The Exclusive Brethren, a closed Christian fellowship, have had a place in the 2025 federal campaign that has been on the public record since last year. Members turned up in unusual numbers at polling places, often in Liberal shirts, in seats the Coalition needed.¹ In June 2025 The Age reported that Bruce Hales had recorded a short message and sent it only to members, on a private church video site they log into to watch meetings and leadership recordings. The paper said he told them to staff polling places each day, keep members turning out to work those tables, and talk to voters as they arrived.² On Friday 21 August 2026 that record reached parliament. What arrived with it was sharper than a turnout story.

That morning The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald alleged that church elders had paid far-right operators, in cash and by PayID, to disrupt Labor, Greens and independent campaigns.³ The papers say they have seen leaked messages and records of those payments. They are standing those documents up. Lloyd Grimshaw, a director of Plymouth Brethren Christian Church in Australia, the registered charity, appeared by video before the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters and called the reporting a “complete lie.”^{4, 5}

The committee was also asking about the tables outside the school or hall where Australians vote. Volunteers in party colours hand how-to-vote cards and try to win the last few metres. That is organised campaigning at the vote. It is not stuffing ballot boxes. It is not the same as paying far-right operators, including people named in the hearing as neo-Nazis, to follow candidates and heckle the Prime Minister. Grimshaw did not deny that members had been at the polling places.

He said:

I’m not denying that many of our members from the church got involved. I wouldn’t deny that there was obviously some coordination—of course there must’ve been—amongst those members. But what I can assure you is that it certainly wasn’t coordination or direction from the church.⁶

He said members had coordinated. He said the church had not directed them. The sitting’s Proof Hansard, the official transcript, is uncorrected.

Elders, far-right operators, neo-Nazis

The hearing was an inquiry into the 2025 federal election. The committee’s brief already included aggressive conduct, obstruction, intimidation, and how political material is authorised. Chair Jerome Laxale put that investigation to Grimshaw in the first minutes.

The papers’ allegation is a paid disruption operation. Sherryn Groch, a reporter at The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, later told ABC 7am that the operators were given candidates’ locations, including the Prime Minister’s, and were used to follow, heckle and film. She said the stunts included far-right figures ambushing Anthony Albanese in a hotel lobby.⁷ That is journalism. It is not a finding of the committee. Grimshaw’s denial does not cancel the documents the papers say they have seen.

Grimshaw’s first long answer was that the church made no donations or support, “in any way,” to parties or third parties. He said:

Without names, it doesn’t even meet a threshold of gossip.⁵

He did not know Laurence McIntyre, whom the papers named as one of the far-right figures and who had heckled Albanese at a Brisbane clinic on the first day of the campaign.⁸ ABC News repeated McIntyre’s name on the day of the hearing.⁹ Grimshaw said he had never heard of Chris De Bruyne or Morgan C Jonas either.⁵

Dr Monique Ryan, the independent member for Kooyong, then put named neo-Nazi interruption on the record. Harrison McLean, a former Proud Boys member, at a Kooyong event on 23 April 2025. Matt Trihey, whom she described as a known neo-Nazi, at Friends of the ABC on 24 April. Joel Davis, whom she also called a known neo-Nazi, at Kew pre-poll on 30 April, at an antisemitic action. Grimshaw had never heard those names either. The church, he said, rejects antisemitism:

Never funded one cent to any political cause or party or candidate.¹⁰

The committee did not produce bank records on Friday. Friday did not prove that anyone paid far-right operators. Grimshaw saying he had never heard the names does not close that story. The papers still say they have seen the messages and the payment records. Ryan putting named neo-Nazis on the Hansard is why those records are not a sideshow to how-to-vote cards.

The charity and the fellowship

Grimshaw’s “church” is a small secretariat: website, Bible literature, the phone number on the building. The fellowship, he said, is 82 unincorporated assemblies, “no constituent governing document other than the Holy Bible,” operating autonomously. The people in party shirts at the polling places were, he said, private citizens volunteering. The charity, on his account, had not sent them.

Senator Corinne Mulholland told him former members did not describe the church that way. They had told the committee that church is leadership “from Mr Hales down,” not the person who opens the mail. Grimshaw’s reply was that those witnesses were ex-members. Discounting people who have left does not settle who the church is. Families already know that once you are out, you do not count.¹¹

She also pointed to geography. Similar campaigning, similar signage, similar tactics, from Perth to Ipswich. She asked him:

This committee is supposed to accept the argument that there was no level of coordination of those members from the church.⁶

Grimshaw said he understood it was hard to accept. He then repeated that the charity had not directed them.

