Guardian stands by report after the candidate for Chisholm, Gladys Liu, said the report was ‘wrong’ and she had been ‘misrepresented’

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The audio of an 2016 interview with Gladys Liu, now the Liberal candidate for the Melbourne seat of Chisholm, has been released after she questioned the accuracy of comments she made to the writer of a Guardian article.

Liu ran an anti-Labor campaign on WeChat, the most popular Chinese-language social media network, ahead of the 2016 election and in the July 2016 report claimed credit for helping to get then Liberal MP Julia Banks elected to parliament.

The electorate bucked a nationwide trend and the Liberals snatched the marginal seat from Labor, amid former speaker Anna Burke’s retirement.

Liu told the Guardian the campaign on WeChat was run by volunteers like herself and centred on three issues: the Safe Schools controversy, same-sex marriage and economic management. In discussing the role of the campaign, Liu commented on how issues including same sex marriage were received in the Chinese community and on WeChat – the article did not represent those comments as Liu’s personal views.

“A lot of Chinese parents they just do not agree with letting boys go into a girls’ toilet,” she told the Guardian. “They strongly oppose the Safe Schools program.

“Not only toilets, it’s also the crossdressing, the introduction of transgender – this is something they found difficult to accept, especially to primary aged children.

“The second thing is same sex marriage, now that is kind of connected to the first one, that is their belief that same-sex marriage is against normal practice.

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“The Chinese people come to Australia because they want good education for their children, good environment, they want good things for their next generation, not to be destroyed – they use the word destroyed – by these sort of concepts of same-sex, transgender, intergender, crossgender and all this rubbish. To them this is just ridiculous rubbish.”

Hong Kong-born Liu, a former speech pathologist who is now running as the Liberal candidate for Chisholm, has now dismissed the Guardian’s reporting as “fake” and “wrong” and told the Australian on Monday that she was “misrepresented”.

“I was asked about what I had heard from the Chinese community and I told the person who interviewed me what I heard. When it was reported, it became my words,” she said.

The Guardian has released audio of the interview and stands by its reporting.

Labor’s Taiwanese-born candidate, the former mayor Jennifer Yang, has hit out at her opponent’s characterisation of the Chinese people in the electorate.

A spokesman for Yang said that the Labor candidate was referring to Liu’s “abhorrent” generalisation of the Chinese community’s views, not Guardian Australia’s story.

Comment has been sought from Liu.