FAIR GAME: The Incredible Untold Story of Scientology
in Australia
STEVE CANNANE
ABC Books, 2016, 378 pages
Review by Phil Shannon
L. Ron Hubbard, science
fiction writer and founder of the ‘Church’ of Scientology, employed ‘body-routers’
to lure passer-bys (‘raw meat’, he called them) off the street and into the
offices of his cult with the enticement of a free, and quite bogus, personality
test and then relieve his victims of their money with ever more expensive
courses, in much the same way (‘look, all I wanted was a personality test’) that,
in Day at the Races, the race-track swindler,
Chico, hooks a hapless Groucho (‘look, all I wanted was to place a bet on
Sunup’) into buying Chico’s entire library of higher-level code books of hot
race tips.
ABC journalist, Steve Cannane,
in Fair Game, examines the Australian
franchise of Scientology in all its nuttiness, from Hubbard’s batpoop crazy theology
(‘Operating Thetans’, Xenu the evil galactic overlord, the residue of exploded
aliens gumming up people’s minds with ‘engrams’) to the pseudo-scientific psychological
techniques (‘E-meters’, ‘auditing’), all matched in bonkers inventiveness by
Hubbard’s personal mythology (including Hubbard the severely-injured war hero
who saved Australia from Japanese invasion and who was only saved from death
through the power of his own mind).
Hubbard’s (drug-induced) fantasies
took shape in 1950 with Dianetics, a new ‘science of the mind’ (later evolving
into Scientology) which occupied a brazenly outlandish niche in the self-help market. Hubbard’s was a calculated craziness,
however. The man who claimed to have
visited the Van Allen radiation belt, Venus and Heaven did know his way around Planet
Profit - two points of Hubbard’s twelve-point policy governing Scientology’s financial
matters were ‘MAKE MONEY’ and ‘MAKE MORE MONEY’.
To the desperate, the
ambitious and the greedy, Scientology acted as a psychological placebo. Any improvements in one’s life were purely
fortuitous, but Scientology racked up enough spurious hits to recruit tens of
thousands of followers and turn the enterprise into a global multi-billion
dollar racket. Forbes magazine placed Hubbard in their top 400 wealthiest US
individuals in 1985.
Hubbard’s wealth came from
suckering the gullible into expensive books and courses by targeting an
individual’s greatest weakness or desire.
Particularly susceptible were anxious students, business chancers with
big investments gone putrid (James Packer, son of Australia’s richest man), injured
or striving sportspeople (Sydney’s elite rugby league players), musicians
(Chick Corea, Kate Cerebrano) and Hollywood celebrities including Tom Cruise,
Nicole Kidman, John Travolta, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Penelope Cruz, Kirstie
Allen and Nancy Cartwright (the voice of Bart Simpson).
Hubbard (a foaming
anti-communist) also perfected classic capitalist exploitation of his workers who
typically slogged away for just $50 a week but his most remunerative scam was
gaining tax-exempt status as a religion. The US government had deemed Scientology a
spiritual organisation, whilst, on anti-discrimination grounds, the federal
Whitlam Labor government formally recognised Scientology as a religion in
Australia (reinforced by the High Court in 1983). The most credulous of Scientology’s victims were
secular governments.
The Australian federal government,
for example, ignored its own Department of Immigration advice in 1955 that the
American missionaries Hubbard sent to spread Scientology in Australia were
‘clearly charlatans’. It ignored a
Victorian government Board of Inquiry that found Scientology to be an
exploitative con. It ignored the three
states which banned Scientology from 1965 (bans which, although Cannane
disagrees on free speech grounds, were warranted because Scientology’s belief
system is part of a package deal along with its financial fraud and personal
harm).
Ignored, too, was Julian
Assange’s publishing, through Wikileaks, of thousands of pages of leaked
Scientology secrets, including how it attempts to silence its defectors and
other critics through surveillance, litigation, harassment and dirty tricks,
including criminal infiltration of government agencies and the Australian Labor
Party.
Ignored, too, was the mounting
testimony of Scientology’s abuses of its members, a crime spree that included
forced abortions, physical violence, emotional and sexual abuse, human
trafficking, slave labour, embezzlement and blackmail. The Rehabilitation Project Force (a
‘voluntary program of spiritual rehabilitation’, for PR purposes) is a virtual gulag
of brutal punishment centres, including one in Sydney, which imposes hard
labour, semi-starvation, forced confessions and intense ideological ‘re-education’
upon those elite Scientology lieutenants who deviate in any way, real or
imagined, from the supreme leader or who threaten the cult’s reputation.
Australian governments have
continued their three-sensory-impaired-monkey stance towards Scientology. The Rudd Labor government, with the Liberal ‘opposition’
in tow, stifled calls for an investigation into Scientology because they feared
opening up the tax-free status of the more orthodox churches to public critique,
and may have doubted whether these religions, with their long record of abusive
practices, would pass a proposed public interest or community benefit test. The momentum of publicity, however, has seen
steep declines in Scientology recruitment and membership (to around two
thousand in Australia).
Scientology’s survival is not
just about government-sanctioned protection of an obviously fake, personally
harmful, money-hoovering ‘religious’ cult, for if Australian governments are
too timid to take on an easy target such as Scientology, then the
vote-garnering power and wealth of the vastly bigger traditional religions, and
their industrial-scale scam of taxpayers’ billions through the tax and
education systems, won’t be challenged any time soon.
