Since this inquiry began the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church has given the Australian parliament one answer: the church had no involvement in the 2025 federal election, and if members campaigned they did so alone, as individuals, by coincidence, in their thousands. On Friday, in the last exchange of a three-hour hearing, that answer changed. It is now that the people at the polling booths were not acting as church members at all. They were, in Gareth Hales’s words, concerned business groups.
That is not a smaller claim. It is a different one. And it points at an organisation this platform has spent the week documenting.
The answer that moved
The final question of the hearing came from Mr Gee, who put to Gareth Hales that thousands of members of his church had campaigned in a coordinated way and asked whether he could understand why the church’s denials were hard to believe. The answer:
“I can understand it’s difficult to believe, but they weren’t members of the church. They were members of concerned business groups and members of private citizens. They weren’t there on behalf of church.”
Gareth Hales, JSCEM, 16 October 2026 · broadcast 04:29:10 BST
Read that twice. The defence is no longer that there was no organisation. The defence is that the organisation was a different one.
He said it more than once. Asked by Mr Newman why the Liberal Party’s own post-election review describes the Plymouth Brethren as a support group, he answered that he was not talking about the Plymouth Brethren at all: “I’m talking about concerned businessmen that may well have campaigned in their own electoral right.” Asked what drew him into the campaign in the first place, the answer was not faith. It was commerce:
“I was a concerned businessman and I belong to a lot of business groups, and that’s church and non-church — mainly non-church.”
Gareth Hales · broadcast 03:44:58 BST
So the committee is owed a question it did not ask on Friday. If the mobilisation was not the church but the business groups, which business groups? Who convenes them? Where do they meet? Who pays for the room?
Those questions have documented answers, and we published them on Wednesday. The church’s global business organisation, UBT, and its sister operation GAP trade from Level 6, 10 Herb Elliott Avenue, Sydney Olympic Park — the same floor given on the public register by the church’s service company, by its global charity, by its school operator and by its investment arm. Attendance at the annual Strive seminar, where the organisation’s funding target is set, is compulsory. A church with no structure does not have a head office; a loose network of concerned businessmen does not have a global budget.
Where father and son disagreed
Bruce Hales gave evidence first, from late morning in Canberra. Gareth followed in the early afternoon. They were asked several of the same questions. They gave different answers.
Should a sermon be acted on?
Mr Newman: “You would expect members of your congregation who are listening to your sermons to act on them, would you not?”
broadcast 02:45:03 BST
Bruce Hales: “Well I would expect so, Mr Newman.”
Ms Campbell: “Members should therefore not do anything as a result of that sermon or that preaching?”
broadcast 03:26:29 BST
Gareth Hales: “Yeah, I think they should just lie as they are.”
Would permission have been needed?
Bruce Hales, on his sons’ campaign recording: “I think if they’d asked me about them and asked permission, I would have denied it.” Asked whether his son had deliberately not asked him: “Quite likely.”
broadcast 02:11:13 BST
Gareth Hales: “I wouldn’t have to ask any permission of him… I don’t have to check off everything with him. Absolutely not.”
broadcast 03:35:25 BST
And the message itself. Both men were read the same text, reported in April 2025 and attributed to Gareth and his brothers after their father’s Bible reading: “How awesome was it to hear that recording on GMS. We should all be freshly charged and motivated to give this all we’ve got… Make sure our booths are manned and volunteers fired up each day to dominate the play. It’s all in the extra 1%… Keep up the ground game… The Lord can do what we can’t.”
Bruce Hales: “First I’ve heard of it, categorically, unequivocally.”
broadcast 02:19:33 BST
Gareth Hales, asked whether he wrote those words: “I’d have to check.” Taken on notice.
broadcast 03:21:03 BST
One of these men could answer immediately. The other was being asked about his own words, published six months ago under his own name, and could not say either way.
What Gareth Hales could and could not remember
Six exchanges. We make no claim about any of them beyond what is on the record. They are set out flat, in the order they occurred, with what else is on the record beside them.
