You’d have thought that even in federal parliament, revelations that a group of Christians paid neo-Nazis to try to sway an election would prompt some introspection.
Apparently not if you’re in the federal Coalition.
When Plymouth Brethren Christian Church spokesman Lloyd Grimshaw beamed into a hearing of the electoral matters committee on Friday to answer some hard questions, three senior Coalition figures were on hand to dole out Dorothy Dixers and indulge the fantasy that the church was the real victim here.
Now the Liberal Party’s top two figures, Tony Abbott and Angus Taylor, have gone on a nice long bike ride sponsored by one of the church’s charities, the Rapid Relief Team.
Grimshaw’s oleaginous evidence on Friday was that he knew nothing of Nazis and that the revelations in this, masthead – backed by documentary evidence and multiple sources – rose no higher than “gossip”.
Grimshaw declined an invitation to go on oath to give his evidence – something the Brethren claim is based on scripture. Even with the benefit of that theological escape clause, though, Oily Lloyd couldn’t say with certainty on whose behalf he was speaking.
Was it the tiny company/charity that he’s a director of, the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church Ltd? Or was it the church itself, a global, unincorporated fellowship of 50,000 people?
This convenient confusion meant that when Grimshaw denied “the church” was responsible for thousands of his co-religionists flooding polling booths at the last federal election, he was probably just talking about his company.
So let’s get it straight. The church – a strictly hierarchical global fellowship – from its leader Bruce Hales and his multimillionaire sons on down was highly organised and hell-bent on seeing Peter Dutton elected.
To hide its involvement, it ordered its members to disguise their clothing and lie about their affiliation, then it flew them all over the country so nobody would recognise them on home turf.
The Brethren campaign probably cost millions, perhaps tens of millions of dollars, all of which was undisclosed. We now know some of this they paid to far-right figures.
Any proposed quid pro quo from all this has never been clear. Did the Brethren want an easy ride from a Dutton government when the Australian Tax Office finally releases the results of its long-running investigation? Did they simply want more sweet government contracts for their NDIS, office fitout and other businesses?
The job of Grimshaw and his little company, PBCC Limited, is to give implausible deniability to all this. It’s what he was doing before the committee on Friday. He’s been doing it for years.
In 2016, for example, Grimshaw co-signed a “confidentiality deed”. His little company, PBCC Ltd, agreed to pay $920,000 to an overly talkative former church spokesman, who would in return destroy evidence in a defamation case and refuse to testify. The case was over the church’s attempt to cover up the repeated sexual abuse by an elder of a seven-year-old girl.
All these things are on the public record because I’ve put them there.
What that means is that Grimshaw is not the villain of this piece. He’s just a camp follower obeying his own indoctrination.
The real villains are Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan’s Coalition. Because after Grimshaw slithered back to his day job, their political parties expressed outrage that a parliamentary committee had even dared ask questions of the Brethren church. They demanded the committee chair’s sacking. Then Taylor set off on a Brethren-sponsored bike ride.
The fact is, this is all about the money.
The Coalition has relied on under-the-table donations from the Brethren for decades. In 2016, NSW ICAC’s Operation Spicer unearthed a document showing $67,230 in donations from the party’s Brethren “friends”, most of them a few dollars under the disclosable threshold.
In ICAC now, Operation Rosny is investigating the Catholic Schools NSW’s alleged $265,000 influence-buying campaign with the state Liberals. If a quarter of a million dollars is enough to give rise to an allegation of corruption, public hearings and the full rigmarole, what would ICAC say about the Brethren’s wholesale spending in the attempt to buy the federal government?
If only the National Anti-Corruption Commission had the same legislation and the same energy as ICAC.
Maybe then phones would be tapped, public hearings held, and we’d stop soft-soaping this odious church and call the Brethren’s campaign by its proper name – rampant political corruption.
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Michael Bachelard is a senior writer and former deputy editor and investigations editor of The Age. He has worked in Canberra, Melbourne and Jakarta, has written two books and won multiple awards for journalism, including the Gold Walkley.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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