Answer: these three politicians came into contact with the Exclusive Brethren and have suffered political damage as a result.
Don Brash and John Howard are now history, but Kevin Rudd currently remains the Prime Minister of Australia. Will Rudd manage to retain his role in the next Australian General Election? Time will tell, but the informed media are sharpening their swords over a mounting list of unfathomable decisions that simply do not add up. Of greater import perhaps is the ‘chatter’ from members of the Australian electorate who are the final arbiters in the future of any politician.
For example, consider the voices of those who have objected to the seeming duplicity in Keven Rudd’s decision to allow over $70 million to be paid to the Exclusive Brethren school system in Australia. It is almost mystifying to watch the man who had the courage in late 2007 to call the Exclusive Brethren what they are – “an extremist cult and sect … who break up families” – and then just two years later, to fork out an almost obscenely disproportionate contribution to the school system blatantly designed by the cult for the cult.
These are not schools aimed at producing well-rounded citizens of the countries and communities in which they are located. They serve one main purpose –
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The Exclusive Brethren have been desperate to repair some of the public damage caused to their reputation since their disasterous foray into international politics in 2003. Initially they attempted to handle their own public relations, but their inability to be persuasive in the media forced them to hire a public relations firm.
“In early 2007, senior members of the Exclusive Brethren Christian Fellowship approached Jackson Wells seeking assistance dealing with a sudden and intense increase in media interest…”
“At the heart of Jackson Wells strategy to assist the Brethren was to increase the Church’s engagement with the wider community, mainly through the media.”
“The Brethren Church still has some way to travel in gaining an accurate public understanding of the lifestyle of its members”
The Exclusive Brethren have a track record of hypocrisy. For example, while still maintaining that the Internet was a “pipeline of filth”, they created a website that even today spouts:
“The Exclusive Brethren practice separation from evil, recognising this as God’s principle of unity. They shun the conduits of evil communications: television, the radio, and the Internet…”
In an attempt to demonstrate a self-perceived commitment to public good deeds, The Exclusive Brethren used to trumpet the fact that they had offered unspecified assistance in the aftermath of 9/11 on their ‘evil’ website:
“The Exclusive Brethren assisted the rescue efforts at Ground Zero during the aftermath of the tragic attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.”
This changed following the February 2009 bushfires in Victoria Australia when Jackson Wells co-founder quietly leaked the fact that the Exclusive Brethren had donated $3 million to the Red Cross Appeal. (Source Peter Jackson blog )
Shortly afterward, the Exclusive Brethren website replaced their 9/11 self-congratulation with the Jackson Wells bushfire donation story:
“Members of the Exclusive Brethren donated more than A$3 million to the Red Cross Bushfire Appeal to assist those affected by the devastating Black Saturday blazes in Victoria on February 7, 2009.
Many Brethren live close to areas burned and employ people who lost loved ones and property in the fires.”
Source – The Exclusive Brethren website
To ensure that the public get the message, an Exclusive Brethren school has now published a book labelled as a fund raiser. In a remarkable public relations coup, they even persuaded Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister to offer support for the enterprise!
The public relations smoke screen follows on the heels of the recent announcement that the Exclusive Brethren schools system have been granted over $70 million (AUS) in Australian federal funds over the next two years.
Brethren schools get $70m in funding
The Australian
by Rick Wallace
January 12, 2010The Rudd government is handing more than $70 million to schools run by the Exclusive Brethren, a religious sect Kevin Rudd described as an “extremist cult” that breaks up families.
The sect’s schools have secured more than $8.4m under the government’s school building stimulus package and they will share in $62m in recurrent taxpayer funding.
Documents show a Brethren-run school at Swan Hill in northern Victoria was granted $1.2m for a library and $800,000 for a hall when its most recent annual report shows it had just 16 pupils and already had a library.
Grants data released by the commonwealth shows that Brethren schools in every state received funding under the $12.4 billion schools stimulus package. Despite the Brethren’s past disdain for computers, figures show its schools have received more than 300 under the commonwealth computers-in-school initiative.
