A church that tells its members not to vote ran a multimillion-dollar covert campaign to elect a government. Thousands of its people worked polling booths in borrowed t-shirts under instructions marked “CONFIDENTIALITY is mandatory”. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age reported that elders paid neo-Nazi affiliates and far-right figures in cash to harass the prime minister; the church denies it. Every account of this has established what happened. None has established what it was for. That question has an answer, and it is on public registers.

Friday

Gareth Hales is called at 11.30am. Bruce Hales at 1.00pm. Committee Room 2R1, Parliament House, Canberra, Friday 16 October. The first time this church's worldwide leader has answered questions in any parliament.

Anthony Albanese, who was tracked by flight app, followed from airports and heckled on camera, has asked publicly what the quid pro quo was. It is the right question and it has not been answered — not by the church, which denies everything, and not by the reporting, which was concerned with proving the operation existed. So: what does this church need from a government?

What they told the last parliament

On 21 August 2026, the church's spokesman Lloyd Grimshaw gave evidence to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. From the official transcript:

“We have no constituent governing document other than the Holy Bible.”

“There are no employees in the church, there are no official positions or titles… it's a Christian fellowship, so there is no hierarchical appointment to say these people are senior and these aren't.”

“There is no such thing as a Brethren business because the church does not have any businesses, it doesn't have any vested interests.”

He is owed two qualifications. He confined his remarks to Australia, and he said that when he says “the church” he means a secretariat entity that is the charity in Australia — though after the morning break he clarified that he was “representing the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church and representing the fellowship”, because separating the two would mean contacting 82 congregations.

Take the three claims in turn: no governing document, no hierarchy, no vested interests.

The governing document, and the man named in it

There is a constituent governing document, and the United Kingdom's charity regulator approved it.

When the Charity Commission registered the Preston Down Trust on 3 January 2014, it did so on the basis of an annexed Deed of Variation. Under that deed, a “Member of the Congregation” must be a person “in fellowship with Mr B D Hales (so long as he lives)”. Only such a person may be a trustee. A trustee who stops meeting the test “shall thereupon cease to be a Trustee”.

Where there is any doubt about whether somebody qualifies, the Minister of the Lord in the Recovery — Bruce Hales — “may by writing in the stipulated form declare whether any person is or was at the particular time in fellowship”, and that writing is “conclusive evidence”. He may reinstate a removed trustee and “also remove any of the existing Trustees as [he] considers appropriate”. Appeal against removal lies to him, and his decision is “final and conclusive”. Where a congregation falls below two members, the power to appoint and remove vests in him. The deed cannot be amended without his written sanction.

That is a governing document, and it describes a hierarchy with one man at the top of it, holding conclusive and unappealable power over who controls charitable property.

Nor was it drafted for Britain. A trust deed for the Papakura Gospel Hall Trust in New Zealand, dated 21 February 2006 — eight years earlier — contains the same machinery: fellowship with Mr B.D. Hales as the membership test, trusteeship conditional on it, automatic cessation, appeal to him, final and conclusive. It goes further: no hall may be sold without “the prior sanction of the Minister of the Lord in Recovery”. Its cover page reads: “© 2005 This Deed is Copyright to The New Zealand Church & Gospel Halls Assistance Fund.”

A copyrighted template, issued from the centre, placing one named man in control of property in every country it reaches. That is not an autonomous congregation. It is a franchise agreement.

“There is no centralised recordkeeping”

That was Mr Grimshaw's evidence. The assemblies are autonomous, he said, and nobody keeps central records.

The Universal Business Team publishes an app on the Google Play Store called Connect. Its developer is listed as UBT Global Software Development; the legal entity behind it is UBT Holdings Limited. Its own tagline is “Community Directory Application”. It has been downloaded more than ten thousand times and was last updated on 12 October 2026.

Its privacy notice — published by UBT, in public, and quoted here from its own text — says this:

“The Connect Services provide information about individual members of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (‘PBCC’) and enable contact to be made between PBCC members worldwide.”

Access is restricted. Subscribers pay a fee, and “all subscribers must be verified as PBCC members before they are provided with log-in details”. The service “will only connect to approved devices with the UBT installed Streamline3 software”. Everything uploaded “is checked first by UBT staff (employees and PBCC volunteers) to ensure that personal information aligns with PBCC member records”.

The notice then lists what the directory holds on each person:

It is “refreshed and verified on average every 2-3 years”. And on deletion:

“If information is deleted from the Connect Services we will continue to hold it on our database (accessible only to authorised UBT staff) for the purposes of verification and ongoing recordkeeping for the PBCC.”

Ongoing recordkeeping for the PBCC. In UBT's own words, in a document it publishes to comply with data protection law.

