Mother hit by Liberal pamphlets tells inquiry Brethren made voting ‘unsafe’

2 months ago 5

A young mother has given evidence of being hit repeatedly with Liberal National Party pamphlets as she and her three-year-old child ran a gauntlet of Exclusive Brethren men on the way to vote at the May federal election.

Voter Cassandra Barrett, who at the time was a victim of domestic violence at home, said the behaviour from a throng of young men canvassing for the LNP candidate outside a polling place in Queensland had left her son terrified and her on the verge of tears.

Cassandra Barrett says the behaviour of Plymouth Brethren Christian Church members at the last election had made her feel wary about voting in person.

“I felt really intimidated and unsafe – I just wanted to cry,” she told a hearing of the parliament’s post-election inquiry. “I was trying to vote… people should feel safe to vote.”

Barrett’s is one of dozens of shocking stories from around the country provided in submissions and evidence to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, which is holding an inquiry into the conduct of the federal election.

Members of the religious sect, now known as the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, turned out in huge numbers in marginal electorates to campaign for then-Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. The effort prompted Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to label the church a cult, to ask what was the arrangement between them and Dutton, and to suggest there was a policy “quid pro quo”.

The committee inquiry is exploring whether the Brethren effort nationwide amounted to “domestic interference” in the poll, and whether the church should have been registered under electoral law as an “independent third-party campaigner,” given its large cash and in-kind investment.

Exclusive Brethren members in Liberal shirts gather in Sorell, Tasmania, in the marginal Labor seat of Lyons.

The joint committee has heard evidence from voters and volunteers nationwide that the church members’ presence overwhelmed and intimidated people, creating a threatening atmosphere in many polling booths.

A hearing of the committee on December 11 suggested ground zero for poor behaviour in Queensland was the marginal Labor seat of Blair – an outer-suburban electorate of the kind targeted by Dutton.

“It was like a war zone, it didn’t feel like an election campaign,” Labor campaign director, Madonna Stott, told this masthead after giving evidence to the committee.

“I really like campaigning. I like the challenge, I love the adrenaline – everything that goes with it. But the thought of an election now sends a shiver down my spine. And yeah, it profoundly changed the way we look at campaigns.”

Brethren members, wearing clothes to make them unrecognisable as such, head to a polling booth in Kooyong in support of the Liberal candidate.

The Australian Electoral Commission’s acting deputy electoral commissioner Kath Gleeson agreed in her evidence that “there were challenges” from the behaviour of Plymouth Brethren Christian Church members.

“It really disappoints and concerns the AEC because we want voters to feel safe, and we want our staff to feel safe in their workplace,” Gleeson said in October. However, she said most of the problems had happened outside the six-metre zone around polling places controlled by the AEC.

In the commission’s view, she added, “there was not interference in the election such that the integrity of the election was compromised or Australians wouldn’t trust the result”.

In its submission, the Brethren church made a complicated argument that the church was not involved in coordinating the campaign, but its “community” did coordinate after “senior members … said that they would be volunteering”. The church’s leader, Bruce Hales, encouraged their involvement in a church-wide message in April.

A Plymouth Brethren Christian Church service with women, in headscarves, at the back of the church.

The submission revealed that individual parishioners donated approximately $700,000 to the political entity “Advance”.

Cassandra Barrett told the inquiry that, on the footpath leading to the pre-polling station she encountered a “sea of blue” – the colour of the Liberal t-shirts. As she walked down the path, the tunnel of Brethren members leaned in, crowding her and her son, who clung to her leg. After she declined to take one of their how-to-vote cards, they “started hitting me in the back with the cards”.

“It was like a tap, but startling,” she told this masthead, “and it was multiple times. I didn’t expect it. It was very jarring. I froze for a second trying to figure out what to do, then I grabbed my son and picked him up, clinging to him as I tried to get through this gauntlet.

“It was very overwhelming. I felt like crying.”