One. He could not say whether he wrote it
The GMS message was read to him in full. “I don’t believe I said those words.” Did you write them? “I’d have to check… I’d have to look at the source documents here to actually verify they are my words.” The committee accepted it on notice. He has two weeks to say whether a message published under his name in a national newspaper in April 2025 is his.
Two. He could name who was not there
Dr Ryan asked whether Gareth Hales’s company, Santé Global, booked a room at the Ryde-Parramatta Golf Club on 1 April 2025. “Yes we did.” He described it as a business meeting — clients, suppliers, contractors, about “deals, projects, clients, operations, project management”.
Asked whether the far-right activists Morgan C. Jonas and Chris de Bruyne were present, he was certain. Jonas was not there. De Bruyne was not there. Asked who was there:
Mr Gee: “So you have a recollection of who wasn’t there, but you don’t have a recollection of who was there.”
broadcast 04:13:37 BST
Gareth Hales: “No, I just happen to know those two guys weren’t there.” … “I don’t recall, I’d have to get a list of names.”
He later explained the gap in his memory by saying the company uses the club constantly: “we have hundreds of meetings at this golf club, we use it regularly.” Which does not make the two certainties easier to account for. Taken on notice.
Three. The distance collapsed inside one answer
Lester Sharples is a senior church member who has said publicly that he attended that meeting and that Gareth Hales was there. Asked whether he knew him:
“Don’t know him very well, but I have heard of him.” … “Now I had two meetings with him, with business, here at our premises, and we spoke briefly about the campaign.”
broadcast 03:30:24 BST
Two sentences, one answer. Two meetings at his own premises, both touching the campaign, with a man he had heard of.
Four. Three men he barely knew came to his office, and all three raised the campaign
Morgan C. Jonas, whom Gareth Hales says he did not know to be a political activist, came to his office once, for about twenty minutes, ostensibly about a wood-chipping business. “He touched on the campaign briefly and then he went, and I never heard or saw of him again.”
Chris de Bruyne came twice, he says, for business advice. “He spoke briefly about the camp, but then I never heard or saw of him again.” Asked whether de Bruyne had sought advice about a venture called Australian Fire Brand, he did not recall the name. Asked whether he knew either man was a far-right activist, he said he did not.
Lester Sharples, as above, came twice. The campaign was mentioned briefly.
Three men, one office, three sets of brief and unmemorable remarks about a federal election, in the weeks of that election, by coincidence.
Five. The committee had to point out that his two answers did not match
Asked plainly by Mr Newman whether he asked anyone to do anything, he said: “No, I didn’t.” He had already said something else:
“If I was on a call — of course, every time I’m on a call a leader is expected to encourage, inspire if at all possible.”
broadcast 03:53:35 BST
The chair intervened to say the two answers were at odds and invited him to clarify. What followed was a distinction between directing and encouraging, then an acceptance that he had encouraged perhaps five or six people, none of whom he could name, in a setting he could not describe. The word leader came from a witness who had told the committee thirty minutes earlier that he holds no role in the church.
Six. He saw none of the signs
Gareth Hales told the committee he attended four polling places — Eastwood, Top Ryde in Bradfield, Parramatta, and door-knocking in Chatswood and Lane Cove — across several New South Wales seats. In those same seats, in the same fortnight, his father’s words appeared on electronic billboards and on signage on the back of trucks. Photographs of them have been published. He was asked whether he saw any.
“I didn’t see any.”
broadcast 04:06:33 BST
What they said, and what the filings say
Over the past week we published six pieces built entirely on the church’s own recordings, handbooks, company filings and charity returns. Friday’s evidence did not sit alongside that material. It ran straight into it.
“There are no official positions or titles” — and the global advisory panel
That was Lloyd Grimshaw’s evidence to this committee on 21 August. On Friday, Dr Ryan asked Gareth Hales whether he sits on the church’s global advisory panel. He did not say there is no such body. He said:
“No, I’m not on the global advisory panel. No, not my role.”
Gareth Hales · broadcast 03:30:24 BST
A panel you are not on, which is not your role, is a panel. In a church with no positions and no titles, a witness recognised the name of a global governing body instantly and placed himself outside it. The committee moved on. The five systems, published Wednesday, sets out what GAP is and who runs it.
