Sam died at an Exclusive Brethren-linked workplace. His sister wants answers

When Sam Keast arrived in Melbourne for his dream job, he produced a video tour for his dad of the factory he’d been sent to Australia to set up and run.

“Welcome to my kingdom,” he declared.

Two months later, the young man in the video was dead. He was found lifeless inside the factory he’d so proudly and so recently established.

Sam Keast, who died by suicide in a factory in Melbourne in 2023.

The last two calls on the day before Sam Keast’s suicide aged 27 were with his New Zealand-based employer, Playground Centre Limited. The first was an attempt to call in sick. He was told he needed to do another delivery.

The second call, in the hours before he took his own life, was a 47-minute conversation with a manager in New Zealand. In a later statement to the Victorian coroner, who is investigating the death, the manager did not reveal what was said in the call. Whatever it was, while Keast was on the phone, he Googled the words “work negligence”.

That internet search, his sister, Serena, told this masthead, is “as good as a suicide note”.

“Sam believed that Playground Centre would ‘do right by him’,” she wrote in her submission to WorkSafe Victoria, which is investigating the case alongside the Coroner.

“Sam was always a glass half-full kind of guy ... I believe whatever the conversations he had [that day] was the final straw – he finally saw that, to them, he was just another cog in the machine being taken advantage of.”

Serena told this masthead that in the weeks and days leading up to his death, her brother had complained about his long working hours and the stress he had been under.

When she pressed him to claim overtime or call a union for help, he flatly declined. He could not, he was scared of being sacked, he said.

That fear stemmed from the fact that the senior personnel who run the Playground Centre are part of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. Under New Zealand law, businesses run by the brethren’s members hold an exemption under workplace law that other businesses don’t enjoy – they can legally prevent a union representative ever entering their workplaces.

As an employee, to call a union might end your employment. And Sam told his sister that everyone who worked there knew it.

Child’s play

Sam Keast, according to his father, Harley, was a quiet child who had turned into a lovely, creative young man. He was a Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast, he organised groups to play fantasy game Warhammer, and imported and painted the miniature figurines players use.

Serena told police in her statement for the Victorian coroner that Keast was “strongly influenced by the games he liked to play and Gothic culture”.

“He was quite particular about the way he dressed and presented himself,” she wrote, and “he was incredibly personable and liked by many”.

Sam Keast at the factory where he died.

His artistic flair, says Harley, was one of the reasons he was so attached to building playground equipment – a job he’d been working at with the company in Whanganui, New Zealand, since 2018.

“He loved it,” Harley says, “it was creative – the fact that he was doing it for children.”

And, on the face of it, Playground Centre should have been a great place to work. In Keast’s employment contract, obtained from his family by this masthead, it is described as being run by “practical Christian persons” who insist on “a high moral standard of conduct”.

Although Keast and many of his fellow employees were not members of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, their work contract spelled out the brethren’s dress code: “Women will wear skirts or dresses … men will wear long trousers”. (Members believe God “takes no pleasure in the legs of a man”.)

“Elect Vessel” of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church Bruce D. Hales (left front), preaching in the United States.

Non-brethren employees were expected to “respect … religious views and this may be, but not limited to, blasphemy, use of unacceptable language, use of radios”. (The brethren believe radios are a “pipeline of filth”.)

In Keast’s possession when he died was a document called “Job Description Form” produced by the brethren’s “parent company”, Universal Business Team, whose headquarters were raided by the Australian Tax Office last year looking for evidence of wrongdoing by “high net worth” individuals, including the sect’s hugely wealthy leadership.

As this masthead reported at the time, businesses run by the brethren are part of a vast “ecosystem” of schools, charities and companies, with Universal Business Team accountants, advisers and consultants at the core.

A form from the brethren’s “parent company”, Universal Business Team, among the belongings of dead worker Sam Keast.

Another belief of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church was not spelled out in Keast’s contract, but Sam told family members it was a reality for him. It was made clear to every non-brethren member who worked at Playground Centre that unions were barred.

The closed religious group’s animating principle is separation from the corruption and defilement of the world. It has lobbied governments over many years to protect church members and employees of their businesses from being “unequally yoked” to any worldly organisations, particularly unions.

In Australia, that special exemption was removed from workplace legislation in 2009. But in New Zealand, where Playground Centre is based, it remains part of the law.

Keast had never thought much about it. But a few days before his death, he had a long conversation with Serena, who lives in Melbourne. Sam said he was becoming desperate about his work conditions.

Keast, horsing around on a piece of playground equipment.

“The first thing I told him is, why aren’t you part of the CFMEU? And he’s like, ‘No, I’m not allowed’,” Serena told this masthead.

