The behavior of Senator Eric Abetz in the Senate over the Exclusive Brethren affair can be assessed from the following attacks and interjections by Abetz to stem the flow of revelations from Senator Milne. I table verbatim their various confrontations …

“Hansard. Thursday, 18 March 2010

Page: 2197

Senator Milne

……Having said that, what has the government or the coalition done since they both expressed concern about what is going on in the Exclusive Brethren cult? Nothing. When truth in advertising legislation was introduced to stop these kinds of cults putting out election advertising material that told blatant lies, what did they say? They said, ‘No, we don’t want truth in advertising.’ We even had the Liberal party lying, saying that they had nothing to do with Exclusive Brethren advertising and then being forced to admit after a state election that Damien Mantach, a former director of the Liberal Party in Tasmania, was up to his neck in it, that they had written, authorised and placed ads with complete lies attacking the Greens. This is a problem we have—
…..
Senator Abetz —Madam Acting Deputy President, a point of order: I know it is always very difficult for a Green to say they got it wrong but the standing orders do require an unequivocal withdrawal and I seek such an unequivocal withdrawal.

Senator MILNE —I withdraw the term ‘lie’, but I point out that Damien Mantach, a friend of Senator Abetz, had to admit in court that the Liberal Party placed and wrote those advertisements for the Exclusive Brethren, having said previously that they had nothing to do with them and had no knowledge of them.

MATTERS OF PUBLIC INTEREST; Political Advertising

Hansard Wednesday, 17 March 2010

Page: 2080

Senator MILNE (1:52 PM) —I rise today to support the remarks of my colleague Senator Brown when he said that what we desperately need in Australia is truth-in-advertising legislation. We also need electoral reform, very strong legislation on political donations to bring state electoral acts around the country into line, so that we do not have a situation where state governments can exploit loopholes in electoral acts, as the Labor Party in Tasmania has done in the lead-up to the election on Saturday.
There is a cancer in the culture of Tasmania. It is a cancer in the body politic. It set in 20 years ago under the then Liberal Premier, Robin Gray, when the William Carter royal commission released its report into the attempted bribery of Labor MP Jim Cox by Tasmanian media magnate and head of Gunns Kiln Dried, Edmund Rouse. The royal commission said that Premier Robin Gray had acted ‘deceitfully and dishonestly’ and had been ‘misleading and deceptively evasive’. The Premier of Tasmania was found by a royal commission to have exhibited that behaviour, and he was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse out on Saturday saying, ‘You can’t vote Green; you have to vote Liberal or Labor but not Green.’ This is a man who had been found by a royal commission to be deceitful, dishonest, misleading and deceptively evasive.
At the time, the royal commission investigated a group called Concerned Citizens for Tasmania. This anonymous group came out and said there had to be majority government and a second election. What the royal commission found was that it had been deliberately designed to mislead the community into believing that a group of well-meaning and concerned people had spontaneously come together to express their concern and to join others in voicing their protest about the Labor-Green accord, and it was found to have emanated from the Premier’s office. This is the man who came out in Saturday’s paper in Tasmania saying, ‘Trust me, don’t vote for the Greens.’ This is a man who the royal commission had fingered as having organised a campaign which was supposed to be spontaneous but which was set up to deceive the people of Tasmania.

That was a Liberal Premier, and the Liberal Party continued that in 2006 in the Tasmanian election. This was not just known in Tasmania. Senator Eric Abetz was a senior Liberal in Tasmania at the time. The Director of the Liberal Party, Damien Mantach, came out at the time and denied that the Liberal Party had anything to do with the Exclusive Brethren attack on the Greens. He said, ‘I want to firmly put on the record that the Liberal Party of Tasmania, during last year’s state election, at no time paid for or placed advertisements for any members of the Exclusive Brethren.’ Subsequently, as a result of a very brave act and a brave court case by Martine Delaney, it came out that the ads for the Exclusive Brethren had been billed to the Liberal Party and the Director of the Tasmanian Liberal Party had to say at the time, ‘I know it doesn’t look fantastic.’ No, it does not. It was deceitful. It was designed to mislead.

