooping out the Liberals’ blue-ribbon seats like some kind of electoral melon baller — have the same effect at the state level?

Here are some of the candidates we know about so far.

In Sandringham, former Bayside mayor Clarke Martin has announced a teal run. Is this the first bloke to explicitly adopt the designation? It’s his third such attempt, this time backed by Voices of Goldstein splinter group, the Bayside independent group.

Frankston Hospital doctor Kate Lardner is standing for the seat of Mornington, where the Liberal candidate is former federal MP Chris Crewther, last seen making unrepeatable spicy comments under parliamentary privilege about his local basketball association.

Sophie Torney, whose name and vibe really do sound like the product of a random teal candidate generator, is running in Kew. We noticed over the weekend she had to replace the auto-generated subtitles on her campaign video with custom-made ones, because the automated version kept referring to her as “candidate for Q”, which may have attracted supporters she wasn’t as keen on.

Speaking of Kew, the soon-to-be ex-member for the seat, Tim Smith, was disinvited from addressing a gathering of Liberal Party faithful, and was baffled that the Liberals were acting like the “party of Marx, not Menzies” — a fun one, given Menzies’ censorship fondness ensured that Australia had the largest list of banned books in the Western world.

Nomi Kaltmann, a legal interpretation analyst in the federal public service who was previously an electorate officer for Mark Dreyfus, quit the ALP earlier this year and almost immediately announced she would take a run at Deputy Liberal Leader David Southwick in Caulfield.

Polling puts Labor comfortably ahead — though high-profile former federal MPs such as Josh Frydenberg and Tony Abbott have been on the hustings, insisting the profoundly dysfunctional Victorian party (which, let’s be honest, is not a designation that only applies to the Libs in the garden state) can turn things around.