“No talking about unions. No talking about overtime. No asking for extra benefits. That was just not allowed. You get fired on the spot.”

A one-man band

Keast’s move to Australia in September 2023 was a big promotion. A company document shows he was elevated from dispatch and assembly work in the little North Island town of Whanganui to “Ops manager” in Australia.

He would be dealing with private developers and a number of councils. From Greater Dandenong in Melbourne’s south-east to Sunbury in the far north-west, councils are big customers of Playground Centre.

With the new title, according to Serena, her brother was promised training, a pay rise, and housing in Melbourne for six months.

Sam Keast’s grieving sister, Serena, at her home in Melbourne.Credit: Jason South

But by November, two months after he’d started working in Australia, she says none of this had happened. Keast told his family that, despite asking for it, he had still not been trained as a manager. Beyond transitional accommodation in an Airbnb, he’d had to find and pay for his own accommodation.

Text messages he sent his managers reveal that for most of his time in Australia, her brother’s pay was going into a New Zealand account. With no Australian financial history, securing a lease for a rental property was impossible.

He complained to both Serena and his father of being a one-man band in the factory in Truganina in Melbourne’s outer western suburbs. They say he was expected to set up, manage and run it, wrangle paperwork, work solo with heavy timber logs – often at height – to build the playground equipment, then deliver completed items around the state.

In text messages, he asked the company more than once, without luck, for training for a mandatory Victorian certification as a forklift driver. Serena told WorkSafe in a submission to their investigation that there was no basket on the machine so he could work safely from heights to build the towering playground equipment.

Working at height: the kind of structure Samuel Keast was building alone, or with one temporary assistant, at the Playground Centre factory in Melbourne.

Keast also complained to his family he was working excessive hours, including nights and weekends.

For all that, he was paid $28 an hour and no overtime. In a voice message the day before Keast left New Zealand, a company manager had said it would “bump your wage up a bit for you so you’re not losing anything in the exchange rate differential”. So $NZ28 ($25) an hour became $28 an hour.

Text messages also reveal Keast was paying for workplace necessities – including fuel for the company ute – on his own credit card, then seeking reimbursement.

“He had no access to company funds at all,” says Harley, “and there was a two, three, five-day delay in reimbursing him. It’s the difference in eating or not. We had a very long conversation about two or three weeks before he died about how he wasn’t coping, and they were piling too many things on him.”

Sam Keast with his dogs in New Zealand.

The lack of communication from head office was also a concern, his family says.

“He struggled to get information out of [Playground Centre] about what his employment entitlements were,” Serena told police in her statement.

Evidence from Keast’s phones – work and private – which Serena obtained and examined, and this masthead has seen, show emails and text messages to his supervisor would go unanswered for days.

Message from Sam Keast to his father expressing frustration at the lack of communication with his company.

Also on the phone were searches showing he was actively looking for work in the hospitality industry.

‘Very cold’

In some ways what shocked his sister most, however, was the company’s response after Keast died.

His body was discovered on November 30, 2023 – 2½ months after he started in Australia and a day after a long phone call to a manager. Serena received a call from a company representative about her brother’s death only after she filled out a contact form on the Playground Centre website.

“He was very cold in that call,” Serena says of the manager. “He said, ‘I’m just calling to let you know that Sam died’. I actually asked him, ‘How did he die?’ He made sure it was very much that he [took his own life]. No emotion, no. No compassion.” It made her angry.

What made her angrier, though, was that WorkSafe did not originally investigate the death.

Under Victorian law, some deaths that occur at workplaces, including some suicides and health-related deaths, are not subject to mandatory investigation. Only after Serena called to check on the progress of the probe and discovered nothing was happening did she lodge an investigation request with WorkSafe.

WorkSafe and the coroner have both confirmed an investigation into Keast’s death is ongoing. Neither would comment.

A year after these events, the family has decided to speak out. Serena, a former high-level corporate nurse, cannot work. She suffers from complex grief and post-traumatic stress disorder. Harley says he never wants this to happen to another family.

A spokesman for the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church said the brethren had “no jurisdiction whatsoever over the workplaces of our parishioners”, and right-of-entry provisions for unions were catered for in the law, “not by a church that some members of that business happen to belong to”.

Playground Centre now refuses to speak directly to the family. It has hired a “crisis manager” whose website says that “what motivates me and gets me excited is seeing employers well presented [sic] in the compliance space”. It also boasts of holding workplace regulators such as WorkSafe “to account”.

When this masthead put detailed questions to the company about these events, the consultant declined to comment during the investigation.

In a statement to police for the coronial brief, the company was equally silent. It left virtually every section of the form blank.

Asked by police about any recent “employment conditions” that might have affected the former employee, it responded: “N/A”.

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