With this election now in Tasmania we have the Labor Party doing precisely the same. In 2006 there was a group called Tasmanians for a Better Future. Just like the Concerned Citizens for Tasmania before them, under the Electoral Act they did not have to say who they were or how much money they had or anything else. It was a secretive group and the organisation was the result of Corporate Communications run by Tony Harrison, who worked for Robin Gray in the eighties. So aren’t they a nice little bunch of people? Out they came with a slogan that said ‘Tasmanians for a better future’. Coincidentally, Paul Lennon, the Premier of the day, had the slogan ‘For a better Tasmania’. To this day, the Tasmanian people do not know who bought the 2006 election, who put their money into ‘Tasmanians for a better future’ or who those people are.

The only person who has come forward and said he was part of it is Michael Kent, the former head of the TCCI, the Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Now we have David Bartlett, the man who said that he wanted to lead the Labor Party in Tasmania and that he wanted to have a kind, clever and connected Tasmania. What the Labor Party is doing in Tasmania is not kind, not clever and not connected. Dirty dialling is not kind. The electoral advertisement designed to deceive—because there is no legislation in Tasmania to prevent it—is not clever and it is not connected. It will backfire on the Labor Party, I have no doubt. But the point is that the people of Tasmania are being bombarded by advertising which is putting out lies and misleading the community in that state.

We have had a succession of these premiers and these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There was Michael Field, who broke his word and broke the Labor-Green accord—a signed document. He said he would not reintroduce security legislation and then he did so. He misled the parliament and he lied to the people of Tasmania. Paul Lennon was exactly the same—a Labor Premier of Tasmania, disgraced because of the relationship between his government and the forest industry. There was John Gay, Gunns, the Ralphs Bay canal development, and Tony Rundle, a former Liberal Premier. Need I go on! The extraordinary thing is that the four of them—Labor and Liberal premiers—have all broken their word to the people of Tasmania by saying, ‘Don’t vote for the Greens.’

The Greens are the only people in this context who have not broken their word and have stuck to what they said they would do. We have kept to the documents we signed. The people of Tasmania know that we will press for truth in advertising and it is up to Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott to now come out and support truthful advertising. That is what we want. The Prime Minister’s office and the Leader of the Opposition’s office both know and must act

COMMITTEES;Community Affairs Committee;Reference Date:27 Aug 2008

Hansard. Wednesday, 27 August 2008

Page: 3949

Senator MILNE (6:14 PM) —I rise in continuance of the debate on Senator Brown’s motion. Last night, in beginning my remarks, I was commenting on the fact that when I was teaching on the north-west coast of Tasmania many years ago I had a very bright and capable young woman in my class who was not allowed to go on to further education because the Exclusive Brethren prohibited it. They prohibit their young people from being able to go to university at all. As a former Meadowbank school principal, David Stewart, an Exclusive Brethren principal said:

We do not go in for higher learning. We gave up universities in the 1960s as the hotbed of atheism. They prove that everything is nothing to their own satisfaction. We have suffered no loss to our knowledge. We particularly recoil from novels and cinemas.

That is why those young people cannot go to university: because the brethren say so. They also make sure that they have arranged marriages and that once women are married they cannot work. It is the most repressive culture. But even if you were to accept that, by far and away the worst they do is break up families. If anybody tries to leave the Exclusive Brethren, that is the point at which they are cut off. They are cut off from children, parents, families, whatever. A person leaves and it is as if they have died from that point on. No matter how much the person on the outside tries to make contact with their family, they are cut off and denied. How is it that we are allowing this in Australia? We have already had evidence, and we have seen, that they have tried to interfere, for example, in matters before the Family Court.

But I want to concentrate for a minute on schools, because the Exclusive Brethren gets Commonwealth government funding for its private schools. Why is taxpayers’ money going to fund schools which actively prohibit people from going on to further education? My understanding is that you get federal funding if you meet the curriculum requirements of the states. How can these schools meet the curriculum requirements of the states when the Brethren have said that they are not allowed to have computers?

Until recently they could not even have fax machines. We understand that some computers have been bought and left in boxes in the foyer of the school. However, we have also heard recently that the Elect Vessel has decided that Exclusive Brethren can now have access to some computers but that they will be ordered through him and through his businesses. He will provide whatever is needed under these arrangements, and we do not even know whether that is in Australia or New Zealand.

