On Friday morning Bruce Hales told the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters that he had no involvement in the 2025 federal election, made no donation, payment or contribution to anyone, and had no agreement or understanding with any political party or with any group or person involved in the campaign. What he knew of his members’ participation, he said, he had learned “primarily from the media”. This is what the public registers say happened while he was not watching.
Five donors, thirteen payments, $655,000
Advance Australia is a registered significant third party. Its annual return for 2024–25 records total receipts of $13,459,036 and declared electoral expenditure of $10,108,548.
Of those receipts, $655,000 came from five members of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, across thirteen separate payments.
| Donor | Payments | Total |
|---|---|---|
| Roderick Tunley | 2 | $246,500 |
| David Steele | 2 | $226,500 |
| Andrew Gillies | 5 | $145,000 |
| Gavin Grace | 2 | $18,500 |
| Peter Grace | 2 | $18,500 |
| Total | 13 | $655,000 |
Fifty donors disclosed giving to Advance that year, between them $4,722,200. These five men account for close to one dollar in every seven of it.
Ninety-one per cent of it arrived in twenty-one days
The 2025 federal election was held on Saturday 3 May. The dates on these payments are not spread across the year.
| Date | Donor | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 14 April 2025 | Roderick Tunley | $16,500 |
| 17 April 2025 | Roderick Tunley | $230,000 |
| 2 May 2025 | David Steele | $210,000 |
| 3 May 2025 — polling day | Andrew Gillies | $100,000 |
| 5 May 2025 | Andrew Gillies | $40,000 |
That is $596,500 — ninety-one per cent of the total — in the twenty-one days from 14 April to 5 May. David Steele’s $210,000 was paid the day before Australians voted. Andrew Gillies paid $100,000 on polling day itself and a further $40,000 two days after it, when the result was already known.
Four donations of exactly $16,500
Now look at the smaller payments, because this is the part that matters.
| Date | Donor | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 27 February 2025 | David Steele | $16,500 |
| 4 March 2025 | Gavin Grace | $16,500 |
| 4 March 2025 | Peter Grace | $16,500 |
| 14 April 2025 | Roderick Tunley | $16,500 |
Four men, four identical sums, across seven weeks.
The disclosure threshold for the 2024–25 financial year was $16,900. Below that figure, a donation does not have to be publicly attributed to anyone. $16,500 is $400 under it.
It is also, to the dollar, $15,000 plus ten per cent.
Nothing about this is unlawful. A donation of $16,500 is lawful. Four donations of $16,500 are lawful. Giving a sum that falls below a disclosure threshold is lawful, and we make no allegation that any of these payments breached any rule or that any of the men named here has done anything wrong. What the public register shows is the pattern. What it cannot show is how four people came to the same figure within seven weeks, and that is a question only they and Advance Australia can answer. We have asked. Any of the donors named here is welcome to answer it too, and we will publish any response in full.
How two of them became visible anyway
The threshold does not apply to each payment separately. It applies to the total a donor gives one recipient across the financial year. That is the only reason the Grace brothers appear in this story at all.
| Donor | Payments | Year total |
|---|---|---|
| Gavin Grace | $2,000 on 19 Sep 2024, $16,500 on 4 Mar 2025 | $18,500 |
| Peter Grace | $2,000 on 16 Sep 2024, $16,500 on 4 Mar 2025 | $18,500 |
Each brother crossed the line by $1,600, and crossed it because of a $2,000 payment made six months earlier. Strip out that September payment and each man gave $16,500 and nothing else — and neither would appear on any public register, in this article, or anywhere at all.
David Steele and Roderick Tunley are visible for the same accidental reason: each later gave a sum so large that their annual totals were disclosed, and the $16,500 came out with it.
What the threshold hides
Advance itemises $5,266,378 of receipts in its 2024–25 return. Its total receipts were $13,459,036. So $8,192,658 — sixty-one per cent of everything it received that year — is not attributed to anyone in any public record.
