PLANET JACKSON: Power, Greed & Unions BRAD NORINGTON

PLANET JACKSON: Power, Greed & Unions

BRAD NORINGTON

Melbourne University Press, 2016, 328 pages

 

Review by Phil Shannon

Michael Williamson, top dog of the Health Services Union (HSU), used to joke that ‘nothing’s too good for the workers - and their representatives’, as he brazenly defrauded the union to generously enrich himself.  $5 million worth of generosity – that’s an awful lot of life’s little luxuries like fine wine, retail goods, international holidays, mortgage repayments, home renovations, Mercedes, speedboats and private school fees.  Just one lavish, boozy lunch with his cronies would burn through the annual dues ($600) of one of his low-paid union members (hospital cleaners, orderlies, clerks, porters, etc.), writes journalist, Brad Norington, in Planet Jackson.

 

Williamson’s thieving was accomplished through misuse of his union credit card, through HSU business supply contracts at grossly inflated prices from companies fully or partially owned by himself or his family, and through nepotism and cronyism (he put eight family members on the union payroll whilst his mistress received $155,000 a year for two days ‘work’ a week).  For a creative flourish, Williamson claimed reimbursement for false claims of muggings and burglaries of union money.  Obviously, the poor chap must have been struggling to get by on his annual salary of $700,000.

 

Other senior HSU officials aped his example.  Craig Thomson, a protégé of Williamson, trousered $250,000 to fund his successful 2007 Australian Labor Party (ALP) federal election campaign, and embezzled $24,000 to spend on prostitutes, sporting memorabilia and firewood, amongst the dishes on offer from the smorgasbord of personal goodies supplied on other people’s dimes.

 

Kathy Jackson was a $1.4 billion financial embellisher in her mentor’s mould – her favourites from the corruption buffet were fashion, medical services, hi-fi gear, groceries, liquor, camping equipment, shopping trips to Hong Kong and divorce settlement payments to her ex-husband.  During the 2004 Boxing Day sales, Jackson ran up $7,000 in a single day on her union credit cards.

 

Jackson was the most cynical of the three, blowing the whistle on Williamson but only in an internal power struggle - so even that act of honesty was self-serving.  Noble whistle-blower was the “perfect cover” for her own corruption, says Norington.

 

The HSU thieves were all addicted to greed.  Even when Thomson faced ignominious defeat in the 2013 elections, he decided to stand again as an independent - just so he could milk the taxpayer by claiming a ‘resettlement allowance’ of $97,000 for defeated  incumbents.  Jackson, when publicly disgraced, tried to mine a new income seam by getting her hooks into a retired, dementia-suffering QC for a share of his $30 million estate, whilst having herself appointed as executor which gave her access to his bank accounts.

 

Norington examines in minute detail every sordid nut and filthy bolt of the HSU leaders’ corruption but only occasionally lifts his eyes to examine a greater corruption than that of a few light-fingered union officials, namely the industrially and politically corrupting intersection of the ALP and its affiliated unions.

 

Williamson, Thomson and Jackson bartered their union bloc votes for factional influence and potential plush parliamentary careers in the ALP whilst Labor politicians needed their factional union allies, even the crooked ones.  Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, opportunistically motivated by retaining office, publicly covered for Thomson, whilst the party paid his enormous legal bills to keep him from going bankrupt, losing his seat and bringing down the minority Gillard government.

 

The HSU Three, even whilst they were shamelessly diddling their union members, saw the ALP, the self-proclaimed ‘party for the workers’, as a suitable political home for themselves.  That tells us something, something unwholesome, about where the ALP’s loyalties really lie – with the labour elite, at the expense of the workers they claim to represent.

HIGH NOON Glenn Frankel

HIGH NOON: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic

GLENN FRANKEL

Bloomsbury, 2017, 377 pages

 

The Hollywood western, High Noon, starring Gary Cooper, was the frontrunner for the Oscars in 1953.  It picked up four awards, including Best Actor for Cooper, but there was no statuette for the screenwriter, Carl Foreman, and none of the winners’ acceptance speeches even mentioned his name.  As Foreman’s son later said, ‘it was like this weird Stalinism – Foreman didn’t exist, there wasn’t a writer!’.