I have seen a report from the Exclusive Brethren today arguing that they are being vilified. In fact they say they obey the law scrupulously. That is not so. We have had before the parliament in the last few years the discrepancies under the Electoral Act, where they did not obey the law scrupulously, and they set up front companies in order to fund the Howard government’s election campaign. To this day we still do not know who gave the donations to Willmac so that Willmac could then make a single donation to the Liberal Party during the 2004 election—and that is ongoing. Another way in which they do not obey the law scrupulously was demonstrated on a current affairs program. An Exclusive Brethren woman said that she had transferred money, large sums of cash, in and out of Australia. In Ngaire Thomas’s book she said that it is quite common for them to bring bound paper parcels of cash in and out of the country. There are all sorts of things that we need to look at in terms of these tax arrangements in the transporting money arrangements and the deductions that are granted for being members of a so-called religion when the businesses are being run on a for-profit basis.

I want to go to the schools argument for a moment. In his contribution Senator Brown talked about letters that he had had from people who have left the Exclusive Brethren. They told absolutely heart-wrenching stories of what it has meant to them to lose their families, and they are actually supporting and wanting an inquiry into the behaviour of this cult. The Prime Minister has acknowledged that it is a cult and yet we understand that the government is not going to support this inquiry. I simply do not understand why the government is not going to support an inquiry into this sect, and I give notice now that I will be seeking to have incorporated into the Hansard these particular letters. I will quote from one of them in relation to schools, and this is of particular interest to me because I understand how the Exclusive Brethren get around the current funding arrangements. In order to qualify for federal government funding for non-government schools you have to have a certain number of students, so what they do is register one school and declare that it has up to 20 campuses all around the state, sometimes as far away as 600 kilometres or whatever from the school. So they set up a whole range of small schools and then claim it to be one school for the purposes of federal government funding.

I would like to know how the Howard government justified a 36 per cent increase in federal government funding for Brethren schools during the Howard years. It went from $10 million over three years to an estimated $50 million over four years for a national student population in total of about 2,000. How is that possible? Earlier today the coalition was talking about wanting transparency and openness in government processes. I want transparency and openness as to how it is that taxpayers’ money is being used to fund the schools of a cult which do not allow the same access to information technology that, under the curriculum, other students are required to have. I want to know how it is that we are using federal government taxpayers’ funding in schools which actively prevent kids from going on to further education and which actively prevent girls from doing subjects in the manual arts. I find that quite interesting.

Also quite interesting is the relationship between Brethren schools and Brethren businesses and politics. We know that the Liberal Party used the names and addresses of Brethren schools to authorise political advertisements during the 2004 election campaign. For example, there have been reports that when government funds are received at the Victorian Glenvale School the money is channelled into the Brethren marketing company, ProVision, putting at risk funds needed to pay for teachers. That is an allegation that I would like to see investigated in the course of an inquiry.

There are so many issues in relation to the Exclusive Brethren. One that is really of concern is about a website that was set up—peebs.net. It was set up by people who have left the Brethren and it is their main support network. These people have been in effectively closed societies for a long time and when they come out into the broader society it is the equivalent of coming out of jail because they have not had to interact with the broader society in their whole lives. This website has been particularly important in supporting them. If you go and have a look at the website you will see all their stories. They also have a suicide support watch on that website for people who are not coping with losing access to their families: children, parents and siblings. That website is critical and yet we now know that the Brethren in the USA are trying to force the closure of that website in spite of the fact that it has saved the lives of desperate people who have used it for emergency contact. We now know that there is litigation, as I said, in the United States to try to shut down this website.

That is the kind of power these people have. They have enough power to gain entry to the Prime Minister’s office. In spite of the fact that they do not vote, they feel comfortable intervening in elections in extremely dubious ways and, as I said, not transparent ways—particularly in relation to that Willmac incident in the 2004 election, because you cannot get behind the front company that they used to channel their donations to the Liberal Party. Of course, we will never forget the Tasmanian election where the same strategy was used and where advertisements—

Senator Abetz interjecting—

Senator MILNE —I am very glad that Senator Abetz is here to answer this because I have always wanted to know how it was that the Liberal Party wrote the ad, placed the ad and paid for the ad from the Exclusive Brethren during that campaign.

Senator Abetz —We didn’t.

Senator MILNE —That came out in the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal in Tasmania when Damien Mantach was forced to admit that that was the case. He then argued that some kind of mix-up occurred as to why the Liberal Party’s cheques were paying for ads that were placed as part of the Exclusive Brethren campaign in the Tasmanian 2006 election.

