A candidate for the Christian Democratic Party has stood by comments calling for gay and lesbian AIDS sufferers to pay for treatment in public hospitals, saying it would act to prevent the spread of the disease.

Dr David Kim was the lead CDP candidate for the Senate in the ACT during last year's federal election.

Earlier this month, during a conversation on the Safe Schools program, Dr Kim took to Facebook to call for changes to the way gay and lesbian people living with AIDS access treatment.

"The LGBTI patients of AIDS should not be freely treated at the public hospitals," Dr Kim posted.

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Whatsapp The comments were made during a conversation about the Safe Schools program.

Dr Kim confirmed to Hack that he wrote the post, but said it was part of a broader discussion on sex education in schools.

"I don't want to judge one group of people," he said, admitting that the subject was "sensitive".

Dr Kim said treating AIDS cost the public purse "really big money" and that LGBTI people have a "very high chance of getting HIV", the virus that leads to AIDS.

According to the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations (AFAO), nearly seven out of ten new infections of HIV occur in gay or bisexual men.

Excluding gay and lesbian AIDS patients would ensure that "ordinary people" have access to public funding in the future, Dr Kim said.

Public hospitals have financial limits."

Increasing the financial burden on patients may limit the spread of the disease, he said.

"We don't want to encourage [gay sex]," Dr Kim said.

There have been about 1000 new infections of HIV in Australia a year since 2013, taking the total diagnoses since the virus was detected in 1984 to just over 36,000.

Condoms remain the best way to prevent the spread of the virus.

'We can't endorse these comments'

The CDP has distanced itself from Dr Kim's comments, saying they were made "in the context of a personal conversation" and did not reflect party policy.

"We have no official policy to deny treatment to anyone," a spokeswoman for the party told Hack.

She said the party's founder, Reverend Fred Nile, had in the past paid for private health insurance for a patient of AIDS to get treatment.

"We can't endorse those comments at all," she said of Dr Kim's Facebook post.

Executive Director of AFAO, Darryl O'Donnell, told Hack that rejecting stigma was critical in tackling the spread of HIV.

People living with HIV already face enormous stigma when it comes to their health and treatment."

"We know the stigma that exists is often a tremendous barrier to people seeking the treatment they need. It can stop people getting tested and treated, which slows our efforts to address HIV, and compromises the health of the individual," he said.

In the 2016 federal election, the CDP, which says it stands for "fundamental Christian beliefs", received about 162,000 votes. That's 1.2 per cent of the national vote.

In the ACT, they received just under 3,100 votes - also roughly 1.2 per cent of the territory's overall vote.

The CDP does much better in state elections and has had successful tilts at seats in New South Wales since the early 1980s.