 

Foreman had become an Un-Person because he had not sufficiently repented of the political sin of his past membership of the US communist party in his recent hearing before the anti-Communist witch-hunters of the federal government’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

 

Journalist, Glenn Frankel’s, book revisits the political atmosphere of the time through High Noon in which the sheriff of Hadleyville (Marshal Will Kane, played by Cooper), deserted by that town’s cowardly citizens and spineless authorities, faces down a murderous rancher and his three gun-slingers in a shoot-out in the main street as the designated hour, twelve noon, approaches.

 

Repurposed from its origins as a parable about the newly-established United Nations Organisation’s aim of preventing aggression, Foreman saw the possibility of a different allegory in High Noon, with HUAC’s victims represented in the figure of the vulnerable sheriff, HUAC’s political thugs symbolised by the rancher’s criminal gang, and Hadleyville standing in for a craven Hollywood.

 

Foreman had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, because it was, as he told his HUAC inquisitors, ‘the organisation most dedicated to fighting poverty and racism at home and Fascism abroad’ but he had drifted away from the party because of Stalin.  HUAC, however, was gunning for Hollywood Reds, and (much like Stalin), it wanted total political degradation of the accused in an elaborate Show Trial.  HUAC needed to choreograph spectacular political theatrics to reveal a giant “Red Plot to destroy America” by parading a stream of self-flagellating communist penitents denouncing their political faith, dumping on the party and ratting on their comrades by naming names (even though HUAC already had all the names courtesy of FBI spying).

 

Snitching on their comrades (at the cost of total loss of all self-respect) was the only way to avoid jail for contempt of Congress or staying off the career-ending Hollywood blacklist.  The blacklist had been adopted by the movie studios, and their Wall Street financiers, to avoid the economic loss that would result from conservative boycotts and pickets of films which employed HUAC targets.  The blacklist (for those with communist affiliations) and its equally damaging partner, the ‘graylist’ (which lassoed non-communists deemed politically risky because of their support for progressive causes), drove some five hundred Hollywooders out of work.

 

By contrast, ‘friendly’ witnesses (including Cooper) were warmly welcomed by HUAC.  Cooper, a Montana Republican, had had a stint in a paramilitary polo club which trained to bust up ‘subversive’ gatherings but the Paramount studio persuaded their star to leave the vigilante outfit because such bare-knuckled politics would damage his brand value.  The FBI, which helpfully ran political screen tests for the ‘friendlies’, was subsequently pleased to report to HUAC that the newly-respectable conservative star had passed his audition – he ‘presents an excellent appearance and will testify in a smooth, even, soft-spoken, unexcitable manner’, like his on-screen persona.  Cooper leant celebrity endorsement to HUAC.

 

In High Noon, some viewers spotted the screenwriter’s deliberate allusions to HUAC.  John Wayne did - Hollywood’s chief anti-communist bully, who said he never regretted ‘having helped run Foreman out of the country’ to exile in England, hated High Noon, regarding it as ‘the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen’.  The film did, after all, implicitly criticise the moral abdication of religion, commerce, the judiciary and liberals.  They were all brave from a distance but melted away when their anti-blacklist principles saw HUAC’s spotlight swing towards them.

 

One elite group of people have always missed the political point of the film.  High Noon has been “the film most requested by American presidents” (Bill Clinton tops the list with twenty private screenings) because the POTUSes see in Marshal Kane’s courageous stand a reflection of themselves as standard-bearers, often in opposition to their electorate, of moral integrity in the cause of right versus wrong.  These fantasy heroes, however, are imposters, poseurs dishonouring a film which was the antithesis of their practice of governing, with violence and legal persecution, on behalf of the greedy, ruthless, criminal enterprise of American capitalism.

 

The real heroes are to be found in Frankel’s excellent book.  Every defendant who appeared before HUAC faced their own individual high noon, vulnerable and scared, but they rose above their fear and, though wounded like the sheriff in the shoot-out, they survived and the political value of liberty triumphed, whilst it was the persecuting villains of HUAC who, in the end, bit the dust.