Although it might appear that ‘flying under the radar’ has recently proved beneficial to the secretive cult and their advisors, the confused signals from the Rudd administration have resulted in increased media scrutiny. Rick Wallace of the Australian continues investigating the outrageous funding:
Exclusive Brethren enjoying $1m taxpayer windfall
The Australian
by Rick Wallace
January 13, 2010Despite being assessed as wealthy, the Brethren’s mushrooming network of schools is being funded at a higher rate than independent schools in battling regional communities such as Bourke and Longreach.
The secretive but financially savvy sect has taken advantage of a “no-disadvantage” clause put in the funding system by the Howard government, of which the Brethren was a strong supporter.
…
The no-disadvantage clause means that despite the wealth of the Brethren schools’ communities, their funding level is preserved at that awarded to the original campus at Meadowbank in Sydney. Australian Education Union federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said the funding guarantee was costing taxpayers $3.5 billion a year and must be urgently reviewed.
“The over-funding of the Exclusive Brethren’s MET school is a prime example of a corrupted funding system, with half the private schools in the country funded above their entitlement,” Mr Gavrielatos said.
It is a remarkable moment – an Exclusive Brethren submission to the Australian Human Rights Commission is a newsworthy event indeed! The following submission was published a few hours ago on the Human Rights Commission website.
The three names shown as signatories: Daniel Hales, John Myhill and David Stewart, are representative elders of the cult in Australia. (Daniel Hales is the passed-over older brother to the current reclusive leader, Bruce D. Hales.)
There is little hint of the Jackson Wells ‘turn of phrase’ in this tangled document – some comments border on Incitement to Discriminate and the general appeal seems to be little more than a ‘self-pity party‘.
Submission to the Australian Human Rights Commission Continue reading »
on
Freedom of Religion and Belief in the 21st Century
by
Daniel Hales, John Myhill and David Stewart
[2009]
Are Jackson Wells now writing Exclusive Brethren advertisements for teachers in their schools? Surely we are not alone in recognising certain phrases and the old familiar half-truths and hidden meanings. Below is a July 2nd advert for a teacher in an Exclusive Brethren school in Australia. The EB are looking for a ‘teacher of Business and VET based Accountancy’ (a highly honored profession among the Brethren).
It is quite striking how impossible it is to tell that this is an Exclusive Brethren ad! This brings back memories of those notorious political smear leaflets – possibly the main difference between those and the advertisment below is that the address here is probably real!
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The Allbrook Education Trust (UK 1056053) is a Hampshire, UK Exclusive Brethren charitable trust, connected to the UK’s huge Exclusive Brethren Focus Learning Trust (UK 1099725). Allbrook has had a difficult couple of years in finding suitable alternative accomodation for its growing educational needs.
Since the cult realized that its only future asset was their children in the 1980′s, the Exclusive Brethren have been implementing a home-school operation which evolved into an impressive world-wide chain of EB-only schools and educational trusts.
There is a component of desperation involved in the EB educational structure. Their current worldwide leader, Australian Bruce Hales is quoted as admitting the Exclusive Brethren do not evangelize in order to recruit. As far as they are concerned, growth will come from within – and that means the children must be protected from The Enemy. By careful shifting of the limited genetic pool components, the EB have seemingly slowed a high tendency toward Downs Syndrome but still suffer from a very high incidence of Autism judging by their frequent Special Ed advertisements in various teaching journals.
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Reproduced with permission from:
Breakout: How I escaped from the Exclusive Brethren
by David Tchappat (2009)
The following chapter was written by a former Exclusive Brethren member who wishes to remain anonymous.
A Short History of the Exclusive Brethren
There are many Christians known as “brethren” who trace the origins of their movement to John Nelson Darby who lived just over 200 years ago in Dublin. Schism and division has been a consistent feature of the movement almost from the start. The following summary relates to the Taylor-Symington-Hales Branch of the Exclusive Brethren (signified by the more recent leaders of this group); arguably the most radical and perhaps controversial of all the groups in the Brethren movement.
The Brethren trace the origins of the movement to John Nelson Darby who was born in London in 1800 into an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family. Lord Nelson, a friend of his uncle, Admiral Sir Henry Darby, was a sponsor at young Darby’s christening.
Darby’s mother died when he was five years old and at the age of 15 his family moved to the ancestral estate in Ireland. He took an honours degree at Dublin University and studied law for three years at the Dublin Chancery Bar. But he never practiced law. To the annoyance of his family, he abandoned his legal career and became a priest in the Irish Church of England in 1826, serving in the parish of Calary in the mountains of County Wicklow.
