The Brethren, the influencers and the election inquiry: what's actually being alleged
The Plymouth Brethren Christian Church has flatly denied before a parliamentary inquiry that it secretly paid far-right influencers to stage stunts targeting Anthony Albanese and other politicians during the 2025 federal election.
Lloyd Grimshaw, a director of the church, told the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) at a public hearing on 21 August 2026 that Nine newspapers' reporting on the church's alleged election activities was a "complete lie." Grimshaw told the committee the church did not participate in the 2025 election campaign in any way — not paying for political activity, chartering planes, or moving people around The Guardian.
JSCEM is the parliamentary committee that reviews how federal elections are run. It has members from both houses of parliament and from across the party spectrum, and after each election it looks at what worked, what didn't, and whether the rules need tightening.
The denial cuts across reporting published by Nine newspapers alleging the Brethren paid influencers to disrupt the Labor campaign. Among those named was Laurence McIntyre, who was filmed heckling the prime minister. McIntyre was previously pictured with neo-Nazi figures Joel Davis and Blair Cottrell and was reported by the ABC to be an organiser for a March for Australia anti-immigration rally in 2025 The Guardian; ABC.
The church also rejected claims it had coordinated hundreds of volunteers to support Liberal candidates, including at polling booths across Australia. Grimshaw acknowledged that some church members volunteered during the election but denied the church instructed or coordinated their activities. That distinction — between individual members acting on their own initiative and an institutional mobilisation effort — sits at the heart of the committee's scrutiny.
The hearing was broadcast live from Parliament House. The Brethren appeared alongside Advance, a conservative campaigning group, before a committee conducting a review of all aspects of the conduct of the 2025 federal election, referred on 3 September 2025 APH.
The committee has been working through this inquiry for the better part of a year. A Hansard record (the official transcript of parliamentary proceedings) from a 7 November 2025 hearing documents a questioner raising that people from the Exclusive Brethren or Plymouth Brethren handed out how-to-vote cards for conservative parties en masse. The Brethren also made a submission to the inquiry, which was referenced in the Coalition members' dissenting report on the interim findings APH. A dissenting report means the Coalition members on the committee disagreed with the majority's conclusions and wrote their own version — standard practice for JSCEM, but worth noting given the political sensitivity of the Brethren allegations.
The church has pushed back hard on the scrutiny itself. It claimed it was subject to "extraordinary attacks by the media and even by members of parliament" in connection with the allegations about its election activities The Guardian. That framing casts the church as besieged rather than evasive, a posture that may play well with supporters but does little to resolve the specific factual questions the committee is asking.
The broader context here is that the stakes are genuine either way. If a religious organisation did systematically funnel volunteers and paid agitators into an election campaign, that raises serious questions about electoral disclosure laws, third-party campaigning thresholds (the rules governing groups that aren't political parties but spend money trying to influence elections), and whether the Australian Electoral Commission has the tools to enforce them. If it did not, the church has been subjected to a serious and very public smear. The committee's job is to sort one from the other.
What the hearing produced was a blanket denial and a concession. The denial covers the serious stuff: payments to influencers, coordinated volunteering, chartered planes. The concession is narrower. Some members did volunteer. Grimshaw's line is that individuals made their own choices. Whether that holds up against the volume of alleged activity, the documentary trail Nine claims to possess, and the testimony of other witnesses is what the committee will have to weigh.
The Coalition's dissenting report complicates the politics. If Coalition members have already broken from the committee majority on findings related to the Brethren's submission, the partisan temperature around this inquiry is running high. That makes the final report, when it lands, a document worth reading closely — for what it says about third-party electioneering and for what it reveals about the state of consensus on electoral integrity across the parliament.
None of this is resolved. Grimshaw gave the committee his version. Nine stands by its reporting. The committee will report in due course. The gap between a categorical denial and a categorical finding is where the work is.
