"The Canberra Liberals are the most conservative branch of the Liberal party in the nation".
It's one of Chief Minister and Labor leader Andrew Barr's most trusted lines of attack against his opponents, rolled out repeatedly as a tactic aimed at exposing the Liberals' as at odds with Canberra's progressive bent.
But is it true - are Alistair Coe's Liberals more socially conservative than their colleagues around the country, as Mr Barr and Labor so regularly claim?
Results from ANU's smartvote candidate questionnaire suggest not.
The survey, which the university is running in partnership with The Canberra Times, asked candidates to declare their position on 32 topics, including social issues such as abortion, euthanasia, pill testing and whether churches should have the right to refuse to administer same-sex marriages.
Ian McAllister, a professor at ANU's school of politics and international relations, said the answers indicated the Liberals' team of candidates were more socially progressive than their federal counterparts, who answered many of the same questions prior to the 2019 election.
On the question of abortion, fewer than a third of the 19 Canberra Liberals candidates who responded to the survey said they opposed it.
Opposition leader Alistair Coe was among that group, along with incumbents Andrew Wall and James Milligan and candidates Robert Johnson, Leanne Castley and Ignatius Rozario.
More than half of the Liberal candidates supported voluntary euthanasia, according to the survey results.
While all but three Labor candidates provided the same answers to each question, the Liberals were evidently given more freedom to express their true opinion on social issues.
Professor McAllister said it was important for voters to know what their local candidate truly believed.
"They [voters] don't want party animals," professor McAllister said.
"That's one of the major factors that is causing distrust that ordinary voters have in the political process.
"I think the Liberals have played this quite well in terms of encouraging their candidates to express their views.
"It's good the Labor party participated as well, but they were much more disciplined in terms of how their candidates completed the questionnaire."
Professor McAllister said with major parties in Australia and overseas pursuing predominately centrist economic goals, voters were increasingly looking to "moral issues" to help them differentiate one offering from the other.
"A lot of that has to do with generational change, economic security and prosperity" he said.
"Since the 1970s and 1980s, people have enjoyed a level of prosperity and economic security that we haven't had anytime in the past couple of hundred years. This has tended to focus things on rights, values equity and things like that."
A total 105 of the 137 candidates contesting Saturday's election had filled out the questionnaire as of Monday night, a proportion professor McAllister described as excellent.
An estimated 20,000 people have accessed the online platform, which matches voters to candidates which share their views on particular issues.
