Senator Sam McMahon, who resigned from the CLP earlier this year, will re-contest the upcoming federal election as a Liberal Democrat, she has announced.

Ms McMahon made the announcement this morning in Darwin, following months of speculation she would be running for the fledgling party led by former Queensland premier Campbell Newman.

Ms McMahon will run as the Liberal Democrats senate candidate and her electoral officer Kylie Bonanni, who also recently resigned from the CLP, will run as the party’s Lower House candidate in Solomon.

Ms Bonanni announced last week that she was running as an independent against Labor incumbent Luke Gosling and the CLP’s candidate Tina MacFarlane.

Ms McMahon said she only made the decision to seek re-election with the Liberal Democrats two days ago.

“I’ll be quite honest, I’ve had a fair beating from politics. I was happy to step away,” Ms McMahon said Friday morning.

“But I have exercised my female prerogative to change my mind, and that is what I have done, and I am here to announce that I will be contesting the next election in the Senate for the Liberal Democrat Party.”

She added that the decision to seek re-election was based on “a great desire from many, many Territorians to have me to continue to represent them”.

“I’ve accomplished quite a lot in three years, but there’s more to do,” she said.

Ms McMahon has been in talks with the party since at least January, when she made the decision to resign from the Country Liberals over what she said was abuse by her former chief of staff who currently holds a position with the party.

She lost pre-selection for the party’s senate ticket to Jacinta Price last July.

The Liberal Democrats are a small party that says it adheres to “classical liberal or libertarian” philosophies including promoting smaller government. The party’s website says it stands for “greater freedom, smaller government and personal responsibility”.

It currently has two Victorian state members who were ejected from the Victorian Legislative Assembly for refusing to disclose their vaccination status last year but were later admitted after providing their status.

Ms McMahon had told the NT Independent in January that she had been approached by minor parties in Canberra about joining them – “every party but the Greens”, she said.

But she had stated that while she had no intention of defecting to another party that “a day is long time in politics and you never rule anything out”.

Ms McMahon, who was elected to the Senate in 2019, has had a turbulent first term as NT Senator, including being involved in a public domestic violence situation with her former chief of staff, allegations she was intoxicated on the floor of the Senate and last December, she allegedly attempted to punch the federal director of the Nationals at a Canberra pub during a staff Christmas function.