BOLSHOI CONFIDENTIAL by Simon Morrison

BOLSHOI CONFIDENTIAL: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today

SIMON MORRISON

4^th Estate, 2016, 507 pages

 

Review by Phil Shannon

Behind the Illustrious reputation of Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet lies a much grimier reality, says Simon Morrison, professor of music at Princeton University, in Bolshoi Confidential, his history of the 250 year-old cultural institution.  Raised from the swamps of Moscow, the Bolshoi Theatre which houses the ballet began life as a light entertainment and vaudeville hall, using cheap labour from a nearby orphans’ home for the children of serfs, before growing ever more opulent and elitist. 

It was the place to be seen for every pompous stuffed shirt in the Tsarist court.  Its aristocratic ballet directors treated the lowlier dancers like serfs.  Corrupt administrators embezzled state funds, resulting in mass lay-offs (once mid-pirouette) and savage wage cuts.  Economic compulsion forced dancers to turn to keeping dairy cows to make ends meet or propelled female dancers into the arms of wealthy patrons and the pawing attentions of the Tsarist elite - it was “a wretched economy where lesser-skilled dancers were promised access, through their art, to aristocratic circles, only to become sex slaves”. 

There was thus every reason for Russia’s socialist revolutionaries in 1917 to regard the Bolshoi as a decadent icon of gilded autocracy.  The 1,400 Bolshoi workforce greeted the 1917 revolution with anticipation, forming, in the spirit of the democratising times, a management-workers’ council, including ballet, orchestra, choir and trades representatives, which sent a representative to Moscow’s public and social services union committee. 

The Bolshoi wasn’t all that bolshie, however, as this union was one of the very few which supported the capitalist, war-fighting provisional government and was hostile to the Bolshevik-led workers’ soviets.  Anti-Bolshevik factions in the Bolshoi administration were replaced after the October revolution, however, and the Bolshoi remained in operation throughout the Bolshevik era despite a vigorous public debate about using fuel, food and other scarce resources to keep the aristocratic arts humming whilst labourers starved during a time of debilitating counter-revolutionary civil war, invasion, blockade and famine. 

The Bolsheviks’ education and culture minister (the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment), Anatoly Lunacharsky, was the Bolshoi’s most energetic defender, ensuring food rations were supplied, wood was obtained for heating and that silk and leather ballet pumps (five hundred a season) were procured. 

The Bolshoi’s other influential champion was the Bolshevik and government leader, Vladimir Lenin, who, in battles with didactic ‘agit-prop’ advocates who wanted a thorough proletarianisation of culture, cooled their premature cultural fever by calmly arguing that ‘it is too early yet to put the bourgeois artistic heritage in an archive’.  Like Trotsky, Lenin saw that cultural revolution is a slow, organic process taking decades, if not centuries. 

Still, experimentation was now on the Bolshoi agenda.  Traditional repertoire mixed it with modernist ballets (almost-nude dances set to avant-garde scores by Scriabin), ballet-operas about soccer (including one by Dimitri Shostakovich, a political and cultural revolutionary, fan of American jazz and blues, and soccer fanatic) and populist ballet-circus hybrids.  Dozens of Bolshoi orchestra members decamped to Persimfans, the egalitarian orchestra that played without a conductor. 

Despite Morrison’s obligatory anti-Bolshevik sentiments (Lenin’s “pseudo-Marxist political posturing” behind his “utopian fantasy” was “destined for tragedy” gives you the general idea), he unearths no horror tales of Bolshevik censorship or repression of the Bolshoi.  Indeed, Morrison has to agree with one critic that “the revolution [for all the suffering it induced – sic], was a free-for-all for creative experiment” for at least a decade after the Bolshevik revolution, and even into the early Stalinist 1930s, when “fear did not yet hang in the air” during artistic debates.  