Janja Lalich, a sociologist who has spent more than thirty years on high-control groups, has interviewed Exclusive Brethren in Britain and seen clients raised in Plymouth Brethren congregations in Canada. On the podcast Blackballed in July 2022 she said the doctrine of separation keeps members as far from “the world” as possible; they will not eat in the same restaurant room as outsiders, or go into non-Brethren homes:

There’s an incredible, extreme isolation.¹²

If the rest of the world is wicked, and you may not eat in the same room as it, a polling place is not a small chore. It is other people’s tables, other parties’ colours, officials, cameras, and voters you are not allowed to have in your house. Members still turned up in numbers, in Liberal shirts, in seats the Coalition needed. Grimshaw’s answer is that they chose it as private citizens. A fellowship that polices contact with outsiders does not flood the most public metre of an election as private whim. Either members were sent, or the separation rule was lifted for the campaign. Isolation, on Lalich’s account, is the rule indoors. The campaigning is the exception the street is meant to see.

The recording, and who was not there to answer

Global Media Stream is a private website. Members log in, with credentials tied to the church’s business-advisory firm, and watch recordings the public cannot see: meetings, and messages from leadership.¹³ Grimshaw told the committee it was a meeting archive. In June 2025 The Age reported that Bruce Hales, whom the paper called “man of God,” had recorded a short message two weeks into the campaign and that it went out to members on that site. The paper said he told members, including their families, to staff polling places each day and speak to voters as they arrived. After that recording went out, The Age said more members appeared at the tables.² On Friday the committee asked who would take responsibility for those words.

The quoted words, Grimshaw said, were a Bible reading, five words from an hour, selective and misinterpreted. Mulholland did not accept that. She said:

It’s a little hard to accept that was misinterpreted, Mr Grimshaw, when that was a direction that was given from the church leadership and people in very high positions, including members of the Hales family.¹⁴

She interrupted while he was still explaining the Bible reading.

Senator Steph Hodgins-May asked whether Bruce Hales is what the church calls the Elect Vessel. That is the name members use for their worldwide leader. Grimshaw would not give him the title. It belongs, he said, to Paul in the Acts of the Apostles. He did recognise Hales as a senior leader, with “no official appointments or titles.” Inside the fellowship, members still use Elect Vessel for the man whose messages they watch. Grimshaw did not admit that name on the Hansard.¹⁵

He said he cannot speak for Bruce Hales. He still offered what he called Hales’s views:

the views that I’m offering now about his position.¹⁵

A director of the registered charity cannot answer for Hales’s recording.

On Blackballed in July 2022, Lalich said that in a group of this kind loyalty runs first to the leader:

For families, in a cult, there can only be one loyalty, and that’s to the leader. And that includes parents and children.¹²

Hodgins-May said the source of the Hales recording was anonymous “for fear of repercussions.”¹⁶ Laxale asked Grimshaw to take away a request for the audio, or a transcript, and answer later in writing. Grimshaw would take the question. Some of it, he thought, was “covered by copyright et cetera.” Asked whether he would provide it, or was not sure, he said:

I’m not sure at this stage whether I can provide it, but I’m happy to take the question on notice.¹⁷

That is avoidant. It is evasive. It is not a witness answering a straightforward request.

Hodgins-May asked the committee to invite Hales so he could say whether the comments attributed to him were genuine, and what he meant by them. She told the chair:

I don’t know if I’m going to get much further with Mr Grimshaw on that.¹⁶

Laxale said the committee can consider that at its next meeting. He did not name a date. No invitation has been issued. It is not a summons.

Leaving him unheard, after a recording the papers have reported and a source who stayed anonymous for fear of repercussions, would be the committee stepping back.

If they invite him, they are asking whether those comments were direction, and whether members acted on their own. If they do not, Friday leaves Hales unheard, and only a minute of audio in dispute.

They will not own the tables

The church’s written submission to the inquiry cited a survey of members. Grimshaw said they ran it because of media reporting, and to prepare for Friday. They asked whether people had volunteered at the 2025 election, and what that experience was. They did not ask how volunteers came to be in Liberal target seats. Sixty-one replies came back. He did not survey the church’s 16,000 members. In the submission, and on Friday, he called the volunteer turnout a “strong showing.”¹⁸ He said members were outraged after the Prime Minister used the word cult, and that this spurred them to volunteer. Laxale noted that Albanese’s comments were on 29 April and that pre-poll voting had started on 22 April. Grimshaw said the comments were a spur, not the start.

