Government inquiries

When a parliament aims its investigative machinery at religious belief, the consequences reach far beyond the groups first named. This hub tracks how governments inquire into “cults”, “sects”, and new religious movements, and what those inquiries mean for freedom of religion or belief.

The current anchor is in Australia. In late April 2025 the Parliament of Victoria announced an Inquiry into the Recruitment Methods and Impacts of Cults and Organized Fringe Groups, conducted by its Legal and Social Issues Committee and chaired by Labor MP Ella George [1]. The chair has framed it carefully: the inquiry is “not about judging or questioning anyone’s beliefs,” George has said. It is “focused on the actions, not the beliefs behind them.” The immediate impetus appears to have been the popularity of Secrets We Keep: Pray Harder, a podcast series by journalist Richard Baker that began in late October 2024; politically, the inquiry was pushed by the Labor member for Geelong, Christine Couzens, together with Victorian Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny.

Victoria has been here before. Inquiries into so-called “cults” have recurred in Australia since at least the 1960s, the prototype being the 1963 Victorian Board of Inquiry into Scientology, the “Anderson Inquiry”. In 1983 the Church of the New Faith (the name Scientology had adopted in Victoria) won the High Court case that remains the benchmark for how religion is defined in Australian law. And in late 2009 Senator Nick Xenophon called, unsuccessfully, for a Royal Commission into the Church of Scientology; both major parties rejected the call.

The recurring objection is definitional. Try to define a cult, argues Freedom for Faith’s Mike Southon, and you end up with something either so narrow that nothing qualifies or so broad that any church you dislike does [2]. Freedom for Faith warned that the Victorian inquiry’s guidance-note definition is so broad it could capture almost every mainline Christian denomination in Australia, along with sectors of the Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu communities. And witnesses at the hearings did label the Australian Christian Churches, the country’s largest Pentecostal denomination, a “cult” [3]. For legal scholar Keith Thompson the stakes reach past any one state: by redefining harm so that any personal slight becomes actionable in law, he argues, the inquiry works against the framework of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) [4].

The stories below collect our original analysis and the republished source material this coverage rests on. As the archive grows, the hub will extend to inquiries beyond Australia.

Start here

• The Victoria “Cults” Inquiry: An Overview. The grounded guide to the inquiry, its origins, and the definitional problem.
• How we source claims. How every factual claim on this site traces to a documented source.

Further Reading

[1] The Victoria, Australia, Inquiry on “Cults.” 1. The Australian Context

[2] The Victoria, Australia, Inquiry into “Cults”: Why Christians Are Concerned

[3] The Victoria, Australia, Inquiry on “Cults.” 2. Dangerous for All Religions

[4] The Victoria, Australia, Anti-Cult Inquiry: Interview with Professor Keith Thompson