It was only after Lenin’s death, Trotsky’s political defeat and Lunacharsky’s removal to a diplomatic posting that grey Stalinist political conformity, censorship and terror descended on the Bolshoi.  The classics were deemed safe (Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake was a hardy perennial) but new works were politically sensitive and were repeatedly sent back for extensive ideological repairs.  Major composers such as Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khachaturian all fought bruising, frustrating and potentially lethal battles with Stalin’s censors.  Meanwhile, members of Stalin’s entourage helped themselves to pretty young ballerinas. 

The post-Stalin Soviet era was freer but some malign traditions persisted.  Celebrity dancers could still be groped by a drunken Premier Brezhnev in the back of his limousine whilst a Béla Bartók expressionist ballet was menacingly critiqued for its ‘anti-socialist-realism’.  In Putin’s post-Soviet Russia, a ballet scene involving a drunken priest from his adored Russian Orthodox Church had to be excised.  As a despondent Bolshoi ballet master lamented in 2015, ‘there was censorship; there still is’. 

The Bolshoi’s artists’ unions are today headed by Bolshoi administrators; corruption is rife (bribes are paid for auditions or prime roles); ‘claques’ (“professional audience members” who offer demonstrative applause for selected dancers in exchange for $1,500 tickets which they resell) get staggeringly rich; and the principal dancer in 2013 organises an acid attack on the artistic director for passing over his ballerina girlfriend for plum roles - just another day at the ballet.  The brief Bolshevik interregnum of artistic freedom and political grace is looking better all the time.

LENIN ON THE TRAIN by CATHERINE MERRIDALE

LENIN ON THE TRAIN

CATHERINE MERRIDALE

Allen Lane, 2016, 354 pages

 

Review by Phil Shannon

The German ‘sealed train’ that gave Lenin safe passage from exile in Switzerland through war-time Germany to Russia in April 1917 was historically pivotal.  As the British historian, Catherine Merridale, reminds us in Lenin on the Train, Lenin was seen as a ‘plague bacillus’ (in Winston Churchill’s phrase) by Berlin, deployed by a German state desperate for a military edge in the first world war through taking one of its enemy states out of the war by sowing revolutionary disruption in Russia.  If Berlin was using Lenin for its military aims, however, Lenin was more than happy to use the German state for his political goal of socialist revolution in Russia and the rest of Europe.

 

Banished from Russia by Tsarist courts, Lenin had spent twenty years isolated from his home country and its simmering revolutionary discontents when stirring news came of the revolution which overthrew the autocratic Tsarist monarchy  in February 1917.  Lenin saw that the job of revolution was only half done, however.

 

Stopping the workers, peasants and soldiers from dispatching the new capitalist oligarchy was the top leadership in their workplace-based soviets of elected delegates.  These leaders, not deemed worthy of exile like the Bolshy Bolsheviks, were timid socialists, developing a liking for the comfortable pace of glacial reform and eyeing off the material pickings from comfortable seats in a mooted Western-style parliament (no more working with hammer or sickle for them).  A frantic Lenin was desperate to return.

 

All legitimate travel avenues for Lenin, however, were blocked by Britain which wanted to keep its ally, Russia, in the war, whilst Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, had vetoed a plan for Lenin to travel in disguise in a sleeper train because he would arouse suspicions due to his tendency, even in his sleep, to let fly against the political perfidy of fake socialists and revolutionary laggards. 

 

When the possibility of German assistance was first floated, Lenin was cautious.  By accepting the assistance of a government whose military was slaughtering Russians on the eastern front, Lenin could be seen as either a national or class traitor in Russia, and being stymied by Russian jail or being shunned by the Russian working people.

 

Deciding the benefits outweighed the risks, however, Lenin eventually accepted the offer of a German train but only after negotiating stringent conditions.  He insisted that the carriage be granted ‘extra-territorial status’ to ‘seal’ it from contact with Germans, including a chalk line dividing the Russian exiles’ territory from the German territory of the military guards on board.  Lenin was also adamant that Germany not bankroll the 32 returning Bolshevik revolutionaries (local Swiss socialists raised the cash) for the week-long  journey.