Senator Abetz —That’s just wrong.

Senator MILNE —I would like to hear from Senator Abetz whether Damien Mantach was not telling the truth in the tribunal, whether the tribunal had false information or what was going on. There is a very clear and close relationship between the coalition and the Exclusive Brethren and there is a paper trail through that Anti-Discrimination Tribunal which demonstrates it.

It is no coincidence, in my view, that Damien Mantach worked in Prime Minister Howard’s office at the time that the Liberal Party ran the campaign with the Brethren against the Greens in the 2004 federal election and then moved to Tasmania to run the Liberal Party campaign in the 2006 state election where—surprise, surprise—exactly the same tactics were used. We were then able to prove through the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal that those ads were written, placed and paid for—

Senator Abetz —We proved—

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Carol Brown)—Senator Abetz!

Senator MILNE —as I indicated, by the Liberal Party. When I say ‘we’ I am referring to the people who took action in the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal. It was proved there. I do not mean ‘we’ in terms of the Greens.

Senator Abetz —A quick recovery now!

Senator MILNE —It is on the record that the Greens did not appear in the tribunal, so I am not alleging that I was in the tribunal.

Senator Abetz interjecting—

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT —Senator Abetz!

Senator MILNE —However, I am not going to be distracted by this because the fact of the matter is that the Liberal Party and the Exclusive Brethren were as one in the community campaigning and it was not until the matter became very hot in the lead-up to the last federal election that the Prime Minister gave a directive to the Liberal Party not to associate as closely with the Exclusive Brethren.

I find it extraordinary that the Labor Party are not interested in actually examining the relationship between the Exclusive Brethren and the coalition. They ought to be interested in how Commonwealth money is spent. I think that, at the very least, we deserve to have an inquiry into the funding of Brethren schools and the basis on which that funding occurs and whether Brethren schools actually fulfil the state curriculum guidelines as required by state governments in order to qualify for federal government funding.

I also want to quote from another letter from an ex-Brethren member in Tasmania which says:

Since we made our decision to leave the cult, which was based on what was the best for our family, including our children, we believed it was in their best interests for us to give them the freedom of choice as they matured. This freedom of choice is to be able to partake in the activities of our community which the cult totally and absolutely forbids. Our daughter went to the Melbourne conservatory of music and is now doing a doctorate, our elder son was in the Air Force as a pilot officer and has a degree in aeronautical engineering, and our younger son is now a plasterer. He is also in the process of going to Uganda to work with the orphans there. I give you this background because, if we had stayed with the cult, our children would not have had these opportunities. Since we have left, which would be about 20 years ago now, my wife’s parents have not contacted her—not once. They have not even contacted their grandchildren. They did not advise her on the deaths of her grandparents. They disowned her and she may as well have been dead and buried simply because she chose to pursue a different lifestyle. When we made our decision the cult offered to look after our children whilst we reconsidered our decision. If we had allowed this, we would never have seen them again.

How can this be going on in Australia in 2008? How can we be allowing this cult to lead to the break-up of families and to this misery? And then they try to close down the only capacity those people have to contact each other and to talk to each other. How is that possible and how is it that the Senate could possibly deny an inquiry into the way this cult operates? I urge senators to reconsider this particular motion. We are asking for an inquiry into the industrial relations exemptions that they have had, their public funding, tax and other arrangements, and the activities which threaten families and the best interests of children. What is wrong with having an inquiry into this cult? Perhaps somebody can enlighten me as to what is wrong with inquiring into those activities when it is clear they are not in the best interests of our community.

We have the coalition prepared to go with interventions all over the country for whatever else it likes but apparently a parliament not interested in intervening in the best interests of a transparent, open, compassionate, decent Australian society. I do not believe that the activities of this cult contribute to that when they do not allow parents to contact their children and vice versa, and when they keep people from their parents, grandparents and the like. It is cruel, it is harmful and it should not be tolerated in our society today. Before I conclude I seek leave to incorporate into the Hansard the letter to the Prime Minister circulated yesterday by Senator Brown.

Leave not granted.”

• Pete Godfrey in Comments: Nice piece of digging John. Of course it does seem odd that a cult that does not vote in elections manages to have such close ties with the Liberals doesn’t it. We can only assume that their power comes from political donations. We need a new bumper sticker: “Politics, Donations Rule”

Karl Stevens’ satire