If Bruce Hales, global leader of the secretive Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, started last Friday hoping to persuade parliament that his church’s involvement in the 2025 election was not coordinated, then he failed spectacularly.
“Either he was repeatedly and systemically dishonest to the committee, or he’s been marginalised by whoever is now in charge of operations for the church at large,” Monique Ryan, the independent member for the Melbourne seat of Kooyong, tells The Saturday Paper.
“Much of what he said was utterly at odds with what current and former members of the church have told me in private communications and in the number of submissions to the committee that those people have made. They are absolutely adamant that he has control over what goes on inside the church to a very significant extent.”
The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has heard evidence that the Brethren worked closely with then Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton and his campaign team to provide extensive financial and volunteer support to Liberal and National party candidates across the country. Thousands of members were bussed to marginal seats to hand out for the Liberal Party at booths.
Multiple sources from inside the church have contacted the committee to detail how the Brethren was given access to Liberal campaign resources, such as the party’s phonebank database, to make thousands of calls on behalf of Liberal candidates. They said individual church members provided multiple cash donations that came in just below the then federal disclosure threshold of $16,900, in order to conceal their identity, but which together added up to millions of dollars.
At the hearing last Friday, Hales’s son Gareth was asked by Queensland Labor senator Corinne Mulholland about a report in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald that stated he was part of a far-right WhatsApp chat group that was used, in Mulholland’s words, “to tail and heckle and intimidate politicians and candidates and people, including the prime minister”.
Hales replied that he had “no contact with neo-Nazis, and I completely reject their views”, adding he had not “had meetings with far-right protesters”. Still, Gareth Hales did say he met with Chris De Bruyne and Morgan C Jonas, described by independent MP Andrew Gee as “far right”, during the campaign. Hales described the encounters as “business meetings, business related, nothing to do with stalking, following, all these other things that you’re speaking about”.
Gee asked Gareth Hales whether, given the strength of the evidence before the committee that thousands of Plymouth Brethren members had taken part in a nationally coordinated campaign, he understood that the church’s denial of any role in directing them defied belief.
Hales insisted that, while it might be hard to believe, those involved were private citizens and not acting on behalf of the church. Gee replied: “I, for one, am not buying what you are selling.”
Committee chair Jerome Laxale, the Labor member for the Sydney seat of Bennelong, was no more convinced. He tells The Saturday Paper that the evidence from both Bruce and Gareth Hales was “the polar opposite of the evidence our committee has received”, leaving a “chasm in realities” that the committee must weigh as it prepares its final report to Special Minister of State Don Farrell early in the new year.
“The thing that has struck me the most, and still strikes me, is the lack of transparency around their involvement,” Laxale says.
“They always make it about ‘attacks on religion’ and, you know, ‘why shouldn’t people of faith participate?’ I think that’s a pretty meek defence because that’s not what I’m concerned about. I’m concerned about transparency and that if you are going to participate in an election at the scale at which they did, with that level of coordination and expenditure, then you need to declare that.”
Even if the joint standing committee has no power to make decisions or laws on its own, any adverse finding that the Brethren was actively involved in the election campaign will cause significant headaches for the church. Under Commonwealth electoral laws, any individual or organisation, other than a political party, candidate or sitting parliamentarian, that actively spends or fundraises substantial amounts for the purposes of political advocacy or campaigning must register as a significant third party, as unions, peak industry bodies and lobby groups such as Advance or GetUp! are required to do, in order to limit their potential influence without strict financial oversight.
“The Brethren are not engaged in day-to-day politics, so they have no feel for what persuades swinging voters and they end up being way too aggressive. Not only does it put people off, it attracts endless media scrutiny.”
If the Australian Electoral Commission, which is already conducting its own investigation into the Brethren’s activities, finds the church did in fact breach electoral laws, Laxale says that would prove the church’s electoral involvement and probably trigger a separate investigation by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, as charities cannot keep their tax-free status if they are found to have engaged in party political campaigning.
This would deal a huge blow to the Brethren, as its enormous wealth and ecosystem of successful businesses and linked charities rely heavily on retaining the tax-free status.
“It’s a matter for the AEC to determine whether or not they breached electoral law, so that’s not on the inquiry to do that. We don’t have the power to do that. We’re inquiring into the 2025 election, and obviously there was significant involvement from the Brethren,” Laxale says. “But my understanding is that investigations are ongoing between the AEC and the Brethren. Obviously, they would be interested in the evidence that our inquiry is getting from people who have written submissions but also the public hearings.
“We’ve got our final report due and then it’ll be a matter for the AEC to determine whether or not electoral law was breached.”
With Liberal and National members of the committee running what Monique Ryan said amounted to active interference on behalf of Bruce and Gareth Hales, Liberal MPs from the party’s moderate wing are openly questioning why the party is so keen to help an obscure sect that has only about 16,000 members in Australia and just over 50,000 worldwide.