The Connect Services are owned and operated by UBT Marketing Pty Limited (ACN 162 091 796) as trustee for the UBT Marketing Trust, a licensee of the UBT Trust, of The Precinct, Level 6, 10 Herb Elliott Avenue, Sydney Olympic Park — the address the Australian Taxation Office searched in March 2024. Copyright belongs to Universal Business Team Pty Limited. The licence runs to UBT entities globally, with centres of operation in Australia, Argentina, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, and a UK regional office in Warwick.

So: a worldwide register of the membership of a church — names, addresses, photographs, places of worship, family links and marriage connections between households — compiled and verified against member records, held on a database at a single Sydney address, licensed internationally, copyrighted to a trading company, and sold back to the membership by subscription.

Each of the three claims fails against this one document. There is centralised recordkeeping. The congregations are not autonomous. And a company sells a product that only members of the church may buy, which is as close to the definition of a Brethren business as anything in the register.

The structure, as the church draws it itself

The church has its own diagram of what it is. It is titled “The Community Ecosystem”, and at the centre of it sits GAP — the Global Advisory Panel. Around it, entities are grouped under five headings, in the church's own words:

A recording of a Global Funding Team meeting describes the same structure in operating terms. GAP “has oversight and provides overall direction to the ecosystem”. Entities are sorted into revenue raisers (UBT, TyreMax, Campus&Co), consolidators (the National Assistance Fund, the Grace Trust, Vision Foundation) and recipients (OneSchool, the Rapid Relief Team, Vision Welfare). Each prepares a five-year strategic plan, and “they review that with GAP annually”. Businesses are given donation guidance as a percentage of net profit, varying by region.

In that meeting the Vision Foundation was described as holding $42 million across nine businesses, and as targeting $500 million at 20% returns — benchmarked, in the meeting's own words, against Harvard's endowment.

Its filed accounts show how that is going. The Australian entity alone — Vision Foundation, ABN 42 450 621 746, a registered charity, in its special purpose financial report to the ACNC for the year ended 30 June 2025 — reports:

Read that last line again. A registered charity holding a quarter of a billion dollars, which made a $57 million surplus in a single year, four fifths of it invested in the businesses of its own members, gave nothing to any charity at all. The previous year it gave $2,138,688 against a surplus of $81,973,687 — two and a half pence in the pound.

This is one entity, in one country, and it is halfway to the $500 million target on the timetable the meeting described. Whatever else it is, it is not a collection plate.

And New Zealand is not a charity at all. There, Vision Invest NZ Funds is a licensed managed investment scheme under New Zealand financial markets law — a regulated fund product with a Product Disclosure Statement, an offer open for applications, FundRock NZ Limited as manager, the statutory body Public Trust as supervisor and custodian, the Australian firm Aura Funds Management as investment manager, and KPMG as auditor. It operates one fund, the Vision Income Fund, whose units in issue rose from 98,499,812 to 136,750,767 in the year to 31 March 2024, at a unit price held at $1.0000. It is a lending fund: a separate loan administrator assesses applications against a Lending and Credit Policy and monitors “all money paid by borrowers”.

A charity holding a quarter of a billion dollars in one country; a licensed investment scheme of some $137 million making loans in another. Both called Vision.

And the Rapid Relief Team — the one Brethren charity that serves anybody outside the church, the one that fed Tony Abbott and Angus Taylor's bike riders in September, days after the far-right payments were first reported and weeks after Mr Grimshaw gave his evidence — is described in that meeting as “one of the key ways we protect and maintain the external reputation of our church”.

Revenue raisers, consolidators, recipients. Five-year plans reviewed annually by a central panel. Donation targets as a percentage of net profit. An endowment benchmarked against Harvard. A reputation-management arm. There is a word for an organisation shaped like that, and it is not fellowship.

The church’s own map of itselfRedrawn from an internal diagram titled “The Community Ecosystem”GAP — the Global Advisory Panel, at the centre of the diagramImprove profits ofCommunitybusinessesUBTUBTAFund education andwelfare needsGFTNAFVision FoundationTyreMaxProtect and educateour youngOneSchool GlobalElevatecircumstancesHR100UBT AssistVision WelfareMaintain our way oflifeUBT HouseholdOneMediFundCampus&CoOrbitRRTraises and pools the moneyspends itEvery body here is separately registered. The diagram is the church’s, not ours.

“No vested interests”

Bruce Hales is invariably described, when a story breaks, as a Sydney accountant. Our investigation finds he audits three companies, all owned by members of his own church.

Westlab, owned by Gavin Grace — the man who ran the church's campaign in the marginal Sydney seat of Bennelong, and who is on video coaching booth workers to deflect questions about their religion. Westlab took $686 million in pandemic revenue, including from federal government contracts.

