Senior Counsel Calls for Hillsong Founder to Be Referred to Police

By Dan Box
Social Affairs Reporter
December 19, 2014

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/subscribe/news/1/index.html?sourceCode=TAWEB_WRE170_a&mode=premium&dest=http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/in-depth/senior-counsel-calls-for-hillsong-founder-to-be-referred-to-police/story-fngburq5-1227162370779&memtype=anonymous

HILLSONG Church founder Brian Houston should be referred to police for investigation after he failed to report child sexual abuse carried out by his father, the royal commission’s senior counsel has found.

Simeon Beckett, counsel assisting the Royal Commission into ­Institutional ­Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, also found Brian Houston — who was national president of the Pentecostal church umbrella organisation ­Assemblies of God when he heard about the abuse — had a “conflict of interest” and never told police about his father Frank Houston’s abuse of a boy from the age of seven in 1970. He first found out about the abuse in 1999.

His submission says that Frank Houston admitted the abuse to his son and this confession could have been used to secure a conviction had Brian Houston ­informed police. “As that information may relate to contravention of a law ... it is submitted it is appropriate to refer Pastor Brian Houston’s conduct to the NSW Police Commissioner,” it says.

The commission heard evidence that Frank Houston abused several children in Australia and New Zealand in the 1960s and 70s while at the Assemblies of God, ­before Hillsong existed.