Unitemised receipts cover a great many ordinary things: merchandise, membership, interest, small gifts. We are not suggesting that $8.19 million is undeclared Brethren money, and there is no evidence of that. The point is narrower and it is not disputable. A donation of $16,500, given once, by anybody, leaves no public trace. The gap in which such donations would sit is six times larger than everything the five named men gave combined.
We know about these five because four of them happened to give something else as well.
The only creditor Advance had to name
The same return discloses Advance’s debts. Total debts at 30 June 2025: $27,150. Of that, $22,426 is itemised, owed to a single creditor; the remaining $4,724 falls below the disclosure threshold and is not attributed.
The named creditor is Jetmark Trade Signage.
Jetmark Trade Signage is a business name registered to ABN 67 324 562 395, The Trustee for Jetmark Unit Trust, of 87–91 Lambeck Drive, Tullamarine, Victoria. The name was registered on 9 May 2019 and remained registered until 11 June 2026, so it was current throughout the election. The same ABN also carries the names Jetmark Signage Group, Cover Styl, Cover Styl Australia, Solar Screen Australia, Upstyl Architectural Films and Zed7 Products.
The trust’s key people are recorded in our directory as Craig Hornsey and David Hornsey, members of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church.
Jetmark operates a trade-only print division from the Tullamarine address. Its published product list includes corflutes, banner mesh, flex and fabric banners, pull-up banners, wall and window graphics, directional signage, point-of-sale material and installation — which is, more or less item for item, the physical inventory of an Australian ground campaign.
In other years, it was the post office
A single unpaid invoice proves a trading relationship and nothing more. It does not establish how much Advance paid Jetmark across the year, and the register cannot tell us: significant third party returns itemise receipts and debts, but not payments.
What the register does show is the comparison.
In the two preceding financial years, the only creditor Advance Australia was required to name was Australia Post. In 2024–25 — the year of the federal election — it was a Brethren-owned signage printer in Tullamarine.
Jetmark itself has made no political disclosure of any kind. We examined every donor return naming Advance as recipient from 2018–19 to 2024–25, across 334 entries. Jetmark appears in none of them. It is not a donor. It is a supplier that was still owed money when the books closed.
Set against what the church has said
Lloyd Grimshaw, for the church, to this committee on 21 August 2026:
“There is no such thing as a Brethren business because the church does not have any businesses, it doesn’t have any vested interests.”
Bruce Hales, in his opening statement to the same committee on Friday:
“I had no agreement or understanding with the Liberal Party or any political party, or with any group or person involved in the 2025 federal election. I made no donation, payment or contribution to anyone. I do not commission or pay for advertising of any kind.”
Bruce Hales, JSCEM, 16 October 2026
Both statements may be entirely true as written. Neither addresses what the registers show: that members of the church put $655,000 into a campaign organisation in the closing weeks of an election, that four of them did so in identical amounts set just below the point at which they would have had to be named, and that the same organisation finished the year owing money to a business belonging to members of the same church.
Nobody at Friday’s hearing mentioned Advance Australia. The word was not spoken once in three hours.
This has happened before
In the run-up to the 2010 United Kingdom general election, members of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church raised £55,000 for the Young Britons’ Foundation, a Conservative training and campaigning organisation. The money passed through Healthgear Contracts Ltd of Bedford, run by church member Rodney Dummer, who collected donations raised by other members. The invoices were addressed not to the Foundation but to Media Intelligence Partners, the public relations firm led by Nick Wood, a former press secretary to William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith.
The Foundation registered as a third party for the general election of 6 May 2010, and its spending is on the UK Electoral Commission’s register. It reported five items, totalling £134,859.91.
Four of the five were payments to News International Advertising Limited — the advertisements in The Times and The Sunday Times — amounting to £117,297.91 between them.