 

The simple three-word slogan, ‘Peace, Bread, Land’, and the audacious demand for ‘All Power to the Soviets’, that Lenin packed in his travel luggage brought political clarity and direction to the Russian people and brought party unity to the fractious Bolsheviks.  Socialism became not some vague, distant ideal but an urgent, realisable task.  Lenin, says Merridale, “had struck upon a kind of truth that people wanted to hear” -  after the February anti-Tsarist revolution, “the problems that had driven them to risk their lives for freedom in the first place had resurfaced, often with redoubled force” and only Lenin, at the head of the reinvigorated Bolsheviks, had the solution to the problems of war and hunger and lack of democracy.

 

This positive conclusion by Merridale about Lenin’s political impact is remarkably rare amongst orthodox intellectuals, who usually malign Lenin as a progenitor of Stalin, their default ideological setting.  Merridale’s favourable assessment is swiftly undermined, however, when she concludes by venting on what she professes to be Lenin’s inner dictator, whose murderous Marxist hands on the tiller in 1917 meant that “in the end, democracy could only skulk around the fringes of the revolution like a dog with mange”.

 

This linguistically Stalinesque simile is evidence of a lazy politics which also flavours the structure of her book.  The sealed train should be a fascinating microcosm of international politics and the political and personal dynamics of the Bolsheviks but, in Merridale’s hands, the train event is a but a brief narrative hinge between two massive, passionless, white-bread slabs of indigestible pre and post-Revolution history, offering no fresh insights.  Despite this attempt to divert Lenin into a literary siding, and to couple Lenin’s wagon to the loco Stalin, the wheels of democratic socialism remain stubbornly on track.

CAUGHT IN THE REVOLUTION: Petrograd 1917 by HELEN RAPPAPORT

CAUGHT IN THE REVOLUTION: Petrograd 1917

HELEN RAPPAPORT

Windmill Books, 2017, 430 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

In 1916-1917, whilst millions of starving Russian workers queued for hours for scarce bread, or perished on the eastern front, or were made idle from factories in a country where the living conditions were as atrocious as the record winter cold, the cream of the native Russian and foreign Western elites shopped at ease in specialist stores for luxury goods and swanned around at swanky dinner parties, sumptuous banquets, grand balls and nights at the opera.

 

In Caught in The Revolution, the British historian, Helen Rappaport, writes that the imperial pomp of this leisured world of furs and jewels, champagne and cake, and limousine and coach-and-horse, hid the “decay of a dying era” from the Westerners stranded in Petrograd, the Russian capital, by German submarines which had shut off escape through the ports of revolutionary Russia.

 

The Tsarist court and their Western allies were, by class instinct, ill-disposed towards revolution and were ambivalent about the anti-Tsarist revolution in February which resulted in a new government of (unelected) “respectable and bourgeois gentlemen” (perfectly acceptable, they thought) sharing power with directly-elected plebeian assemblies (‘soviets’) of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ representatives (not at all acceptable).

 

This new-fangled, grass-roots democracy of the soviets was met with condescension - weapons, and politics, were now in the hands of ‘irresponsible people’ complained Elsie Bowerman, upper-class English medical orderly.  The newly empowered proletarians were patronised - workers couldn’t cope with liberty because the ‘poorer classes had no opinions of their own’ and were the ‘prey of the last unscrupulous demagogue they have heard’, wailed James Jones, American engineering manager.

 

Aristocratic disdain came as naturally to the Western elite as breathing - the socialist ‘doctrine of Liberty’ was one that ‘preached a contempt for beauty’ as once-beautiful mansions and palaces now housed the great unwashed, sobbed Meriel Buchanan, daughter of the British ambassador, George, who recoiled at the disrespect shown towards their officers by Russian soldiers who ‘crowd into first-class carriages and eat in Restaurant cars while officers wait’.

 

Fear predominated - it was ‘like watching some savage beast that had broken out of its cage’, trembled Negley Farson, an Anglo-American exporter, whilst the soviets heralded the beginning of ‘the high road to anarchy’, fretted Major-General Knox, a future Tory parliamentarian. 

