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Plymouth Brethren church’s director, Luke Grimshaw , has told a parliamentary inquiry his organisation did not pay for members to volunteer or help them travel across the country.

At the parliamentary inquiry into the 2025 election campaign, Grimshaw has so far claimed there was no coordinated campaign for hundreds of members to volunteer at polling booths for Liberal candidates. He told the inquiry:

double quotation mark I can confirm that the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church did not participate in the 2025 election campaign in any way, shape, or form, and that includes paying for any political activity, chartering planes moving people around doing any of that activity that you described. There was not one single cent paid from the church to fund that type of activity.

And whether members got involved in that in their voluntary capacity and activities in coordination with whatever parties they were supporting, I’ve got no knowledge of how that happened. Volunteers have got to get around somehow, but church certainly did not facilitate that.

Grimshaw also told the committee multiple church members had contacted him about how they were treated at polling booths, saying claiming some faced “aggressive questioning” and “verbal abuse” over their involvement.

double quotation mark A young person from our church was brought to tears with the type of abuse she was suffering down there, verbal abuse. And we’ve certainly had other feedback that members were made to feel pretty uncomfortable, to be honest, out on a polling booth, just to have other people bowled up to them and essentially shove a camera in their face and start quite aggressively questioning about what religion they were and questioning their right to be there.