Voltex, owned by Rod Tunley, which made two substantial political donations — one of them before the 2025 election.

Bellriver Homes, owned by David Sandeman.

Separately, we estimate up to $5.5 million a year reaching Bruce Hales from Gospel Trust grants.

So the leader of a church that told a parliament it has “no vested interests” in business signs off the accounts of three of its members' companies — one that earned $686 million from a pandemic in which governments were the buyer, and one that donated to politics in the run-up to the election his church then covertly campaigned in.

Auditing the Auditor: Bruce Hales, his businesses and his income →

So: why?

Here is the answer the inquiry has not yet been given. This church's money depends on government in three distinct ways, and all three can be taken away by the people who win elections.

One: charitable status. In the United Kingdom alone we can evidence at least £15 million a year of value from it — around £5.5m of corporation tax that does not arise on UBT's gifted profits, £8.6m of VAT that does not arise on school fees, and £967,152 of mandatory 80% business rate relief on the school campuses. That is a floor, not a ceiling, and it is one country.

And that is Britain. In Australia the figure is larger and differently shaped: OneSchool Global's Australian schools are substantially government-funded, reported by the Guardian at around $30 million a year. A church with 16,000 members in Australia receives tens of millions a year of public money to educate its own children, on the basis that it is a charity.

Two: the schools. OneSchool Global UK spent £54.9 million in its last filed year educating 2,894 pupils — £18,974 each. Parents contributed £4,065, about a fifth of the cost. The charitable subsidy is £14,909 per pupil. Without it, fees would have to be 4.7 times higher. Every Brethren family's children are educated in these schools. Lose the status and you do not lose a tax break; you lose the school system that keeps the next generation inside the church.

Three: contracts. Our directory records £3 billion of public contract awards to Brethren-connected companies, including £680 million of UK pandemic awards. Bruce Hales is reported to have instructed his followers to “spoil the Egyptians” — to take their spoils from governments. Whether or not that instruction was given in those words, it is an accurate description of the revenue model.

Now set the Australian election against that.

Under electoral law, a group spending more than A$250,000 must register as a significant third party. As this masthead's reporting put it, such a declaration “would mean the church would lose its lucrative charity status”. In March 2024 the Australian Taxation Office raided the church's Sydney Olympic Park precinct. The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission has now received a referral asking whether the church or charities operating alongside it broke the law. More than a dozen Brethren-linked charities hold over A$295 million in tax-free net assets.

That is the quid pro quo, and it was never a promise anybody had to make. The state is simultaneously this church's largest subsidiser, one of its largest customers, and the only body that can end either arrangement. A campaign costing a few million dollars, run through private companies and kept below a declaration threshold, is not an ideological indulgence. On those numbers it is cheap insurance.

It also explains the shape of the thing — why the money moved in cash and through companies rather than from a church account, why booth workers were told to say they were “a concerned business owner”, why the instruction sheet said “no need for official records or documents”. An organisation protecting a tax status cannot be seen to be spending. So it did not spend. Its members' businesses did.

This is not an argument about religion

The church's defenders have settled on one line, and it deserves a straight answer. Seven Coalition MPs called the inquiry a “witch-hunt against people of faith”. Matt Canavan called it “an attempt to apply collective guilt to people of a certain religious faith”. The church says the questions are religious discrimination. Nobody, the argument runs, would say that Catholics campaigned, or Muslims, or Jews.

Their right to campaign is not in question here, and it should not be. Any citizen may campaign. Any believer may campaign as a believer, and say so. If thousands of Brethren had turned out at polling booths in their own names, said who they were, and declared what their church spent, there would be no inquiry and no story.

What is being asked about is not their faith. It is five things no other denomination in this country does.

Catholics who campaign say they are Catholic. That is the difference, and it is not a difference of belief.

The question in front of the committee is not whether people of faith may take part in politics. It is whether an organisation that directs its members' commerce, audits their books, sets their giving as a share of profit, and instructs them to hide their affiliation while campaigning, should continue to be treated as a church for tax purposes while it does so.

That is a question about a commercial structure. It would be asked of any organisation shaped this way, and it is asked of this one because no other religious body in Britain or Australia is shaped this way.

The last time they gave evidence to a parliament

In 2012 the church gave evidence to the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee during its fight for UK charitable status. At paragraph 84 of the committee's report, it records that the church's witness read out what he presented as an extract from the Charity Commission's refusal letter. Part of it was in fact an Upper Tribunal judgment presented as the Commission's own view. A further passage, the Commission said, bore “no relation to anything in that letter” and had been taken out of context from remarks its legal head made about an entirely different application.

The Commission called the misrepresentation “a serious matter” and the evidence “seriously misleading”. The witness apologised, calling it an inadvertent mistake.