Almost immediately John Darby fell out with church leaders over matters of doctrine and by 1827-28 he was meeting to “break bread” in the home of one of four other dissenting young men in Dublin. The group believed that the existence of an established church and ordained clergy was contrary to scripture. “I can find no such thing as a national church in Scripture”, Darby wrote at the time. In 1832, he had a major disagreement with Archbishop Magee about a requirement for converted Catholics to swear allegiance to King George IV and, in the same year, disagreed with Archbishop Whately about matters of church doctrine.
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The Exclusive Brethren love spending money – after all they have very little else to do with it! They don’t take vacations, there is no TV or radio and only highly filtered Internet access. The job for the young men is to make money and the task of the young women is to breed. They aren’t a very attractive group to join and so their only form of growth is from within.
This then explains their growing network of Exclusive Brethren only schools and the long-standing university education bans – ‘we make them and we need to keep them’.
As communities begin to understand the true nature of their ‘shy’, ‘retiring’, but vaguely unfriendly neighbors and begin to see how little they offer or care about the wider communities in which they take up residence, a very understandable backlash is developing.
It is difficult to encourage a group of people (described by Australian Premier Kevin Rudd as “an extremist cult and sect”) who treat others with such disdain and yet have the audacity to call themselves ‘Christian’!
Objections to church
The Daily Advertiser, Australiu
by Ken Grimson
30/03/2009
Australian residents in Stirling Boulevard object to Exclusive Brethren plans
Residents in Stirling Boulevard at Tatton are objecting to plans for an Exclusive Brethren meeting hall to be built in their street, arguing it will devalue properties and create traffic dangers.
“We are not against the Exclusive Brethren, we just don’t think this is the right location for their meeting place,” said neighbouring resident, Eileen Steel.
Spokesman for the Exclusive Brethren, Tim Pridham, said yesterday the planned place of public worship would be designed to look like any other house in the street and his church would work with residents to overcome any concerns they had about the development.
“We have tried to design it like a house so it fits in with other buildings. It will not look like a church,” Mr Pridham said.
Another Stirling Boulevard resident, Barry Bloodworth said everyone who bought land in the street had done so in the belief the street would be for residential purposes only.
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Brethren plans new school in Diamond Valley
The Leader
by William Jackson
Oct 31st, 2008
The controversial Exclusive Brethren church hopes to build a school for about 100 students in the Diamond Valley.
The DV Leader understands a location has already been chosen, but the church has declined to reveal where it is.
The Brethren’s largest Victorian school, in Glenroy, had outgrown its premises, spokesman Doug Burgess said.
“The Diamond Valley area is under consideration, but no planning application has in fact been lodged,” Mr Burgess said.
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‘Firestorm: Black Saturday’s Tragedy’ and the familiar sound of Exclusive Brethren silence
Frequently, it is what the Exclusive Brethren do not say that speaks loudest.
Many will recall the first cult smear advertising that first hit the streets in New Zealand in 2005. Later, Australia suffered the same influx of brochures, pamphlets and handouts. They all had one thing in common - the group behind the material was never mentioned.
Rather than provide any normal route to identity, the Exclusive Brethren intentionally obfuscate their publications. When you consider the way they hide their tracks, this is perhaps understandable: false addresses, misleading names, even the business premises of their unsuspecting tenants … One thing is constant, the name of the Taylorite / Symington / Hales Exclusive Brethren never appears.
9/11 and now 'Black Saturday'
And now, in perhaps their most cynical effort todate, they use their own children in an effort to extract money from a public for whom they care nothing and even seemingly entrap a Prime Minister who has publicly declared them an “extremist cult” to assist them. And their public relations lever? The killer bush fires that swept across Victoria in southern Australia during February, less than a year ago.
‘ Firestorm: Black Saturday’s Tragedy‘ is published by Dennis Jones & Associates of Byswater, Victoria, Australia and there is even a website dedicated to the PR cause: http://www.blacksaturdaysfirestorm.com.au
The Glenvale School is an Exclusive Brethren school – one of those campuses that is set to receive some of the over $70 million hand-out authorized by Kevin Rudd over the next two years:
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