Wednesday, 29 July 2026

 Cindy McLEISH (Eildon) (10:51): I take pride in rising today to speak on the Legal and Social Issues Committee’s latest inquiry, the inquiry into the recruitment methods and impacts of cults and organised fringe groups. As I said, I am very proud to be standing here as part of a number of speakers here today that are going to talk about this inquiry.

This was a pretty challenging inquiry. It relied on deeply personal lived experience alongside contested language and grey areas. Also in that mix were the existing legal and service frameworks. Our committee was absolutely fair and genuine in our approach, and all committee members took this so seriously. We had really strong debate so that we understood and fleshed out a number of different areas. Our inquiry was not a review of academic research worldwide; it was not a literature review. And there were submissions that tried to take it in that direction. It was not an attack on organised religion, but what it was was an inquiry to find out what is happening in this space, fair and square in Victoria – what was happening with regard to recruitment methods and then the impacts of cults and organised fringe groups.

The language itself was challenging, because whilst we all understand what the word ‘cult’ is, we all have our ideas in our minds of what a cult is and we have seen things from overseas and also certainly from Victoria and in and around my electorate in Eildon with the Family, which certainly springs to mind. But when we have changes that we are looking at through policy or legislation, it is really difficult to use the word ‘cult’, so we have consistently referred to ‘coercive high-control groups’.

We had almost 300 submissions, and many of them were confidential. People were worried about what they were going to put forward and how they could be identified and wanted to make sure that they were not. People were living in fear, and it was particularly courageous and brave of a number of people who spoke freely to the cameras and put their opinions and experiences on the record. I cannot thank them enough, because the lived experience really meant so much to us as we went through this.

Equally, I want to commend not just those who made the submissions but the 317 people who responded to an anonymous questionnaire, which was an unusual step. It was something that was done prior to us really getting underway to get an understanding of what was out there and what we might know. Of those 317, just over 80 per cent shared their own experiences and 14.8 per cent shared experiences close to them. Nearly 95 per cent outlined psychological harm, which is just really alarming; personal restrictions, 85.8 per cent; and physical harm, 20.2 per cent.

What surprised me through this was the number of people that were born into these coercive high-control groups. We tend to think of the recruitment and people hanging out at university campuses or train stations or preying on people in different scenarios – people at their most vulnerable. We tend to think about that. But there was a very large cohort of people for whom this is what they knew because they had grown up in this situation; it was their life. They did not necessarily know that what they were experiencing was perhaps different from many, many other people. Even at schools, it was very difficult for a number of people to navigate the situation that they were in, whether it was a type of religion or doomsday or whatever.

I do want to thank the secretariat. I have been here a long time and had a number of secretariats. These guys were fantastic. There was a lot of work that we had to do in making sure that submissions were redacted and kept confidential where they needed to be, because people were feeling very unsafe. They had to field a number of phone calls. People wanted to have their arguments between different groups through our inquiry, and that was just not appropriate. We wanted to keep very much focused on what is happening here in Victoria, and I commend the secretariat for that. I do want to mention that one of the most unusual things was volume 2, In their Words, which documents absolutely, for those who came forward, their own words, so there can be no doubt about what they said.