Two years later the Commission registered the Preston Down Trust on the deed that gives Bruce Hales conclusive control. In the same written evidence the church described the network as “our 200-plus trusts (300 or so halls)” — a possessive the committee was not invited to examine.

That is the precedent for Friday: a parliamentary committee, this church's evidence, and a regulator's finding that what it was told was seriously misleading.

What the committee could ask

  1. The Charity Commission registered the Preston Down Trust on a deed under which only a person “in fellowship with Mr B D Hales” may be a trustee, and his written declaration on that question is “conclusive evidence”. How is that consistent with evidence that the church has no governing document and no hierarchy?
  2. The same machinery appears in a New Zealand deed of 2006 carrying a copyright notice. Who drafted it, and who issues it to congregations?
  3. What is the Global Advisory Panel, who sits on it, and what does it decide?
  4. The committee was told there is “no centralised recordkeeping”. UBT publishes an app, Connect, whose privacy notice states that UBT holds a database of members' names, addresses, photographs, family links and marriage connections “for the purposes of verification and ongoing recordkeeping for the PBCC”. How are those two statements reconciled?
  5. Who authorised UBT to keep member records on behalf of the church, and who may access them?
  6. Do Brethren businesses submit five-year strategic plans for annual review, and are they given donation targets as a percentage of net profit?
  7. Vision Foundation, a registered charity, holds net assets of $262 million, made a surplus of $57 million in the year to June 2025, has $162 million invested in related parties and made no grants to charities at all. What is its charitable purpose, and when will it distribute?
  8. To Mr Bruce Hales: you audit three companies owned by members of your church — Westlab, Voltex and Bellriver Homes. One took $686 million in pandemic revenue; another, Voltex, made a political donation, and a further donation was made in its owner's own name in 2025. What does that role involve, and what are you paid for it?
  9. What sum did the church and entities associated with it spend in connection with the 2025 election, and who calculated whether it fell below A$250,000?
  10. Were you advised that registering as a significant third party would affect the church's charitable status?
  11. To Mr Gareth Hales: were you a member of any chat group in which disruption of campaign events was arranged, and why did Santé Global book the room at the Ryde-Parramatta golf club on 1 April 2025?

How this was put together

Lloyd Grimshaw's evidence is quoted from the official transcript of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, 21 August 2026, with the qualifications he gave. The Preston Down Trust deed is quoted from the Charity Commission's published registration decision of 3 January 2014 and the deed annexed to it; the Papakura deed from the New Zealand Charitable Trusts Register. The 2012 findings are from the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee's report HC 76 and the written evidence to that inquiry.

The charity figures are our own, built from Charity Commission register data for 205 Brethren charities and the filed accounts of OneSchool Global UK, UBT (EU) Ltd and the Grace Trust, with internal transfers netted; the rate relief from the Valuation Office Agency rating list. The Connect app listing is on the Google Play Store; the quotations are from the Global Privacy Notice for the Connect Services published by UBT at ubtpolicy.blob.core.windows.net, last updated June 2022, and from the Play Store listing as at 13 October 2026. “The Community Ecosystem” is the church's own internal diagram. The operating description of the ecosystem comes from a recording of a Global Funding Team meeting. The Vision Foundation figures are taken from its own Special Purpose Financial Report for the year ended 30 June 2025, as filed with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission. The New Zealand details are from the Vision Invest NZ Funds annual report for the accounting period ended 31 March 2024; the scheme's trust deed, financial statements, SIPO and Product Disclosure Statement are on the New Zealand Disclose Register. The three audit clients — Westlab, Voltex and Bellriver Homes — and the Gospel Trust estimate are from our own investigation, linked above. The Australian school funding figure is as reported by the Guardian.

The account of the election operation — the payments, the chats, Santé Global's role, Gavin Grace's instructions to booth workers, Westlab's revenue and Bruce Hales's position as its auditor — is the reporting of Michael Bachelard and Sherryn Groch in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Those reports state that the masthead is not suggesting illegality in the stunts and does not suggest Bruce Hales was directly involved in organising or paying for them.

The church denies involvement in the election. Mr Grimshaw told the committee it never funded one cent to any political cause. Mr Grace says his church has nothing to do with his volunteering. Nothing here alleges that any company or charity named has acted unlawfully.

Albanese asked what the quid pro quo was. On the evidence, nobody needed to offer one. A church with £3 billion of public contracts, £15 million a year of tax advantage in one country alone, and a school system that only works while the status holds, has every commercial reason to care who wins — and a doctrine of separation that keeps its own members from asking why they were sent to the booths.

Brethren Intelligence has investigated the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church since 2020. The directory holds 8,409 companies and 9,000 individuals across 20 countries. The hundred largest companies by revenue are listed free here.

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