A megachurch exposed: thousands of now-public Hillsong documents to test government’s will to act against religious interests

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Thousands of internal Hillsong whistleblower documents have now been uploaded to the Parliament House website, opening up access to the largest-ever dump of files showing the financial workings of a megachurch.

The documents were passed by a whistleblower to independent Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie who tabled them in federal Parliament a week ago. The files include Hillsong board papers, internal working documents, bank statements and credit card records stretching back well over a decade. There are around 10,000 all up. Such is the volume that it has taken close to a week for the Parliament House tabling office to scan and upload them. The complete record is here.

Snippets from the document trove, reported so far, have revealed spending on luxury items such as a Cartier watch and Louis Vuitton luggage for a select group at the top of the church.

The whistleblower documents also raise serious questions about the federal government’s special treatment of religious charities. Under a decade-long arrangement, church-run charities are exempt from disclosing financial information to the charities regulator. This has effectively created a secret haven, virtually beyond regulation, for all religions in Australia, not just Hillsong. 

The question is whether or not the Albanese government has the will to take on powerful religious interests — and their media backers — which have a vested interest in keeping their affairs secret.

Will the government act?

There has been a significant change at the top of the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) with the Albanese government appointing a new head, Sue Woodward. Woodward brings a very different approach to the charities sector to her predecessor, Gary Johns, the former Labor minister turned conservative who was appointed by the Turnbull government.

Woodward has spent years in the not-for-profit sector. Immediately before her appointment she was chief adviser for not-for-profit law with Victorian-based charity Justice Connect. The organisation has strongly advocated for the federal government to abolish the special deal for churches under the so-called Basic Religious Charity (BRC) category.

In 2018 it argued the case to abolish the BRC in its submission to a federal government review of the ACNC Act, saying the category was “problematic” for a number of reasons and that there appeared to be “a lack of clear policy rationale” for its existence.

“There is no valid reason why charitable organisations that are established for one charitable purpose (i.e. advancing religion) should be exempt from certain reporting obligations. It is not clear what special attributes such organisations have which justifies a lower level of regulatory oversight,” it said.

Justice Connect also questioned why there was no limit to the size of “basic” religious charities — some of which, it pointed out, may be large entities that would otherwise have more robust reporting requirements given the amounts of money involved. 

“We also note that community expectations concerning the level of transparency and accountability that religious organisations should adhere to and be subject to, has likely changed over the last five years,” the submission added, referring to revelations at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Ultimately the Morrison government ignored the arguments and decided to take no action on the BRC category.

So can or will the ACNC act? The regulator has declined to comment on whether or not it will press to now abolish the special religious category. In an email to Crikey it confirmed that it was investigating concerns raised about Hillsong. (The ACNC has been looking into Hillsong charities for close to a year.)

Crikey also sought comment on the likelihood of the Albanese government acting on the BRC category in light of the new documents.

A joint statement from Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones and Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, and Treasury Andrew Leigh said the government was “aware of the serious allegations” raised by Mr Wilkie and that “the relevant regulatory agencies” would be “examining the matters”. The statement didn’t address the BCR question.

For its part, Hillsong responded to Wilkie’s tabling of whistleblower documents by accusing the parliamentarian of a “king hit” and of acting in a way that was un-Australian. At the same time, it announced that it was commissioning an independent financial investigation into the whistleblower information tabled in Parliament. This was in addition to the investigation which has been conducted in secret by the ACNC, and a governance review commissioned by the church last year after the departure of founder Brian Houston.

While Hillsong has attracted the headlines, it is certain that traditional churches will be watching developments very closely given the hundreds of millions of dollars they have tied up in secret charities.