“No centralised recordkeeping” — and publication from London
Asked how his weekly readings reach members, Bruce Hales volunteered the answer without being pressed:
“They’re recorded and then they’re published — published centrally in London… by the Bible and Gospel Trust.”
Bruce Hales · broadcast 01:48:23 BST
His son, asked what the Global Media Stream is, said he was not sure of the name, then described the thing itself: global streaming, interactive, including a worldwide meeting run out of New York about a month ago that members elsewhere could watch and take part in. Between them they described a global broadcast system operated centrally by a named charity in another country. Neither was asked who runs it, who may publish to it, or whether the 20 April reading went out on it.
“The church does not have any businesses” — and the concerned business groups
Grimshaw again, in August: “There is no such thing as a Brethren business because the church does not have any businesses, it doesn’t have any vested interests.” Gareth Hales on Friday, explaining both his own involvement and the presence of thousands of others:
“I was a concerned businessman and I belong to a lot of business groups.”
“They weren’t members of the church. They were members of concerned business groups.”
Gareth Hales · broadcast 03:44:58 and 04:29:10 BST
The church’s global business organisation, UBT, and its sister operation GAP are not hypothetical. They file. They share Level 6, 10 Herb Elliott Avenue, Sydney Olympic Park with the church’s service company, its global relief charity, its school operator and its investment arm — one floor, on the public register, in four separate sets of filings.
One trust deed, or various trusts
This is the contradiction nobody in the room noticed, because the two answers were ninety minutes apart.
Asked what his legal role in the church is, Bruce Hales said it exists in a single document:
“The only reference to me at this point in time that I know of is in one of the trust deeds… I have the final word as to whether they are in fact a member of the Plymouth Brethren or not.”
Bruce Hales · broadcast 01:44:47–01:45:33 BST
Asked later whether the Exclusive Brethren is a registered charity, he corrected the premise:
“The Exclusive Brethren as such is not a registered charity. The various trusts to which it owns property are registered as charitable.”
Bruce Hales · broadcast 02:35:13 BST
So the church’s property sits across multiple separately registered charitable trusts, and the man who says he holds no office in the church is written into the deeds as the person with the final word on who is a member. Nobody asked how many such trusts exist. Nobody asked whether the same clause appears in each. Nobody asked what a man with no authority is doing in the governing documents of a property structure at all. He took the charity question on notice, and he is now obliged to answer it in writing.
We are checking the deeds against that answer. Our work on the church’s charitable structure is the starting point.
“There is no command structure” — and one number, once a year
From his written submission of 5 October: “There is no register of members’ private activities, no command structure, and no officer who could truthfully answer for 16,000 private citizens.”
Attendance at the annual Strive seminar is compulsory. It is where the organisation’s funding target is set — one figure, for the whole operation, worldwide. We published the Strive material on Wednesday. A body with no command structure does not have a global budget, and a collection of autonomous congregations does not hold an annual conference nobody may skip. See what happened to the ratio that you agreed.
“Members do not need anyone’s approval” — and the form
Also from the 5 October submission, and repeated in his opening statement on Friday. Set beside it the document we published this week: the form a member completes, disclosing personal financial information, before they may move house. The committee did not put it to him, so it remains where it was — in the five points, unanswered.
Fifty years as a tax adviser and company auditor
Asked what his occupation had been, Bruce Hales said he spent fifty years as a tax adviser and company auditor and retired last year, adding that he has “investments that have arisen out of my own private savings” and has been “well looked after by my sons”. He was asked nothing further about money.
That is a remarkable omission in an inquiry that has heard about eight charities and hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. The church’s endowment fund took in A$44.1m in a single year and spent A$2.0m. From the platform at Strive it is described in the leadership’s own words as the nest egg for the future. The man who says he has no role in any of it audited company accounts for half a century. The Brethren bank has the figures.