Once inside, Barrett said she had complained to an AEC official. “He sighed and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve gotten heaps of complaints about that’, and then he walked off,” she said.

Barrett, who after the election began working in the office of Labor’s MP for Blair, Shayne Neumann, said she had brought her son to the booth because, “I want him to be part of the process as he grows up … but then it was horrible experience”. In future, she was likely to postal vote.

Former ALP state MP Rachel Nolan said elections should be celebrations of democracy, but the Brethren behaviour in Blair in 2025 had “changed the tone”.

“People won’t want to vote … if people feel that they have to run a gauntlet in order to vote, that obviously has quite a profound consequence for community acceptance of the act of voting,” she told the inquiry.

Former Queensland state MP for Ipswich Rachel Nolan said the tone of the election had changed.

Labor campaign manager Madonna Stott said Labor campaigners, including her, had been followed at night by Brethren volunteers in large work utes, to the point where she once drove into a police station carpark to seek refuge.

Labor election posters were “systematically destroyed” within an hour of being put up and Stott said another female Labor volunteer had been told by a Brethren member, “I know your car and I know where you live”.

Stott said she had seen voters having Labor how-to-vote cards pulled out of their hands, being told “you don’t need that”, or those who resisted accepting the Liberal candidate’s card being told “you can’t enter the booth if you’re not carrying one of these cards”.

“Women with prams or people in a wheelchair, they’d throw them in the baby’s prams or into the lap in the wheelchair, or wave them in people’s face, saying, ‘C’mon, c’mon you have to take this’,” Stott said.

If Neumann, the Labor member, came to the booth, “there would be a chant, ‘Shame, Shayne,’ and they’d gather around and yell at him, ‘You’ve done nothing, you’re lazy, what’s he done’?”

Stott said she was used to occasional catcalling, but this was different: “It was en masse … whole hordes of people screaming the same stuff together in unison. And they’d gather really close to make sure Shayne couldn’t get close to people. You can’t put into words what it was like.”

She also said one Brethren businessman had tried to infiltrate the Labor campaign. The man, Leon Attwood, contacted the campaign and asked to join “Labor chats or forums”. Text messages reviewed by this masthead show Attwood asking for “a list of activities where I could put my name down to”.

Stott said her “spidey senses tingled” and she asked to meet Attwood in person. He did not show up.

Attwood, a general manager at Brethren-owned company Atlan Stormwater, responded to questions saying: “You can’t blame a guy for trying! … I can’t believe you called this an infiltration.” He said it had “nothing to do with any political party, church, or where I work”, however, this masthead can confirm the company is owned by the Hales family, and its chief executive was coordinating the Brethren’s pro-LNP Blair campaign.

The deputy chairman of the electoral matters committee, Tasmanian Liberal senator Richard Colbeck, asked a Labor witness to the inquiry if she was “just having a bit of a whinge because you were outnumbered?” and that union volunteers were regularly flown in to Tasmania to campaign for Labor.

Contacted later, however, Colbeck agreed what he had heard of the experience at Blair appeared to be worse.

“I think the point is … if it is coordinated, it should be declared. Unions are a registered third party, and if we’re looking at it in the right context – and I think we are – [the church’s involvement] should be declared,” he told this masthead. “They had registered material and ... members of the Plymouth Brethren were volunteering through the Liberal Party. The question was ‘were they completely coordinated through that process’?”

In 260 submissions and eight days of public hearings, the electoral matters committee has heard stark stories from independent, teal and Labor campaigners around the country.

Dr Deborah Campbell, a volunteer in the Victorian regional seat of Wannon, wrote that “groups of youngish Brethren men monstered, harassed and jeered at” other volunteers and voters. She described them as “Brethren bros”.

Catherine Duloy, a volunteer in the Sydney seat of Bennelong wrote Brethren volunteers would “jeer at voters who did not take their material or who took material for another candidate, for example yelling at them they were ‘an idiot’ or ‘un-Australian’, or that they wanted to ‘ruin Australia’.”