Senator Carol Brown, Labor, asked who those 61 people were, and how the church had reached them. The submission had also said “senior members of our church” volunteered. She asked who those senior members were, and what office they hold. Grimshaw named two of the Hales family as examples, and said they had acted “off their own bat.”¹⁹ Who counts as senior, he said, is “subjective.” Brown said:

you’re being very vague.²⁰

Shayne Neumann, a Labor member of the committee, then asked about the seats. Witnesses had already told the inquiry that Brethren volunteers had turned up in particular House seats, including Kooyong, Bennelong, Bradfield, Goldstein and Neumann’s own seat of Blair. He listed more. Those, he said, were Liberal target seats: places the Coalition needed. He asked who had sent members to those polling places. Grimshaw said he did not know. If you volunteer for a party, he said, the party tells you where to go. Neumann asked whether, in the survey, Grimshaw had asked members how they happened to be in those seats. Grimshaw said no. He had asked whether they volunteered, and what their experience was. He had not asked who they were supporting, or how. A body that can ask members whether they were abused at polling places chose not to ask how they came to be, in unusual numbers, in the seats the Liberals needed.

Grimshaw spent much of Friday on what happened to volunteers at the tables: they were called a cult, filmed, abused. That can be true. It does not answer who sent members, in similar numbers and similar dress, to polling places in seats the Liberals needed. His explanation for why they were there was outrage at the Prime Minister’s language. The committee was asking who organised the turnout. Those are different questions. Friday got an answer on the outrage. It did not get who organised the tables.

Dr Monique Ryan, the independent member for Kooyong, asked why dozens of people identified as Brethren had spent weeks in her inner-Melbourne seat, which has no Brethren congregation that she knows of. She told the committee she had photographs and video. The women, she said, were dressed alike:

All the girls wore black tennis skirts and black leggings.¹⁰

They repeated the same line, “make Australia happy again,” and “clearly had a script” at pre-poll. They were not from the local community, she said, and were reluctant to say more. Matching outfits and a slogan at the Liberal tables is not the same as Joel Davis, the neo-Nazi she had named at Kew. Ryan put both on the record that day: the Brethren-identified booth volunteers in Kooyong, and Davis at Kew. Grimshaw’s method was the same for both: he did not know the names, and he would not accept the identification.

Andrew Gee, the independent member for Calare, put the booth conduct in his own seat on the record. Members of the church in National Party shirts, he told Grimshaw, had followed candidates from polling place to polling place to intimidate them, and had crowded around candidates on the booths. On election day at Bathurst Public School they had filmed him talking to his volunteers; the volunteers were so upset that a complaint was made to the Australian Electoral Commission at that booth. Those three examples, Gee said, were experiences he had had at the hands of Grimshaw’s members. He called the behaviour “disgraceful and reprehensible,” and “an affront to the operation of free and fair elections.”²¹

Grimshaw said he did not support poor behaviour and had no knowledge of what Gee described. He asked what test had been applied to decide the people were Brethren, and whether there had been “definitive identification.” Dress was not membership: “Were they wearing a badge to say they were Brethren members, or did they just happen to be wearing a green T-shirt? The assumption is they were Brethren.” The group is easy to recognise in the street until the question is whether the church is responsible. Then, on his account, identification is an assumption. Gee put the places and the AEC complaint on the Hansard. Grimshaw’s reply was still: prove they were members.

After lunch the committee heard a different witness. Advance Aus Ltd is a campaign organisation, founded in 2018. It is not a church, and it is not the registered charity Grimshaw sat for. Vicki Dunne, a former Liberal member of the Australian Capital Territory parliament and its former Speaker, appeared as Advance’s chair. She told the committee Advance had spent the 2025 election campaigning in seats the Greens held or wanted, after campaigning against the Voice referendum in 2023. The committee did not call Advance as a stand-in for the Brethren. It called a professional campaign organisation that had been a third party on the same 2025 trail. The inquiry was into electoral conduct and campaigning. Advance fields volunteers, picks target seats, and runs how-to-vote work of the kind under examination. Dunne said Advance was independent of the Liberal Party. She also said it was not responsible for other groups that looked similar at the same polling places.

Brethren members in party shirts, Advance’s field campaign, Rapid Relief Team breakfasts for Coalition MPs, and the far-right operators the papers say elders paid are four different things. They can turn up in the same election. That does not make them one organisation. Advance being in the room does not answer the payment allegation, and it does not answer who sent Exclusive Brethren members to Liberal target seats.

Breakfast does not answer the payments

The week after the hearing, no bank records of the alleged payments to far-right operators were produced. What the papers reported instead was a Brethren-linked charity serving breakfast to Coalition leaders.

Rapid Relief Team is a major sponsor of Pollie Pedal, a Coalition cycling fundraiser. Michael Bachelard, of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, reported that breakfasts ran every day of an eight-day tour that set off from Toowoomba on Saturday 22 August. Among the riders were Angus Taylor, who leads the Liberal opposition in federal parliament, and Tony Abbott, a former prime minister and, at the time, the Liberals’ federal president.²² Twenty-four hours after Grimshaw called the committee’s questions “bizarre,”¹⁹ Rapid Relief Team was feeding them as if the week were ordinary. The papers’ own headline on that hospitality sat it “days after Nazi revelations.” Breakfast does not answer the payment allegation. It shows how quickly the Coalition can sit down again.