They were questioning an organisation they had not understood
This is the real failure of Friday, and it explains most of the others. The committee arrived with a mental model of a church — a leader, a clergy, parishes, sermons, a congregation that turns up on Sunday and goes home — and the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church is not that. Almost every question built on the wrong model produced an answer that was entirely truthful and told the committee nothing.
They accepted the Pope analogy. Mr Small offered it twice. Bruce Hales agreed with it. It then became the frame for the rest of the day, and Ms Campbell was reduced to putting it back to Gareth Hales as established fact. It is the wrong comparison in every respect that matters. The Catholic Church has canon law, a published catechism, dioceses, an appointment process and a visible hierarchy — and a Catholic who disagrees with the Pope remains a Catholic, keeps their family and keeps their job. The force of the Brethren structure is the opposite combination: no formal office anywhere, and no exit. Letting that analogy stand handed both witnesses their entire defence inside the first hour, free.
They did not test what fellowship means. Bruce Hales said no member’s place in the fellowship depends on how they vote. Dr Ryan asked whether a member could publicly disagree with his ministry and remain in full fellowship, and accepted the answer yes. Nobody asked the only question that gives those answers meaning: what happens to a member who is not in fellowship. He came close to volunteering it himself, describing former members of whom “only a fairly small percentage have become sort of what we would say in opposition to us”. Nobody followed.
They called a Bible reading a sermon, all morning. He corrected them repeatedly — “let’s just call them a reading” — and distinguished readings from gospel preachings more than once. That is not pedantry. It determines who speaks, who is present, what is recorded and what is distributed, and every correction bought him ground.
They did not know the ministry is published and archived. He told them himself that his readings are recorded and published centrally in London by the Bible and Gospel Trust. The Brethren ministry exists as dated, numbered, citable volumes; his own submission quotes from them. A committee that understood this would not have spent twenty minutes arguing with a witness about a newspaper’s account of what he said on 20 April 2025. It would have asked him to produce the reading.
They kept asking corporate questions of a structure designed to have no officers. Are you a director. Is it your role. Do you hold a title. In an organisation where nobody holds an office, every witness can answer those truthfully in the negative for ever. Gareth Hales used it as his closing position — “I don’t have a formal role in the PBCC” — and it is true, and it is beside the point.
Which is why the sentence quoted earlier got away. When Bruce Hales said he has the final word on whether any individual is a member of the Plymouth Brethren, he was describing a power written into a deed over a body of 56,000 people — and the next question put to him was whether he was a company director. Nobody returned to it. In the same stretch, Dr Ryan asked whether members believe he is a direct messenger from God — “I would think that they would say that what I get, I get from the Lord” — and the follow-up went to another subject entirely.
And nobody asked what GMS is: who operates it, who may publish to it, whether it reaches every member. They read a message off it aloud and never asked what it was.
There is a cost to all of this beyond the lost hour. When a committee does not know where the organisational question sits, its questions start to look like questions about religious practice — about pets, haircuts and facial hair — and at that point the witness stops being a man who runs a global operation and becomes a man of faith being mocked by a parliament. That is precisely the clip the church wants, and on Friday the committee produced it themselves.
The questions that work are the ones built on filings, deeds and recordings rather than on doctrine. There were ten of them available, published the day before, and we are not the only people who had them.
The ten questions we published on Wednesday
On 15 October we set out ten questions for this committee to put, and one longer question that contained all of them. They were published the day before the hearing and are still on this site, unchanged. This is what became of each.
One. The PBCC Services chain, and who changed the Vision Foundation’s registered contact details. Not asked. But in his opening statement Bruce Hales volunteered the existence of “the company that performs the church’s administrative work” — a company the church owns outright — while distancing himself from it. The chain stands unexamined.
Two. Who sits on the Global Advisory Panel and the Global Board, who approves the global budget, who sets the annual funding target. Half asked, by accident. Dr Ryan asked Gareth Hales whether he was on the global advisory panel. He said he was not, and that it was not his role. Nobody asked who is.
Three. The “PBCC member records” named in UBT’s own privacy notice. Not asked. Bruce Hales told the committee the church keeps no register of members’ political activities — a narrower statement than the one he is usually taken to be making, and nobody tested it.
