The ABC is set to launch a new discussion program, with the first episode including a focus on issues arising from the Bondi terrorist attack in which 15 people were gunned down.

ABC National Forum will be moderated by Insiders host and ABC national political lead David Speers.

It will debut in March ­– around nine months after the broadcaster’s Q+A panel show was axed amid a more wide-ranging content restructure.

Although this week’s announcement makes no reference to the show replacing Q+A, the two programs appear to have a similar remit.

The ABC says National Forum will bring together “ordinary citizens, community leaders, experts and policymakers to discuss topical issues of national significance”.

Like Q+A, which ran for almost two decades, it will include a live studio audience. However, a spokesperson confirmed it won’t have a regular timeslot.

“The ABC National Forum will provide a space for Australians to come together to share their knowledge and experiences, hear from others and better understand each other,” Speers said.

The first forum will focus on the lives and experiences of Jewish Australians, including issues arising from the Bondi mass shooting, with the promise it will “facilitate a wide-ranging and stimulating conversation” among its studio audience.

Managing director Hugh Marks said the program reflected the ABC’s “commitment to bringing Australians together” while director of news Justin Stevens said it would foster constructive discussion.

“The ABC has to continually innovate in the space of the town square and this is an important initiative to bring together voices of Australians from all corners of our community in a constructive way,” Stevens said.

“Listening to one another is essential to strengthening social harmony and fostering a more cohesive nation.”

The ABC said it would announce the air date for ABC National Forum in the coming weeks, but at this stage has provided few other details about the format or future discussion points.

However, Nine newspapers quoted a source as saying future forums might consider issues such as immigration or deaths in custody. They also suggested it would be more like SBS’s discussion program Insight than the former Q+A.

An ABC spokesperson told Crikey the forum would be “more personal than political”.

Patricia Karvelas was the host of the ABC’s former panel show Q+A.

Originally hosted by Tony Jones (and then known as Q&A), Q+A had a succession of different hosts in its later years, including Hamish Macdonald, Stan Grant and Patricia Karvelas. It was considered extremely influential in its early years, at one point attracting around half a million viewers, but suffered waning viewership in the lead-up to its demise.

When the ABC announced Q+A’s axing last June, Stevens praised its achievements but said the broadcaster needed to keep innovating and renewing.

“In the two decades since Q+A began, the world has changed,” he said then.

“It’s time to rethink how audiences want to interact and to evolve how we can engage with the public to include as many Australians as possible in national conversations.”

Q+A was discontinued soon after Network Ten had axed its long-running current affairs program The Project, prompting commentary about the struggles for many programs on free-to-air television.

“It looks like commercial and public networks are coming to the same view – that panel-based current affairs programming is a turn-off for audiences, regardless of whether they’re young or old,” media experts Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson wrote in The Conversation at the time.

“This is especially troubling because the closure of each program means the loss of another media town square, where the capacity to listen to and learn from one another in civil ways also disappears.”

Audiences will have to tune in to see how well the new ABC National Forum fills the void.