Our candidate search has been underway for the past few months with a number of nominations received and Expressions of Interest closing earlier this month. 

Our extensive search and intensive selection process has now concluded and Voices of Moncrieff is excited to have selected a member of our community to endorse as its independent candidate for the 2025 Federal election. 

As a grassroots community group, we worked for over 12 months to endorse an independent candidate that can genuinely represent our community outside of the failing two-party system.

Throughout this process, we were very much aware that political parties choose their candidates behind closed doors, with the process described as 'all stitched up anyway'.

So we set out to do things differently and consulted for months with our community on the candidate locals wanted to represent Moncrieff at the next election.

In October 2024 we formed a Candidate Selection Committee to lead our search for a community independent candidate. 

The Committee was community-led and community informed throughout, with our Community Listening Report guiding the search and providing a candidate selection criteria.

In total, 538 people in our community had a say on the qualities they wanted to see in their Federal representative and over 70 potential candidate names were put forward by the community across:

• kitchen table discussions;
• our Have Your Say online survey;
• conversations at people’s doors and events;
• a candidate nomination campaign on our website and social media platforms;
• advertising on radio, online and social media; and
• a letterboxing campaign of over 28,000 homes inviting community members to participate in the process of selecting a candidate.

The Committee took this consultation forward and followed a process and timetable to allow Voices of Moncrieff to meet the goal of endorsing a community-backed independent candidate for the 2025 election. 

Over recent weeks, the Committee has carefully been going through the individuals nominated and conducted interviews with candidate prospects who submitted an Expression of Interest for the role.

In reaching its unanimous decision, the Committee considered a range of information against the selection criteria in our listening report, including many detailed and thoughtful conversations with candidate prospects.

Thank you to everyone in our community who participated in the process.

We appreciate your time and commitment to seeing community-led change in Moncrieff at the next election.

More news on our candidate announcement coming soon!