Weekend Wrap for 20 June 2026

National: 'The devil is trying to deceive': Leaked recordings show Brethren boss's behaviour crackdown (14 June 2026)
Bruce Hales, the multi-millionaire "Man of God" who leads the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, has launched a crackdown on his 50,000-strong flock even as the secretive sect faces mounting scrutiny over its unsuccessful campaigning for the Coalition at the last federal election. Leaked audio of Hales's "ministry", played to members in recent weeks, captures him belligerently tightening rules on how followers dress and behave, where they may go and whom they may associate with. A disciplined religious membership marshalled behind one side of an election, led by a man who polices his followers' private conduct this closely, is precisely the form of organised religious influence in politics the Wrap exists to track.
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The Age

WA: The Netherlands has banned conversion therapy (16 June 2026)
As the Netherlands' Senate voted to criminalise conversion practices, attention returned to Western Australia's stalled commitment to do the same. WA, along with Tasmania and the Northern Territory, remains one of the few Australian jurisdictions yet to ban attempts to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. Attorney-General Tony Buti has again said legislation creating both criminal offences and a civil scheme will reach parliament in 2026. But Labor first promised a ban in 2022, following a parliamentary inquiry into the religious-run Esther House facility, and Roger Cook flagged action as early as 2017 when he was health minister; no bill emerged in 2025. The Esther House inquiry centred on a faith-based residential facility, a reminder that the practices the law would target are overwhelmingly religiously grounded.
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OUTinPerth

National: Pauline Hanson Uses First National Press Club Speech To Attack Trans Community (17 June 2026)
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson used her first National Press Club address to describe the movement for trans equality as a "militant force" and a "transgender insurgency" that had "penetrated almost every regulatory authority", and pledged that in government she would sack Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody and end agencies' participation in workplace inclusion schemes. She compared the movement to "militant Islam", said "transgender ideology" was "propaganda being imposed on kids in classrooms", and called for a "monocultural" rather than multicultural Australia. Equality Australia called the remarks "simply shameful" and warned they would make trans people "greater targets for hate and violence", noting polling that nine in ten Australians support trans people's freedom to live as they choose. The speech matters less for novelty than for timing: One Nation's enlarged crossbench now holds decisive numbers in several chambers.
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Star Observer

SA: Sarah Game's bill restricting late-term abortion access voted down in lower house (17 June 2026)
South Australia's lower house defeated Family First MP Sarah Game's bill to restrict late-term abortion 36 votes to nine, hours after it narrowly cleared the upper house 10–9 with the support of three newly elected One Nation MLCs — the furthest an anti-abortion bill has progressed in the state. The bill would have banned termination from 25 weeks except to save the mother's life or for serious foetal abnormality, after a Labor amendment added the foetal-abnormality ground. Premier Peter Malinauskas and Opposition Leader Ashton Hurn both backed it on a conscience vote, while the Greens opposed it and Health Minister Blair Boyer defended abortion as established healthcare "hard fought and won" by earlier reformers. One Nation's Chantelle Thomas, who carried the bill in the lower house, failed in a bid to defer the vote. Game had days earlier defected to Family First, joined at the announcement by its national director, former Australian Christian Lobby managing director Lyle Shelton.
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ABC News
InDaily

SA: South Australia Updates Birth Certificates For Rainbow Families (17 June 2026)
On the same sitting day, the South Australian Parliament passed the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration (Birth Certificates) Amendment Bill, 33 votes to eight, allowing a non-birth legal parent — previously recorded only as "other parent" — to choose "mother", "father" or "parent" on a child's birth certificate, with the change applying retrospectively. The reform stops short of letting a birth parent who is a trans man or non-binary person be recorded as "father" or "parent". Greens MLC Robert Simms, who has pursued the change for years, called it "another positive advancement", while advocates from Rainbow Families SA said further reform was still needed. The contrast with the abortion vote hours earlier was stark: a pluralist recognition reform passed comfortably in the same chamber where a religious-right restriction narrowly cleared the upper house before collapsing in the lower.
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Star Observer

National: Archbishop Fisher leads multi-faith project to encourage Australians to be counted in the 2026 Census (18 June 2026)
Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher gathered leaders from the Catholic, Anglican, Uniting, Coptic, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu communities at St Mary's Cathedral to launch a national campaign urging Australians to record a religious affiliation on the 2026 Census, telling the launch "you don't have to be a regular worshipper to have a religious identity". Coordinated by the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, the campaign frames the religion question as a matter of honest self-description, but its participants were explicit about the stakes: demographer Mark McCrindle linked the data to planning for "chaplaincy programs", and Buddhist Council representative Rev Heather Topp stressed continued easy access to faith-based chaplaincy in prisons, hospitals and schools. Recent censuses have recorded a sharp rise in "No Religion". The launch is the organised religious response to that trend — and the direct counterpart to the NSL-backed campaign encouraging the non-religious to mark "No Religion".
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The Catholic Weekly
CathNews