A new political party promising to run experienced, expert candidates will be established to contest the next ACT election in an effort to form government and end the two-party system.
Clare Carnell, the as-yet-unnamed party's director, said the project would draw on the experience of party leaders and was a natural maturation of the effort to run independents under a party umbrella at the last poll.
"It showed us that Canberrans are sick and tired of being sick and tired of the same old, same old from Labor, Liberal, Greens. It did also show us that the crossbench is perhaps too small, that a fringe party or a sense of being a protest candidate is not what people want either," Ms Carnell said.
"People are ready, willing and able to vote for a new party that is organised, disciplined and that fields candidates of a calibre who are ready to govern."
Ms Carnell said the new party, to be formally launched in spring, would maintain unapologetically high standards and draw on the experience of party leaders with "deep political experience, first-hand knowledge of how government has worked, but also how it hasn't worked".
"We are not seeking crossbench positions. We are a party who are seeking to govern," she said.
Ms Carnell said the party would be focused on a "back-to-basics" agenda, including bringing the budget back under control, and there would be "no more vanity projects and money wasting" under its leadership.
The Legislative Assembly, a hybrid of state government and local council administration, was the perfect forum to deliver a new approach and style of politics, she said.
"If MLAs from other parties, you know, choose to sit on the crossbenches rather than accept our invitation to join a cabinet or whatever, Canberrans will see that as a deliberate choice to pursue their own agenda rather than working for Canberrans and trying to do politics differently and better, which is what must happen and what I think everybody has been gagging for for a very, very long time," she said.
Ms Carnell co-founded Independents for Canberra, which took 8.5 per cent of the primary vote across the territory and helped Thomas Emerson get elected in Kurrajong. But Ms Carnell stepped down five months before the election due to poor health.
Independents for Canberra was disbanded as a political party in July 2025 and vowed to remain active "as a facilitator and capacity builder for community independents".
Ms Carnell, whose mother Kate Carnell was the ACT's third chief minister and the last Canberra Liberal leader to win an election, said her role as party director was set in stone.
"I am not Carnell 2.0. Kate Carnell is a one-off. To the extent that my skill set and experience base as a barrister and certainly in other not-for-profit spaces, I like attracting people. I like convincing people," she said.
"I like persuading people but being front of house is no part of my plan at any point. It's hard enough finding candidates and convincing them to run without trying to put your own candidacy in the mix."
The party would begin unveiling some of its candidates before the end of the year. Ms Carnell said it had been a challenge to convince the people who had been lined up because they would be sacrificing a great deal to enter the political arena.
"We are not looking for people who are at a loose end, who are looking for a step up," Ms Carnell said.
"Every single person that we're fielding is sacrificing salaries, sacrificing personal assets, sacrificing a whole range of different things to take what some people would see as a step down, if you like, in order to deliver wholesale reform for the territory which is so badly needed."
Ms Carnell said it had always been the plan to announce the party's formation now, a little under halfway through the electoral term, to start drawing Canberrans together, "trying to stop splitting up what we see is not quite universal, but a very, very large majority of Canberrans who want the same thing but are going about it in different ways".
A series of workshops, forums and town hall meetings would be held and the party was eager to get people on board as early as possible before a September launch "that is balloon drop and all".
"It's going to be a lot of fun, but it's also going to be the start of something very real and very exciting," Ms Carnell said.