Michael Bachelard, a journalist at The Age who has led much of the reporting on the Brethren over the past two decades, traces the group’s involvement with the Liberal Party back to the mid 1970s, when Bruce Hales identified his local member of federal parliament, newly elected member for Bennelong John Howard, as a potential ally of the church.
“The politician and the Brethren leaders had a mutual antipathy to trade unions, and a determination to minimise their influence in Australian life,” Bachelard wrote in his 2008 book Behind the Exclusive Brethren.
“They had a similar background and outlook in other ways, too, including their north-western Sydney upbringing and a small-business mindset.”
That involvement has continued to the present day, with current federal Liberal leader Angus Taylor regularly praising the Brethren and calling out one of the church’s charities, the Rapid Relief Team, for its work in the community.
Reflecting on John Howard’s involvement with the Brethren over the course of his political career, a spokesman for the former prime minister tells The Saturday Paper that the characterisation of him in Bachelard’s book “is like a curate’s egg – it’s good in parts”.
“Many of the economic views attributed to him only evolved over time. He has constantly said that he did not bring rigid ideologic attitudes with him into parliament,” the spokesman says.
“Mr Howard adheres strongly to the view that individual Australians or groups are free to either offer or receive help from others during the course of election campaigns – provided all conduct is within the law.”
In an opinion piece published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald earlier this month, former Western Australian Liberal senator Linda Reynolds revealed how in the final weeks of the campaign a senior party official asked her to meet two men described as small businesspeople wanting to help. She recognised them as Brethren members and said they were seeking confidential campaign information and individual logins to Feedback, the party’s voter-contact system, so they could phone voters from their own premises.
Reynolds refused. While she was assured the party would “turn off” its involvement with the Brethren in Western Australia, she soon saw Brethren members arrive in growing numbers at pre-poll booths, briefed by people who weren’t part of the Liberal Party’s local campaign teams, making other volunteers feel uncomfortable and at times intimidated.
When Reynolds raised her concerns in the party room, some colleagues accused her of religious discrimination, an attack line used repeatedly by Coalition members of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters as they tried to mitigate or deflect questions to Bruce and Gareth Hales and other witnesses during other public hearings.
Even though Reynolds did not allege specific misconduct, she noted that the church’s submission to the committee inquiry denied coordinating its members while acknowledging the many Brethren volunteers “clearly were” coordinated.
“So, if the church did not co-ordinate them, who did?” Reynolds wrote.
According to another Liberal moderate from New South Wales, whenever the Liberal Party turns to the Brethren, it ends up backfiring.
“This always blows up in our face,” the moderate Liberal tells The Saturday Paper. “There are many reasons, but the main one is that the Brethren are not engaged in day-to-day politics, so they have no feel for what persuades swinging voters and they end up being way too aggressive. Not only does it put people off, it attracts endless media scrutiny.”
The same Liberal source points to the Liberal Party’s internal review of the 2025 campaign, conducted by former Howard government minister Nick Minchin and former NSW state minister Pru Goward, which essentially admitted that party officials felt they had no choice but to rely on Brethren volunteers.
“The ageing of Party members has added to the problem of providing sufficient numbers of booth workers over the years, and some campaigns were grateful for the assistance of volunteers who were also members of the Plymouth Brethren,” Minchin and Goward wrote.
The review also noted “there were divided opinions about the value of having Plymouth Brethren members handing out Liberal Party” how-to-vote cards and recommended better training of all booth workers to ensure clear messaging and consistently appropriate engagement with voters as they approached the polling booth.
“The Liberal Party does not, nor should have, a religious affiliation test. Protestants, Catholics, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu followers supported the Liberal Party,” Minchin and Goward wrote. “It will need further investigation to determine why such exception has been taken to the role of the Plymouth Brethren; no doubt Brethren members themselves are reviewing their involvement.”
Despite the discomfort among moderate Liberals concerning the Brethren’s involvement, Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie says she remains deeply troubled by the hostile questioning of the Brethren’s involvement in the 2025 election campaign, which she says amounts to little more than religious persecution.
“Utterly disgraceful,” McKenzie tells The Saturday Paper this week. “I was absolutely shocked. I sort of logged on as a participating member and I could not believe the line of questioning, not only from teal MPs, from Greens senators, but also from the Labor Party, questioning why this particular church would pray for our country.
“If people of faith, irrespective of which church, synagogue, mosque, temple they worship at, believe in our democracy enough to actually get involved at election time, that should actually be a good thing. People shouldn’t be barred from participating in a free and fair electoral process simply because they are men and women of faith.”
With the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters now set to write its final report, the recommendations of which could lead to the Plymouth Brethren losing its tax-free status, many of the committee’s members are wondering why Bruce and Gareth Hales appeared so disrespectful and evasive in their answers to questions.
“I guess they’re not used to being held accountable,” observes committee chair Jerome Laxale.