An extract:

March 27, 2006
IN the dying moments of Tasmania’s election campaign, people wearing animal masks drove through the streets of Hobart towing a trailer with an anti-Greens slogan.

In the weeks leading up to this bizarre display, a series of newspaper advertisements and letter-box pamphlets attacked the Greens, warning they were “socially destructive”.

Two of the men authorising these ads were later exposed as members of the Exclusive Brethren, a secretive fundamentalist Christian sect whose leader, or Elect Vessel, is Sydney-based businessman Bruce Hales.

The Brethren seek to remove themselves from the “evils” of the rest of the world and, until 2002, those leaving the church were completely ostracised, a process former members say has cruelly separated husbands from wives and parents from children.

While not allowing members of the sect to vote, they are happy to spend vast amounts of money trying to influence the outcome of election campaigns.

Tasmania has been targeted, but so too have electorates in South Australia and NSW in past state and federal elections, as well as national elections in New Zealand and the US.

In Tasmania, where the Greens vote slumped from 22 per cent at the start of the campaign to 16 per cent on polling day, the Greens believe the ads and pamphlets funded by Brethren members influenced voters.

“I think they had a big influence, not on core Green voters but on the 8 per cent of people polls showed were yet to decide on their vote,” says Greens senator Bob Brown.

The pamphlets and ads targeted the Greens’ policies on legal rights for same sex couples and transgender people, as well as drugs.

They were undoubtedly misleading. One professionally produced pamphlet, authorised by Scottsdale furniture store owner and Brethren member Trevor Christian, claimed the Greens would “introduce the regulated use of cannabis”. It claimed to quote from the Greens’ policy, but omitted the words “for medical purposes”.

Other ads suggested the Greens would destroy families and society. Similar language was used in one Liberal Party pamphlet, prompting questions about Liberal involvement in the Brethren material.

Liberal state director Damien Mantach confirms meeting members of the church before the campaign but denies any involvement in drafting, placing or paying for the ads.

And:

Exclusive Brethren says it has more than 40,000 followers in 19 countries, about 25 per cent of whom are said to live in Australia, with many in Tasmania’s rural north, which takes in timber and farming communities and the north-west Bible belt.

Its origins are in a group formed in Plymouth, on England’s south coast, in the early 19th century as a backlash against what was regarded as a straying from the Bible by the established church.

Always dominated by strong-willed men, the group split in 1848 into the Open Brethren and the Closed or Exclusive Brethren. According to former Exclusive Brethren members, who have their own website, the sect denounces papacy and clergy, but has adopted key elements of both in its structure.

Critics say the group holds an archaic view of the place of women, sometimes requiring they wear headscarves in public. The Exclusive Brethren shun what they call “the conduits of evil communications: television, the radio and the internet”.

And,

The Greens claim Brethren members are most likely those behind the bizarre animal masks seen in Hobart, but the two men have not returned calls to answer this charge.

Instead, they published an advertisement in The Launceston Examiner last week denying the sect paid for the ads: “Whilst we are members of a Christian fellowship known as Exclusive Brethren, our campaign was not initiated, controlled, funded or publicly endorsed by the congregation in any way.

“Although our conscience precludes us from voting, it equally creates a responsibility to testify to persons in government and the community to uphold right Christian principles on which our nation is founded. We are willing to support any government, person or organisation that cares for right moral principles and the prosperity of Tasmania.”

Exclusive Brethren members were not the only shadowy figures bankrolling ad campaigns against the Greens at the Tasmanian election. A TV and print ad campaign backed by a mystery group, Tasmanians for a Better Future, urged Tasmanians to vote for a majority government, using arguments remarkably similar to those employed by Labor.

Michael Kent, president of Tasmania’s peak business group and friend of Premier Paul Lennon, revealed he was one of the backers of the Tasmanians for a Better Future campaign; others would not declare their interest. Former Liberal premier and Gunns Ltd board member Robin Gray, famously linked to an anonymous ad campaign after the 1989 state election, has not said whether he was involved.

Earlier:
Mask ball
The protest
Hidding and his Brethren
Libs: 2 souls in 1 body
How Tasmanian Times and Crikey broke the story:
Exclusive attack on the Greens