What happens when someone leaves

The sitting will not restore a parent, a child, or a marriage. It did put how the group works onto the official transcript.

In public, “the church” cannot coordinate, cannot control private affairs, and cannot own the people at polling places. Families already know the other answer: when someone is cut off, it is never “the church” that did it. It is the Lord’s will, their choice, a test, the world. Parliament was offered a charity secretariat. Relatives have been dealing with the fellowship.

On the same Blackballed interview, Lalich described what happens when someone leaves a group of this kind:

If they leave, they lose everything. They’re shunning, no one will ever talk to them again. They lose their families, they lose their job. It’s very extreme.¹²

For children born inside, she said:

that’s all they know. It’s their entire world.^{12, 12}

Newspapers often describe the Exclusive Brethren as a wealthy sect. Many members are not. Grimshaw put small family businesses and mortgages on the record. What holds the group together is not a pile of money. It is rules, teaching, and the cost of leaving. The person on a polling-place table is not the same as the charity director who appeared on Friday, and neither is the same as the operators the papers say elders paid.

Inside the fellowship this week the message writes itself: the Prime Minister said cult, Labor is attacking faith, Senator Matt Canavan called the inquiry a witch-hunt. Public attack has historically tightened this group, not opened it. That noise does not mean a relative was imagining the control. Cutting someone off, what the fellowship calls withdrawal, did not start with last year’s polling places or with the papers’ payment story. A person who leaves, or who will not keep the rules, is treated as gone: no table, often no speech, often no job in a family business. Parents and children have lived that cut for decades. The alleged cash to far-right operators, and breakfast on Pollie Pedal, sit on top of that separation. They are not the first harm. “The registered charity did not do it” is the answer the committee got. It is also the answer families get.

Friday did not call people who have been cut off, the children, or the spouses still inside who do not fully believe. Mulholland’s former-member evidence was waved off as ex-members. That silence is how the system works. It is also a failure of the sitting.

What happens next

Friday left the papers’ payment allegation in parliament, neither proved nor cancelled; named neo-Nazis on the Hansard that a director said he had never heard of; a nationwide volunteer turnout with no institutional owner on the record; and a request to invite Bruce Hales, parked with no date named. The committee should get the recording, or a written explanation of why it cannot be produced, and it should test the papers’ payment trail as evidence rather than as a director’s insult.

A charity director cannot dispose of a recording that was never his voice, and he cannot close a payment story he says he has never seen. What the committee does next will show whether it treats that as enough, or whether “of course there must’ve been” is allowed to remain the last word on the tables, while the neo-Nazi allegation sits unanswered on the money.

Notes

¹. “Brethren zealots forgot religion and politics don’t mix”, Sydney Morning Herald editorial, 20 August 2026.

². Michael Bachelard and Max Maddison, “‘Game On’: The minute-long message that unleashed the Brethren’s election machine”, The Age, 7 June 2025.

³. Sherryn Groch and Michael Bachelard, “Exclusive Brethren secretly paid far-right activists to perform stunts disrupting the federal election”, Sydney Morning Herald / The Age, 20 August 2026.

⁴. Proof Hansard, Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, 21 August 2026 (uncorrected). Sitting recording, Parliament of Australia.

⁵. Proof Hansard, pp. 2–3.

⁶. Proof Hansard, p. 6.

⁷. Sherryn Groch, interviewed on ABC 7am, 24 August 2026.

⁸. Matthew Knott, Paul Sakkal and James Massola, “Fringe anti-immigrant figure disrupts Albanese as climate activists target Dutton”, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 March 2025.

⁹. Holly Tregenza, “Plymouth Brethren Christian Church denies paying influencers to harass election candidates”, ABC News, 21 August 2026.

¹⁰. Proof Hansard, pp. 9–10.

¹¹. Proof Hansard, p. 7.

¹². Janja Lalich, interview on Blackballed, 8 July 2022, YouTube.

¹³. Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, “Our network”.

¹⁴. Proof Hansard, p. 8.

¹⁵. Proof Hansard, p. 21.

¹⁶. Proof Hansard, p. 22.

¹⁷. Proof Hansard, p. 17.

¹⁸. Proof Hansard, p. 25.

¹⁹. Proof Hansard, p. 24.

²⁰. Proof Hansard, p. 23.

²¹. Proof Hansard, pp. 27–29.

²². Michael Bachelard, “Brethren feed Angus Taylor, Tony Abbott days after Nazi revelations”, Sydney Morning Herald / The Age, 23 August 2026.