Senate candidate for Family First Wendy Francis. Credit:Twitter/wendy4senate She said she personally deleted the comments "because we have a really small number of people helping me and we were just getting overwhelmed" by the number of responses to it. "And I'd have to say that there are 140 characters in a Twitter [message] and this is just a headline. "The gay slur thing; I am not homophobic. "It is one thing to be homosexual; it's another thing altogether to then impose that on children.

A screen grab of Francis' statement. "And I personally do not agree that kids being brought up with a gay couple as surrogate parents is in the best interests of the children. "And so it was a headline that came out and I didn't feel that the headline was even really properly representing me and so I pulled it," she said. A screenshot taken of Wendy Francis' Twitter page yesterday. Asked whether she believed she went too far with her comments, she said she did not believe she had.

"What I'd say to [people opposing the view] is that the headline that has been generated probably really lost sight of what I was saying," she said. "I was talking about emotional child abuse. "And for me we don't yet know what this social experiment is going to result with. "We're talking about not even giving the opportunity to kids to have a mother and a dad and what is worrying me is that we're having a parentless generation," she said. Ms Francis went further, comparing the "parentless" generation with the "stolen generations".

"We had a stolen generation and we saw that that social experiment left children confused, they were without the right to have their mother and father and for me I think the right of the child is to have a mother and a father," she said. Asked why she stood by her statements even though she deleted them, she said that the last thing that she wanted to do was "be unkind to people". "I am not a career politician and I am not wanting to be unkind. But I believe that the rights of the child supersede the selfishness of people wanting the child and saying that they will get one no matter what," she said. "So I believe the child's rights is to have a mother and a father." Loading

Asked to clarify that she removed the comment, not because she regretted it, but because she was inundated with responses, she said: "I think people interpreted it as me saying something that I wasn't saying. Can I say that? "I don't want to say that I went too far because I still believe that the best thing for the child is to have a mother and a father and I do believe that this is a social experiment that, if we used children in any other social experiment, people would agree that that was emotional child abuse."