Members of the secretive Exclusive Brethren sect were highly active at remote, Indigenous polling booths in the Northern Territory at the last federal election, an inquiry has heard.
A series of witnesses – including former NT chief minister Eva Lawler – told the parliamentary inquiry into the 2025 election that teams of Exclusive Brethren members were present at numerous polling booths pushing “far-right” messaging.
The inquiry heard Brethren members were ferried between remote locations via jet in some cases, and by road in others.
Former long-time NT ALP staffer Kerry Gardiner, who volunteered at a booth in the remote Indigenous community of Wadeye, said Exclusive Brethren members were flown in and out daily by a private jet.
He said they were there campaigning for the conservative Country-Liberal Party, which operates as the NT arm of the Liberal and National parties.
Gardiner said members of the sect “told outrageous lies” to voters, in one case a Brethren member had allegedly pushed a 76-year-old man, and that he was “disgusted with their performance”.
Exclusive Brethren members were also flown in and out of other remote Indigenous NT communities, including Galiwin’ku in north-east Arnhem Land, and Milingimbi, and an island off the Arnhem Land central coast, Gardiner said.
“Where there was three or four day voting, (the jet) came and got them every day and took them back like that too,” he told the parliamentary inquiry in Darwin today.
“(It) didn’t just take them there once and dump them.
“None of them were local….they were flown-in by a privately owned jet,” Gardiner said.
He said the jet was owned by Gina Rinehart, who is Australia’s richest person.
When asked how he knew this, he told the inquiry he had seen the jet while campaigning in the remote Indigenous community of Wadeye, about 230km south-west of Darwin by air.
“It had ‘H’ on the tail….Hancock Prospecting, that’s her company,” Gardener told the inquiry.
“I saw the plane.”
“Hancock Prospecting, that’s her company…I saw the plane” — Kerry Gardiner
Hancock Prospecting spokesman James Radford denied the claim.
“This is fake news,” he told The Klaxon.
“I understand one Labor volunteer made these false claims on the basis that he saw the letter H in the registration number of a random aircraft at an airport somewhere in the NT at some point last year.”
“This is fake news” – James Radford, Hancock Prospecting
The Exclusive Brethren is mired in controversy over allegations it ran a secretive multimillion-dollar campaign supporting the Coalition at the 2025 election.
It is alleged the sect made secret payments to far-right agitators to harass Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other left-leaning MPs on the 2025 campaign trail.
The movement, officially known as the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (PBCC), has previously denied any organised involvement in the 2025 election.
Last week the inquiry announced Exclusive Brethren boss Bruce Hales and his son Gareth would be called to appear in October, and would be summonsed “to compel their attendance should they refuse”.
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Former NT chief minister Eva Lawler. Source: Facebook
Former NT chief minister Lawler, also fronting the inquiry in Darwin today, said groups of men, who she believed to be Exclusive Brethren, were present in Palmerston, about 20 kilometres south-east of Darwin.
“There’s a market on every Friday night in the dry season in Palmerston,” Lawler said.
“On the Friday… it must have been the 2nd of May, all of a sudden there is a group, and most of them were quite intimidating men, that appeared at the markets.
“They’d all basically come in for the election.”
Lawler said she asked the men where they were from.
“I spoke to them and said ‘are you local here?’” Lawler said.
“They literally lied to me and said, ‘oh yeah, we’re local. We live here’.”
“(They were) totally sunburnt and, you know, no Territorian is sunburnt,” Lawler said.
“You know, we all wear hats and sunscreen. And I said, ‘Well, I don’t actually think you’re local’.”
“(They were) absolutely lying to people around where they were from,” she said.
“(They were) absolutely lying to people around where they were from” — Eva Lawler
Lawler said the Exclusive Brethren “did the same in Katherine”, about 300km south-east of Darwin.
“They were there for the week of polling, or pre-polling, in Katherine,” she told in inquiry.
“It wasn’t around local issues, it was around them influencing a seat in a federal election that then would support a right-wing view.
“My concern was that they were a group of people that came in to influence an election result…Australia-wide, but also in the Northern Territory,” Lawler said.
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Gina Rinehart’s spokesman James Radford denied the jet claims. Picture Richard Wainwright/AAP
Former NT ALP MP Lynne Walker, said she had volunteered at multiple polling booths in 2025 for Luke Gosling, who was re-elected as ALP MP for Solomon.
They included the remote Galiwin’ku, a remote Indigenous community on Elcho Island, off the cost of north-east Arnhem Land.
“At Galiwinku, we same some different campaigners arrive from Queensland,” Walker told the inquiry.
“One person from Darwin and lots of people from Queensland.
“They were quite well-resourced, but not at all well-prepared for how you operate on a remote polling booth.
“It was one of the more unusual polls that I’ve been on,” Walker said.
She said “four or five” Brethren members arrived at the remote poll, about 550km south-west of Darwin.
“They told us they’d come in on a private charter, so (they were) well-resourced, Walker said.
“It’s an island, you have to charter there, that’s the only way that you can get there.
“They were there for the CLP — they were part of the Brethren,” Walker told the inquiry.
“They were there for the CLP — they were part of the Brethren” — Lynne Walker
When asked how she knew they were from the Exclusive Brethren, Walker replied: “one of our campaign workers asked them”.
Walker, who was an NT MP from 2008 to 2016, was asked whether she had “seen individuals from that church at previous federal elections?”
Walker responded she hadn’t, and it was also the first time she had seen “people come in from interstate”.
Gardiner told the inquiry he had been “been fortunate to live in the Territory from before Cyclone Tracy” and had “seen many elections come and go”.
He had spent nine years as a staffer to an ALP MP for the federal NT seat of Lingiari, which “makes up nearly a sixth of the Australian land mass”.
“I’ve done elections for more than thirty years in the territory,” Gardiner said.
He said there was an “essential decency about how we respect each other”.
“That was very different (to) what I saw with the Plymouth Brethren, they made every effort to disrupt,” he said.
“It was on the verge of violence breaking out,” Gardiner said.
“We had some young chaps there that didn’t like the way they treated our elders on our teams.
“That could have been nasty.”
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Thank you,
Anthony Klan
Editor, The Klaxon
