Support for church families following Prime Minister’s comments at their school this afternoon

Responding to comments made by the Prime Minister of Australia, a spokesperson for the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church said:

This afternoon Prime Minister Albanese held a press conference where he said he doesn’t “attack people’s families”, before falsely labelling our church “The Exclusive Brethren” and criticising “the views that they have.”

The press conference occurred at Winthrop Primary School in Western Australia which is attended by five young children from five families who attend our church.

Understandably these families do feel attacked and are very upset by this, and of course our church will give them whatever support they need.

On Monday 28 April, ahead of the media storm about the decision by some of our parishioners to hand out for a variety of candidates from the Liberal, Nationals, Teals and other parties, we wrote to Labor headquarters to let them know the facts.

On Tuesday 29 April, after the Prime Minister falsely called our church a cult, we then wrote directly to his office – again putting the facts on the record including the following.

• We are a mainstream Christian church with more than 16,600 members in Australia who read a normal bible and live in normal communities.
• Our church does not campaign for, nor support, any political parties and have not organised or coordinated any volunteer efforts of any type in any location.
• Many Australians conscientiously object to voting on religious grounds. Some of our members exercise this individual right but others do not, and are active in politics.
• To that end, we’re aware that members of our church have volunteered this year for a number of political parties.

In that correspondence we said that that we would be happy to sit down with the Labor Party and have a conversation about who we are, what we stand for, and how we contribute to Australia. We have not had a reply to either piece of correspondence.

The fact remains that while our church is politically neutral, some individual members – acting independently – have chosen to support candidates based on shared values, and it is fair to say that we have observed a significant upswing in this volunteering this week, as well as the coordination between those independent groups, since the attacks on our members began.