(Image: Private Media)

This story is part five in a series. For the full series go here.

Soon after Scott Morrison became prime minister in 2018 he invited one of the key figures in his life to dinner at the Lodge. That special guest was Bruce Baird, a former Liberal politician — and a physically towering figure — who has been Morrison’s patron, chief barracker, sponsor and guardian angel stretching back two decades.

Morrison had much to thank him for. Baird had spotted Morrison as a talent in the 1990s when Morrison worked under Baird at Tourism Australia. Baird then entered federal Parliament as the member for Cook in 1998 and when it came time to move on, he gave Morrison a quiet call alerting him to the possibility that he could take over his seat.

“Scott is not somebody who knifes people — he’s a decent person,” Baird told Christian radio station Hope in the days after Morrison became PM.

“He is a person of faith and it is not a pretend faith. He’s a very strong family man. I know he’s concerned about religious freedom.”

And there was more — a sense of destiny: “It’s also true to say that my wife Judy believed [Morrison] was called by God to replace me. That’s known within our family.”  

Courtesy of Baird we now know from three sources that God had chosen Morrison for a political life. Following the journalist’s rule of two independent sources, that must make it true.  Apart from (the late) Judy Baird, there is also Morrison’s then pastor, as well as Morrison himself, who went one further and told Hillsong pastor Joel A’Bell, before he entered Parliament, that God had called him to be prime minister.

Such certainty. Such conviction.

But not only was God on Morrison’s side, so were the godly.

The house of Morrison

Bruce Baird is a key part of the Christian scaffolding that has supported the house of Morrison from the foundations up. It’s a network which took Morrison to Washington DC in February 2011 where he attended the National Prayer Breakfast, the annual big ticket political event sponsored by The Fellowship, an organisation which has worked over several decades to spot key men who are devout Christians and to foster their political careers. 

The Bairds (Bruce’s son, Mike, was New South Wales premier) are but one political Christian family prominent in the rise of Morrison. The Camerons are another. And they are intimately linked. Bruce Baird began his political career in the NSW Parliament, in the seat of Northcott which he took over from Jim Cameron, a staunch morals campaigner who jumped ship from the Liberals to join Christian campaigner Fred Nile. 

Jim Cameron’s son Ross was another strident family values Liberal MP (before he confessed to extramarital affairs and moved on from politics). Ross worked on Bruce Baird’s ministerial staff before finding his own seat in federal Parliament.

Meanwhile Cameron’s other son, Jock, became a stalwart religious influencer, working quietly behind the scenes. Jock worked from Ross’ Canberrra parliamentary office for two or three days a week organising a cross-party forum, the National Student Leadership Forum on Faith and Values, to facilitate an exchange of views between politicians and young potential leaders. 

It also helped play an evangelising role within the Parliament, providing a way to reach the “unchurched”. Jock is also the author of Lasting Influence: the Leadership Strategy of Jesus. a handbook on how to lead as a Christian.

The circle of faith 

In 2011 Morrison declared on his register of interests that he had been given a gift of the following flights from an organisation called Oceania Fellowship:

  • Sydney to Los Angeles
  • Los Angeles to San Antonio
  • San Antonio to Baltimore (stopover in Houston)
  • Washington to Sydney (stopover in Nashville and Los Angeles).

A month later he added another detail to the register: a gift from Oceania Fellowship to the National Prayer Breakfast on February 3, 2011, in Washington. There was no separate accounting for what he had done in the stops leading to Washington on the dime of the Oceania Fellowship.

What is the Oceania Fellowship? 

According to filings with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, the ACNC, the Oceania Fellowship has four directors. One is Jock Cameron. Another, Timothy Pickles, is the executive chairman of Pickles Auctions, the enormously successful family company that operates across Australia and New Zealand.

Pickles and Cameron live in the same street in the same suburb on Sydney’s north shore. Cameron is on the Pickles corporate advisory board. Cameron and Pickles are also board members of a registered charity called Student Leadership Holdings, known as the National Student Leadership Forum on Faith and Values.

Crikey has established that Morrison, then immigration minister, spoke at a leadership forum attended by more than 200 students from Australia and New Zealand in Canberra in 2014. (He was joined by then treasurer Joe Hockey and opposition leader Bill Shorten.)

“He took a leading role in talking to young people about what it meanss to follow Christ in their lives and how it can give you a real sense of purpose and direction for the future,” Bruce Baird said, speaking to Hope radio.

Links to The Fellowship, aka The Family

Back in 2011 it barely caused a ripple that Morrison, then stuck in opposition, had been invited to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, and there appears to have been no digging into who picked up the bill for his travel. Those paying close attention might have joined some dots on the highly secretive organisation known as The Family which is behind the breakfast.

US author Jeff Sharlet had written a book called The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Sharlet had penetrated The Family, also known as The Fellowship, and written an illuminating account of its history, starting in the 1930s when a Norwegian immigrant, Abraham Vereide, arrived in the United States with a new approach to spreading the word of God. Vereide believed the best way to change the world was through men with power: business and political leaders and industrialists like Henry Ford. His power network was built in opposition to organised labour movements. 

Vareide’s work was carried on by a US acolyte, Doug Coe, who became a quiet confidant to a succession of US presidents and political aspirants. Coe’s advice to residents at The Family’s Virginia mansion, Ivanwald, was: “If you’re a person known to be around Jesus, you can go and do anything.” He drove home the moral: “We elect our leaders [but] Jesus elects his.” They were also taught that democracy is “a manifestation of ungodly pride“.

Sharlet coined the term “elite fundamentalism” to capture The Family’s aims. 

“The Family is not so much interested in holding mass rallies, or saving everybody’s souls. Rather, it grows out of this belief that took hold in the 1930s that God works through a few specially chosen individuals. They call them key men, the sort of anointed. And there’s the real concerns, well, not social issues but economic, something that they came to call ‘biblical capitalism’, a sort of laissez-faire capitalism, and especially foreign affairs,” Sharlet explained in an ABC interview.

“They still see God’s interests as those of the absolutely unregulated free markets — a very sort of macho, muscular Christianity that tends to serve the interests of those involved.”

Sharlet had lived for a period in a Georgian mansion owned by The Fellowship where members of the US Congress and politicians from overseas would visit and stay. He also gained access to Fellowship documents. Pressed on any Australian links to The Family, he recalled three names, although he confessed he didn’t have a lot of detail: 

I would just bump into — in the documents — minor Australian politicians, Bruce Baird, a fellow named Ross Cameron, … had been involved, and I don’t know how involved, and I just, that’s not something I followed up on.

It was only in 2019 when Netflix released a documentary on The Fellowship focusing on Coe’s influence that the impact of the movement became known, not just on US politics but wherever America has political and economic interests.

Bruce Baird acknowledged to Crikey that he knew of The Family but did not elaborate. Crikey approached Jock Cameron and Pickles for comment but has not received a response. Attempts to contact Ross Cameron, who has recently joined the hard-right libertarian Liberal Democratic party, also went unanswered.

Next — Acts of faith: how Scott Morrison’s religious beliefs compare with other prime ministers