The fifth, and the only print supplier on the return, was DAS Group of Queensway, Swansea West Business Park, Swansea. £17,562.00, incurred on 4 May 2010, two days before the country voted. Of that, £16,859.52 was spent in England and £702.48 in Scotland. Nothing in Wales, where the printer was.
DAS Group is a Brethren-owned print and promotional merchandise business. Its principal was Richard Graham Brown, later a director of Blank Group Ltd of Swansea — the company that holds the Blank brand DAS Group once carried — alongside Darren Brown.
So in both countries the same thing is true, and in both countries it is the electoral regulator’s own register that says so. Church members put substantial money into a third-party campaign vehicle. And the campaign’s print supplier was a business owned by members of the same church.
| United Kingdom, 2010 | Australia, 2025 | |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign vehicle | Young Britons’ Foundation | Advance Australia |
| From church members | £55,000 | $655,000 |
| Print supplier on the register | DAS Group, Swansea | Jetmark, Tullamarine |
| Family | Brown | Hornsey |
| Amount recorded | £17,562 paid | $22,426 owed |
One difference matters and we state it plainly. The UK return records what DAS Group was paid. The Australian return records only what Jetmark was still owed when the financial year closed. Significant third party returns in Australia itemise receipts and debts but not payments, so the total Advance paid Jetmark across the year is not on any public record. What Jetmark supplied, and for how much, is the question Advance and Jetmark can answer and the register cannot.
A second difference runs the other way. In 2010 the money moved through a member’s company and was invoiced via a third party. In 2025 the donations were made personally, in the donors’ own names, and are public because Australian law required them to be. Whether that reflects a more open approach or simply a stricter disclosure regime is a matter of view.
Nor are these the only two. The same shape — church members funding a campaign vehicle, and a church member’s company supplying it — recurs in other countries and other elections, including Sweden, where the promoter was a Brethren business operating out of the United Kingdom. We have set out that record, and the 2010 episode in full, in elections and lobbying: how the Brethren have worked in different countries.
What is not a matter of view is the recurrence. Gareth Hales told the committee on Friday that the people involved were not church members but “concerned business groups”, acting individually. A single instance is consistent with individuals making individual choices. The same architecture, in two countries, fifteen years apart, is a method.
Questions for Advance Australia and Jetmark
Four questions that the public registers cannot answer, and that both organisations can. We put them in writing to Advance Australia and to Jetmark on 16 October 2026, and asked for a response by 5pm AEDT on Monday 19 October. We will publish any response in full and update this article to reflect it.
To Advance Australia
How much did Advance pay Jetmark Trade Signage, or any business operated by The Trustee for Jetmark Unit Trust, during the 2024–25 financial year, and what goods or services were supplied? Who at Advance had contact with members of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church during the campaign, and in what capacity? And did anyone at Advance advise donors on the disclosure threshold or on the amounts they gave?
To Jetmark
What did Jetmark supply to Advance Australia, to what value, and has the outstanding balance since been paid?
How this was put together
Donation figures are taken from the Australian Electoral Commission’s transparency register, from the returns lodged by the donors themselves naming Advance Australia as recipient, 2018–19 to 2024–25. Advance’s receipts, payments, debts and electoral expenditure are from its annual significant third party return for 2024–25. The disclosure threshold of $16,900 is the AEC’s published indexed figure for that year. Business name and ABN details are from the Australian Business Register. Jetmark’s product range is from its own published trade print pages. The Young Britons’ Foundation’s 2010 campaign spending, including the payment to DAS Group, is from the UK Electoral Commission’s register of third party campaign spending for the general election of 6 May 2010. DAS Group’s business and principal are from the Dun & Bradstreet business directory, the company’s own published site and Companies House records for Blank Group Ltd, company number 10325338.
For the structure behind this — the church’s business network, its funding operation and the single floor in Sydney Olympic Park from which much of it trades — see the five systems that run the Plymouth Brethren worldwide, and for what the Hales gave in evidence on Friday, our account of the hearing.