Four. UBT’s stated goal of doubling member businesses’ net profit by 2030, and what follows for a business that misses it. Not asked.
Five. “If you’ve got a million bucks, you give half away.” Not asked. He was asked whether the church pays him. It does not; he has private investments and is, in his words, “well looked after” by his sons.
Six. His son Charles describing him asking “what happened to the ratio that you agreed?”, after which 58 people lost their jobs in eight weeks. Not asked.
Seven. The Vision Foundation — A$262 million, A$44.1 million of revenue against A$2.0 million of expenses, a stated accumulation phase. Not asked, though Mr Gee put the headline figure to him: that the church’s charities hold assets worth hundreds of millions, and that given what is at stake he might have investigated the allegations himself. The answer was “Not necessarily.”
Eight. Who decided no entity needed to register as a significant third party for the 2025 election, and whether the effect on charitable status was considered. Not asked — and this is the one that matters most, because it is the only question on the list that goes directly to electoral law rather than to church structure. Senator Mahoney came within a sentence of it, observing that “we have processes and places for third parties to disclose their involvement”, and then moved to something else.
Nine. Why the voluntary disclosure to the ATO came from UBT rather than from the individual businesses. Not asked.
Ten. Grimshaw said the April 2025 words were spoken in a Bible meeting and taken out of context; Hales has written they were never spoken at all. Which is correct, and will the church produce the recording? Asked, and it produced the sharpest exchange of the hearing. Bruce Hales: “First I’ve heard of it, categorically, unequivocally.” Pressed on whether that element of the reporting is false, he took it on notice. His son, asked whether he wrote the message, also took it on notice. Nobody asked for the recording.
One of ten put properly. Two glanced at. Seven not asked at all.
And a word that was never said: Advance
In three hours of evidence from the leader of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church and from his son, about their members’ participation in an Australian federal election, nobody mentioned Advance Australia. Not once. The word does not appear in the hearing except as an ordinary verb.
Lloyd Grimshaw was asked about it in August. Neither Hales was asked about it at all.
This is the strangest omission of the day, because the booths are the hard part of the case and the money is the easy part. Who stood where, wearing what, for how long, is contested and difficult to attribute. Donations are recorded, named, dated and filed with the Australian Electoral Commission. Our own examination of the AEC disclosures found at least five members of the church gave a combined $655,000 to Advance, the campaign group that campaigned against the government in 2025.
And Advance is not an informal outfit. It is a registered significant third party, and its return for 2024–25 on the AEC’s transparency register reads:
Total receipts $13,459,036. Total payments $12,374,594. Electoral expenditure $10,108,548. Total debts $27,150.
Source: AEC Transparency Register, annual significant third party returns, 2024–25
The $655,000 falls inside that same return. So of the $13.46 million Advance received in 2024–25, just under five per cent — close to one dollar in every twenty — came from at least five members of a single church whose leader told this committee on Friday that the church does not engage in political activity.
Which sets up the comparison the committee never made. Advance registered, declared, and filed. It spent more than ten million dollars of declared electoral expenditure, and the money that reached it from members of this church is on the public record because the law required somebody to write it down.
The other half of the same campaign — the people — is not on any register anywhere. Thousands of volunteers at polling places across the country, in numbers nobody disputes, and no entity connected with the church registered as a significant third party, declared electoral expenditure, or filed a return. One half of the effort was disclosed by the organisation that received the money. The other half was not disclosed by anyone.
Bruce Hales did address it, in a sense, before anyone could ask. His opening statement contained a pre-emptive blanket denial:
“I had no agreement or understanding with the Liberal Party or any political party, or with any group or person involved in the 2025 federal election. I made no donation, payment or contribution to anyone. I do not commission or pay for advertising of any kind.”
Bruce Hales, opening statement · broadcast 01:35:05 BST
Note what that covers and what it does not. It is a denial about himself: his agreements, his donations, his advertising. It says nothing about whether he knew members were funding Advance, whether anyone in the church’s leadership met or spoke to Advance, or whether any entity connected with the church had dealings with it. Those are different questions, and the committee asked none of them of either witness.
