Exclusive Brethren hearing LIVE updates: Church leader Bruce Hales to appear over allegations church campaigned in 2025 election, paid neo-Nazi associates to harass PM

This is a historic day – it’s like the Olympics for current and former members of the 56,000-strong fellowship of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, also known as the Exclusive Brethren – a group the Prime Minister has called a “cult”.

The church’s supreme leader, Man of God Bruce D. Hales, has been called, for the first time, to answer to the “worldly” authorities for what happened at the 2025 Federal election.

Brethren were behind a huge, two-pronged campaign for Peter Dutton. They disguised their normal dress and manned polling booths in the thousands. Liberal senator Linda Reynolds has confirmed they were pushed on local campaigns from Liberal head office, even if local campaigns didn’t want them.

Even more secretly, senior elders coordinated and paid for a parallel campaign of far-right figures and neo-Nazi associates who harassed left-leaning politicians at public events.

Hales is giving evidence today even though, after providing a submission in response to questions, he said: “I assume my attendance is no longer required”. His assumption was wrong. So what can we expect?

The revelations that elders of the secretive Brethren church mobilised far-right figures around the country to tail and harass MPs on the campaign trail, including the prime minister, have caused uproar in parliament in recent weeks.

Labor has slammed the “intimidation” campaign against Labor and other Coalition opponents as an attack on democracy, while extremism experts have called for an investigation and teal donor Climate 200 has referred the church to the charity regulator for investigation.

But the Coalition and some faith groups, along with American far-right lobby group Turning Point, have lashed the parliamentary inquiry’s focus on the Brethren as an attack on the church’s religious freedom and defended its covert campaign.

Meanwhile, former and current members of the Brethren have spoken out in horror at revelations of the far-right plot by church elders. Some say the Brethren is a controlling sect, not a religion.

The world leader of the secretive Exclusive Brethren sect faces a grilling by federal MPs about his church’s multimillion-dollar, undisclosed campaign for the Coalition at the last election, when he makes his first public appearance in decades before a parliamentary inquiry today.

Bruce Hales and his son Gareth were called to give evidence, under threat of subpoena, by the joint standing committee examining the 2025 federal election – the first time the Brethren’s “Man of God”, “elect vessel” has faced such scrutiny.

We’re covering the hearing live and bringing you all the highlights here.

The parliamentary showdown today comes after this masthead revealed that elders of the sect, which normally shuns the outside world, directed thousands of Brethren members to campaign for the Liberals in 2025. They also ran a second, more shadowy operation in which neo-Nazi associates were paid to tail and heckle MPs and disrupt Labor, Greens and teal events.