Liberal candidate Sophie Mirabella has said the audience was stacked against her at an election forum held in the rural Victorian electorate of Indi.

The forum in Wangaratta on Monday night featured Mirabella along with the Nationals candidate for Indi, Marty Corboy, and the independent, Cathy McGowan, who won the seat from Mirabella by a margin of 0.3% in the 2013 election after a strong grassroots campaign. Until that point, Indi had long been held by conservatives.

Speaking to ABC radio on Tuesday morning, Mirabella said the forum failed to raise “any questions about what I think the top issues of concern for Indi are”, which she said were jobs, infrastructure and roads.

The forum, hosted by the ABC and the Border Mail, saw Corboy grilled about his belief in intelligent design and his anti-abortion views. Mirabella spoke about the need for a publicly available national sex offender registry and the problem caused in the area by the drug ice.

The Border Mail reported that McGowan received “a thunderous round of applause when she declared she would ‘stand there proudly and vote strongly for same-sex marriage’.”

But Mirabella said while issues such as marriage equality may be important to Melburnians, the forum had failed to focus on the issues important to Indi.

“Why don’t we stop talking about what the people in Melbourne are saying and what the stacked-out audience are saying,” she told the ABC’s Jon Faine on Tuesday.

“In all of the surveys I’ve done and the thousands of people that have responded to my surveys over time, the issues of jobs, services and infrastructure are top issues. There was not a single question about that, which was very disappointing.”

The ABC rejected suggestions that the audience was stacked. The 500 audience seats were allocated entirely at random from more than 800 seat requests, a spokeswoman said.

“Audience members were not asked to declare their voting preferences but those who asked questions were asked to state any allegiances they had to political organisations,” she said.

“The overwhelming majority of audience members were from within the Indi electorate, as the event was only promoted on ABC Shepparton and ABC Goulburn Murray, in addition to promotion from the Border Mail. Questions were asked on a first-come first-served basis during the event and were not submitted in advance.”

Mirabella also complained that her campaign was on the receiving of underhand tactics with campaign signs in the electorate defaced and stolen.

“It doesn’t bother me because I’m focused on actually talking about my plan,” Mirabella said. “Politics is about identifying problems and finding solutions. It’s not a colouring-in competition and it’s not a poster competition.”

McGowan told the ABC that her campaigners were not behind the vandalism and theft, saying she felt sorry for Mirabella that it had happened.

“I would like to put on record [that] every one of my supporters is asked to sign a pledge to behave in a certain way and respect other members in the campaign and themselves,” she said. “I think I’m the only politician who asks that.”

McGowan refused to say which side she would choose if she retained the electorate and if there was a hung parliament.



Corboy said he was disappointed by the forum because he was asked about his personal views on issues such as climate change, abortion and marriage equality, and was also pressed about his decision to home-school his six children.

He said that while he believed in climate change: “I am not a crusader on these issues, I am here for my community.



“It not so much annoyed me, because I understand there being some interest in them, but what I was disappointed about was that I couldn’t talk about the opportunities available to Indi through a National party representative.

“I want to focus on jobs and growth.”

He clarified that he was not a creationist but that he believes in intelligent design.

On abortion, he told the audience: “I respect life from the moment of conception to natural birth.” When asked if he would support abortion if a woman was raped, he replied: “This is a very, very, very personal issue for me and my family and I’ll leave it at that.”

If the same-sex marriage plebiscite resulted in a win for the yes vote, Corby said: “I would like to see religious organisations protected and also some businesses.”