Mrs Cross was elected in 2001 as a Liberal but was expelled from the party after a bitter falling out in 2002.

She moved to the cross bench and contested the 2004 election as an Independent, but was unsuccessful.

Mrs Cross received 2608 votes, or 3.1 per cent, and even after preferences were distributed, her 3681 votes left her well short of the more than 10,000 votes required to be elected. She decided to contest October's election because the Assembly was ''a mess''.

''The Opposition has been operating in Dad's Army status for the past 312 years ... there has been so much internal smearing and turmoil that they haven't been focusing on the local community issues,'' she said.

''Because they have been so inept, they haven't been able to take it up to the Government. So the Government has been as any majority government would be arrogant, arbitrary in the decisions that they make.''

She believed the Stanhope Government was too focused on national issues instead of dealing with local concerns.

She cited the ''debacle'' of a planning system and wasted money on an arboretum, and the money spent on challenging Coroner Maria Doogan's investigation into the 2003 bushfires.

Mrs Cross will stand in Molonglo where she will effectively be running against two other high-profile Independents: Richard Mulcahy, who was also expelled from the Liberal Party, and former Queanbeyan mayor Frank Pangallo. But Mrs Cross said she saw them as pseudo-Independents because they had created parties.

''The only genuine Independent running so far that can cast a vote based on merit is me,'' she said.

She hoped there would be two or three ''genuine Independents'' elected to serve as a cross bench to a minority government. Mrs Cross said she was going to try to educate people about the Hare-Clark system used in ACT polls because she did not think people understood how to vote.