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

I thought that the coalition might wish to speak on this, but clearly not. I am also very aware that we have a number of Senate reports to discuss in a very short time, so I am not going to take all the time that is available. But I want to say how very disappointed that I am at the contribution from Senator Evans for the government. I have no doubt about his sincerity when he says that he is concerned about these organisations. But the excuse that the government uses every single time that the issue of cults is brought to this Senate is that they will not inquire into an organisation. The terms of reference of this particular inquiry are very clear. They are looking into the appropriateness of exemptions in regards to tax law, occupational health and safety practices—which is again the responsibility of the Commonwealth—and the adequacy of consumer protection. All of these things are responsibilities of this parliament. To stand here and say, ‘Oh, that’s code for a general look and therefore we’re not going there,’ is to suggest that Senate committees are incapable of framing an inquiry to its terms of reference. It is to suggest that Senate chairs and committees cannot ask witnesses to be relevant to the terms of reference. Of course they can. What we have here is a total copout.

We heard the government and the coalition when they were in government saying, ‘Oh, yes, we’re terribly concerned about this happening.’ But they never offer any solutions. How are you going to address it, then? We are going to have a tax law debate here very shortly and we are going to be looking at the tax benefits provided to those who invest in managed investment schemes. So it is okay to have a debate on the appropriateness of tax deductions upfront on managed investment schemes and changes to the tax law in relation to that. But when it comes to talking about tax laws as they pertain to religious or any other organisations, religious organisations are not allowed to be discussed in this Senate. Why not? Why shouldn’t we be able to apply the public benefit test?

You will find that most religious organisations would be able to come here and talk about that. The United Church would talk about Uniting Care. The Anglican Church would talk about Anglicare. The Catholic Church would talk about St Vincent de Paul, their education systems, their health systems and their welfare provisions. There are an endless number of things that those religious organisations could and would talk about in the event that they were ever asked.

In Britain, there is a public benefits test. We talk all the time about which organisations and initiatives should have tax deductibility. We talk all the time about accelerated depreciation for private sector business and so on. Why would we not ask about the appropriateness of tax deductibility or tax exemption for this particular group of people in our society? It seems to me that in this country if you want to get a huge tax benefit, if you want to completely abuse the health and safety laws of this country, if you want to have absolutely no scrutiny of how you extract money from the people in your organisation and how you spend it, then you need only declare yourself to be a religion and you will be immune. Can you imagine any other workplace where people are exploited, are expected to work long hours every single day of the year and are paid very poorly, but about which everybody says, ‘No, we wouldn’t go into that workplace’? Unions are trying to support people in workplaces yet we have non-unionised workplaces about which we say, ‘We don’t want to know. We don’t want to know if people are exploited. We don’t want to know how they raise their money or how they spend it.’ In fact, this is an ideal scenario for someone: all you have to do is declare yourself to be a religion and you can declare yourself exempt from scrutiny of the laws of Australia, whether they relate to raising money, occupational health and safety, wages, exploitation or brainwashing—the whole shebang.

I heard this morning, for example, that this organisation puts pressure on parents to sign over the guardianship of their children, as young as eight years old, to part of the organisation. Senator Bernardi said the other day, ‘Leave then, if you don’t like it.’ That suggests no understanding of the level of brainwashing that goes on in this particular cult, or in the Exclusive Brethren for that matter, because if you leave you leave behind contact with your children, parents, siblings and/or friends—all of the group that you have spent your time with. You are harassed. You are cut off. Everyone in this parliament knows what it is like when you fall out with friends, family or whomever for whatever reason and how difficult that is to manage. But imagine if you were being coerced. Imagine if you had this kind of pressure. Yesterday, Senator Xenophon read out a statement from an ex-member of the Scientology group. We heard about a situation where people were being pressured into doing things that they did not want to do. You cannot walk away from that. A belief system that is enforced through the levels of psychological coercion really bothers me and it should not be exempt from public scrutiny.

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—