Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

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—