Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This is a very straightforward and direct motion to have a Senate investigation into the plight of certain Australians who are repressed and dispossessed of their rights. Those rights include the fundamental rights of youngsters to education, the rights of women to take part equally in the workplace and the rights of people to be free from outside interference in their relationships with their own families—not least their partners, their children, their siblings, their parents and their grandparents. The Exclusive Brethren sect is infringing on those rights and those freedoms on a broad plane within the Australian community.

In a very lacklustre defence of the Exclusive Brethren position peppered with regret that even he could not support them, Senator Abetz yesterday failed to put a case against this inquiry proceeding. It ought to proceed. In particular, the government, which has not meaningfully contributed to this debate, ought to be supporting this inquiry.

While it is not taking enormous energy from the important matters and issues of the day, which the Greens will be applying ourselves to, we will pursue the matter of government funding of educational institutions run by the Exclusive Brethren. We will be pursuing the political connections between the coalition parties and the Exclusive Brethren. We will be pursuing the alleged breach of the Commonwealth Electoral Act by the Exclusive Brethren’s funding of the coalition’s 2004 election campaign through backdoor methods. We will be pursuing the matter of the rights under Work Choices and other industrial relations legislation of the Exclusive Brethren to exclude unions from 30-plus workplaces in Australia—even if the workers in those places might want the unions to have access—because the hierarchy of the Exclusive Brethren can do that. We will be pursuing these gross infringements of the rights of women, especially married women, to be in the workforce if they wish to and, in particular, the rights of women in workplaces where they have management of male members of that workforce, as happens in workplaces all over Australia. In particular, we will be pursuing the right of thousands of youngsters to be able to get a tertiary education.

I said of Prime Minister Howard that I could not believe that he could turn a blind eye to the activities of the Exclusive Brethren, this destructive removal of the rights of youngsters to a tertiary education in this country. And I am amazed that with the change of government nothing seems to have changed there. However, that is the business of government. With the big parties failing in their duty to properly investigate this destructive sect, it will be up to my colleagues and me to continue to pursue this matter of the Exclusive Brethren—through the committee system, through the question system and through the scrutiny of bills, when appropriate ones come along.

I say this because we have, as ever, members of the Exclusive Brethren hierarchy listening to this debate in the chamber today, in the public section of the chamber. That is not unique to this chamber; it happens in every chamber—the Tasmanian parliament, the South Australian parliament, the Victorian parliament and so on.

The light of day needs to be shone upon the activities of this powerful, self-interested sect run by men who do not give women or youngsters within that group a fair go in 2008 in Australia where everybody should have their rights. A story told to me by a young man who has left the sect, and who was considering suicide just last week, is another poignant indicator of the need for us to be guardians of the interests of all Australians, without fear or favour, and that is what is required here.

On the business of the document that Senator Abetz, on behalf of the opposition, blocked from being incorporated into Hansardwhen I was told I could read that out some other time—I can tell you that that will be the case: it needs to be on the public record. The assisted cover-up of the activities of the Exclusive Brethren by Senator Abetz and colleagues on that side of the parliament is quite untoward in a chamber which values freedom, which values light being shone into dark places and which values the right of all Australians to know what is going on when public moneys—I am talking here about tens of millions of dollars—are extended to a group which removes the rights of the people who live within that group or have either been expelled from it or had the courage to move outside it and face awesome, lifelong punitive action from the men who run this group.

Finally, let me point to a challenge to Senator Abetz and the members on the coalition side of this chamber: have some dialogue with the ‘Elect Vessel’, Mr Bruce Hales, who flies around this country in a Lear jet and who is the only religious leader that I am aware of—of any shape, size, colour, denomination, avocation or belief system—who never, ever allows himself to be brought to public scrutiny. Not one person in the press gallery here, indeed no journalist in Australia, has got within cooee of this man. This is in Australia in 2008, and the opposition, and indeed the government today, is helping the cover-up of his activities, his infringements of the norms of our society, his removal of the rights of thousands of Australians—in their schools, in their workplaces and in their homes—and his personal interference in the rights of families, with such negative impact.

The government and the opposition do not support an inquiry into this, although, as we have seen this morning, they will support an inquiry into all sorts of much lesser matters being brought forward. That is the way of politics; that is the way of influenced politics. The Exclusive Brethren have enormous influence on the coalition parties and will continue to do so. No doubt Senator Abetz and his colleagues would not want to exchange that influence for the benefits that would come to society as a whole if this inquiry were to proceed. This is just another chapter in the opening of a book which should be there for all Australians to read.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Bob Brown’s) be agreed to.