Carol Berry, the new Labor member for Whitlam in NSW and former disability worker, said a group of Liberal volunteers including at least some Brethren members, acted as “a pack of men” mounting a “running commentary on … what I was wearing”.

“I was jeered at and belittled. It felt hostile, tedious, sexist and unpleasant.”

An unnamed candidate for the seat of Forrest in Western Australia described Brethren members being brought in by bus. They “aggressively shouted slogans and harassed electors” and in one case “abused [a volunteer] about her party’s position on gay and trans rights”.

Nicolette Boele, the successful independent candidate for the Sydney seat of Bradfield, told the committee via video link; that Brethren activists “would stand in between me and potential people who wanted to come and talk to me and make sure I didn’t have a good spot to engage with people as they approached the booths”.

In Bradfield, Airtags attached to eight stolen Labor election signs led police to the house of a Brethren man. The signs later ended up in landfill. The day after the theft, the anonymous submitter says, “a large bag of dirty nappies [was] placed over the locked gate on my property (from where one corflute had been removed). I found this act both disgusting and frightening”.

An anonymous submission from the seat of Calare, in regional NSW, said a group of about 20 Brethren members followed two of the candidates as they moved from one booth to another.

“The actions of the church community are separate to the church.”

The Plymouth Brethren Christian Church submission to the inquiry.

“They had obvious instructions to position themselves in such a way as to obstruct volunteers for candidates other than the party’s and to be as noisy and intimidating as possible,” the submission said. “Their aim was to negate the presence of other candidates by surrounding and isolating them, then shouting them down.”

Another submission, from an unidentified electorate, said Brethren members had “ambushed a street walk” by the MP, “aggressively jostled staff and volunteers, surrounded the [MP] and tried to drown out his conversations with local residents and his media interviews”.

The Plymouth Brethren Christian Church ignored a question from this masthead about whether it had offered its members pastoral counselling about their behaviour. Instead, it made a submission it said was prompted in part by “the unprecedented assault which has been launched against us by members of Parliament”.

Two posters, authorised by Freedom Party founder Morgan C. Jonas, that echo Plymouth Brethren Christian Church talking points on the campaign.

“Australia is a free country, where people quite rightly expect to be able to practice their religion free from persecution, discrimination, name-calling or anything of that nature,” the submission said.

It argued the church “did not participate in the election nor coordinate the political involvement of those who did”. However, it conceded that its members “clearly were” coordinated.

“The actions of the church community are separate to the church,” the submission argued.

“There were senior members of our church who said that they would be volunteering … What followed here was a strong showing of volunteers from members of our church. But to say that was organised by the church would be wrong.”

Gareth Hales (centre, in blue Scott Yung T-shirt), the son of the Brethren’s world leader, Bruce Hales, at the Bennelong polling booth in Sydney on April 30.

This masthead revealed in June that the world leader of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, Sydney-based Bruce Hales – who is regarded as next to Jesus in godliness – told his members via their central communication channel in April that “Australia needs to smile again”.

Shortly afterwards, compulsory gatherings played a video of three of Hale’s sons, Gareth, Charles and Dean saying: “Make sure our booths are manned and volunteers fired up each day to dominate the play … It’s game on ... Make sure we don’t leave any gas in the tank!”

The submission from the Liberal Party, national director Andrew Hirst contains no mention of the Brethren, adding: “Liberal Party volunteers have been the subject of aggressive bullying, physical and verbal abuse from the Left for decades”.

The National Party’s federal director Lincoln Folo also does not mention the Brethren but expressed concern that public commentary had “devolved into faith-based discrimination,” saying Labor’s critique had “degenerated to labelling people of faith as a cult”.

A church spokesman said 61 members of his church had reported “being bullied, filmed, name-called and so on”. He did not answer questions about whether the behaviour constituted interference in the election, nor whether it should affect the church’s charitable status.

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