So the questions still stand, and they are short ones. Has either man ever met anyone from Advance Australia? Has anyone in the church’s leadership? Was either aware that members of the church were donating to it on this scale? And given that a group spending at that level ordinarily attracts the third-party disclosure rules, who considered whether those rules applied here — which is question eight, arriving by a different road.
And the question that contained all the others
We ended Wednesday’s piece with a single question, built only from documents: given a verified worldwide membership list, an annual event households are expected to attend, a form disclosing a household’s mortgages, savings, investments and salaries before it may move house, a global relief charity, a global school, a global fundraising operation with one annual target and a global endowment fund — all operating from the same floor of the same building in Sydney — is it credible that thousands of members independently decided, at the same time and in the same way, to campaign in an Australian election?
Nobody put it. But in the last answer of the day, Gareth Hales answered it anyway, and in the only way left open: by saying the thousands were not church members at all.
The clock
The hearing ran on six-minute blocks. Almost none of them were six minutes of questioning, and the interruptions did not fall evenly across the morning.
They came when Bruce Hales said his son had quite likely avoided asking his permission. They came during the sequence linking the 20 April reading to the GMS message. They came when he was asked whether Michael Bachelard’s reporting was false. They came when Gareth Hales was pressed on whom he had encouraged and how. They came when he was asked what he meant by the word us. They came, repeatedly and at length, when he was asked about Linda Reynolds — a former Liberal cabinet minister who has written that she was approached during the final weeks of the campaign by two people she knew to be church members, seeking access to the Liberal Party’s copy of the electoral roll database. The chair had to ask three times for the interruptions to stop before that question could be answered. It was taken on notice.
Some objections were fair. A list of questions about pets, haircuts and facial hair was a long way from the terms of reference, and opening an examination by asking a witness whether he has been telling the truth invites exactly the response it got. But the pattern across three hours is not hard to describe, and anyone can check it: the clock ran hardest at the precise moments the answers were running out.
Two weeks
The most useful thing Friday produced is a list. Both men have seven days to receive further questions and two weeks to answer in writing, and those answers are published by the committee. What is now owed, in writing, to the Parliament of Australia:
Whether Gareth Hales wrote the GMS message. Who attended the meeting at the Ryde-Parramatta Golf Club on 1 April 2025. Whether Michael Bachelard’s reporting of that message is false. Whether the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church is a registered charity in Australia, and which trusts hold its property. Which church members met the Trump administration in New York, and which were trained in campaigning by the MAGA movement in the United States. Whether Bruce Hales considers it appropriate for Turning Point USA to have called on the US State Department to intervene in these proceedings. And what, if anything, the church knows about an approach to a former cabinet minister for access to an electoral database.
Several of those have no good answer available. The GMS question is the clearest: confirming the message concedes a central broadcast system carrying campaign instruction to the membership; denying it tells a parliamentary committee, in writing, that a senior newspaper correspondent fabricated a quotation.
Why this is harder to explain now
Nothing on Friday proved a conspiracy, and we are not asserting one. What Friday did was narrow the space in which the church’s own account can sit.
A church with no hierarchy has one man with the final word on membership, written into a trust deed. A leader with no authority would have refused permission had it been sought. A son with no role describes himself on a call as a leader expected to encourage. Sermons are clear and rarely misinterpreted, and nobody knows what anyone took from them. The thousands at the booths were not church members but concerned business groups — which hold their meetings, as the filings show, on one floor of one building in Sydney Olympic Park.
Each of those statements can be defended on its own. The difficulty is that they were all made by the same two men, to the same committee, on the same morning, about the same election.
How this was put together
The hearing was broadcast live and is publicly available. Quotations above are drawn from that broadcast and are given with the time at which each was spoken, so that any reader can check them. The official Hansard transcript had not been published at the time of writing; where it differs, Hansard is the record and this page will be corrected.
Where this piece refers to filings, addresses, charity returns and the church’s own recordings, those are set out in full in the six-part series published this week, beginning with why the Brethren campaigned at all and concluding with five things the church’s own documents show.