The committee investigating the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church’s intervention in the federal election wants to hear from Peter Dutton and the reviewers who described the Liberal Party campaign as the worst ever.
The parliamentary electoral matters committee is investigating the “purported increase in incidents of aggressive conduct, deliberate obstruction, and intimidating behaviour towards voters” at the last election.
Evidence already gathered from more than 300 submissions and a number of public hearings suggests much of the troubling conduct can be traced to members of the separatist church formerly known as the Exclusive Brethren, who turned out in their thousands nationwide to campaign for Dutton.
Labor MP Jerome Laxale, who chairs the committee, issued an invitation last week for Dutton to give evidence at a hearing later this month.
Laxale says in his letter that Dutton’s office staff member, Sam Jackson-Hope, had been identified in this masthead as being “responsible for Brethren engagement”. “It would be useful for the committee to understand the nature of this relationship from your perspective,” he wrote.
Dutton has not explained how the Brethren came to be such a large part of the campaign, who co-ordinated it from the Liberal side, or if there was a policy quid pro quo, as suggested by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who also labelled the church as a “cult”.
In a separate letter, Laxale also seeks the evidence of party elders Nick Minchin and Pru Goward, whose inquiry into the election failure was first buried by the Liberal Party, then leaked, then tabled in parliament by Albanese.
That review acknowledged there were “divided opinions” in the party about “the value of having Plymouth Brethren members handing out Liberal Party How to Vote cards”.
The committee inquiry last year heard a number of shocking stories from polling booths, including of a young mother who was hit repeatedly with Liberal National Party pamphlets as she and her three-year-old ran a gauntlet of Exclusive Brethren men. They were apparently responding because she would not take a how-to-vote card for the LNP candidate.
The 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.
The Minchin-Goward review did not mention any individual misbehaviour at booths, but it said: “Clearly better training of all booth workers would ensure clear messaging and consistently appropriate engagement with voters as they approached the polling booth.“
However, their review also encouraged future Liberal Party campaign teams to “invest in building greater third-party support”. It did not mention whether it believed the Brethren, whose in-kind efforts would have been worth many millions of dollars to the Coalition, as a potential future group to ask for engagement.
Their report concluded that: “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.“
Laxale invited Goward and Minchin to give evidence to the committee on any aspect of their report.
A Liberal Party spokesperson said Goward and Minchin had turned down the invitation.
“It should be noted that Laxale’s request came directly from him, on his Labor Party-branded letterhead, not through the normal processes of the Joint Standing Committee,” the spokesperson said.
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.