 

When the October revolution, eight months later, toppled the nominal government, Western antagonism to revolution redoubled and Lenin’s Bolsheviks - the most visionary, radical, militant and organised of the revolutionary forces – came in for especially heavy mauling.  The Bolsheviks were said to be bullies, hotheads, incendiary agitators, German agents.

 

Lenin was ‘the poison that will destroy the democratic revolution’, said Edward Heald, international YMCA leader.  Lenin was a ‘utopian dreamer’ and fanatic, ‘blind to justice or mercy, violent, Machiavellian and crazy with vanity’, spluttered Maurice Paleologue, the French Ambassador.  His British counterpart recognised that, as the Bolsheviks were the most popular and able of the revolutionaries, it was imperative that they be ‘squashed’, including assassinating Lenin and Trotsky, or through armed invasion.

Rappaport continues this tradition of aversion to revolution in her casual use of clichéd, politically pejorative language.  The crowds that made the Russian revolution?  ‘Rabble’ and ‘mob’, of course.  The popular supremacy of Bolshevik ideas and organising?  Nothing but power-hungry, extremist ideologues ‘fomenting unrest’ and ‘exploiting grievances’ through ‘inflammatory speeches’ and ‘overblown rhetoric’.

Rappaport’s stale political stereotype of a minority Bolshevik ‘coup’ maintains a hundred years of wilful misreading of the October revolution.  The fulcrum for the revolutionary transfer of power between classes was certainly limited in time (one night) and personnel (Bolsheviks), and organised with military secrecy and precision, but the absence of mass involvement in the mechanics of insurrection does not mean that the October revolution was a minority affair.

After the euphoria of seeing off the Tsar with a two-fingered salute in February, the popular mood had rapidly descended into a surly resentment at the new, bourgeois government which delivered the same old war and same old class exploitation.  In the face of massive popular pressure from months of protests and mutinies, and a leaderless, abortive uprising in July, the Bolsheviks finally overcame their hesitation and acted swiftly and decisively to carry out the popular will.  The efficiency that the Bolsheviks brought to the insurrectionary deed in fact prevented all but the merest fraction of the bloodshed (five thousand killed) of the February revolution.

Rappaport, however, is unburdened by any sophisticated political analysis and settles for the simplistic morality tale of evil Bolsheviks versus freedom-loving democrats.  Rappaport is much happier when writing, as she does in her many other books, about princesses in pretty white dresses, but whilst the Russian revolution may have lacked the regal glitz of an aristocratic caste, and come instead in mud-caked boots, unwashed greatcoats and dirty fingernails, it had the political majesty of revolutionary democratic change.

The Western foreign elite of a century ago saw the October revolution through the prism of their class privilege, through which they glimpsed their future, the future of superfluous people in a world where workers, with the help of those intellectuals who pitch in, govern the society they work and live in, through a great plebeian democratic reset.  They feared a new society in which the pampered stratum, like their moneyed counterparts today, would have to earn their keep and be on an equal footing in decision-making.  Their real fear of Lenin’s syllabus of Applied Marxism was his radical political and economic democracy (his ‘let every cook govern’ sent shivers up the spine of exploiters of cooks everywhere) which threatened their private wealth and undeserved privilege.

 

If Russia hadn’t been a backward, predominantly peasant economy, devastated by war and a ruinous peace treaty with Germany; if revolution in Europe had come to the soviets’ aid; if the capitalist West hadn't invaded the fledging socialist state, starved the Russian people through economic embargo and supported a vicious ‘White’ counter-revolution, then a Stalin-free, democratic socialist Russia might have stood a chance.  All the ifs were against revolutionary Russia, however, and 100 years on, the capitalist West and its orthodox intellectuals are still breathing a sigh of self-interested relief, though the looming torrent of anti-Bolshevik books on the centenary of the Russian Revolution suggests the old nightmare is still disturbing their peaceful repose.

FAIR GAME - Scientology in Australia STEVE CANNANE

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.

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT: Jack Mundey Green Bans Hero by JAMES COLMAN

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero

JAMES COLMAN

NewSouth Publishing, 2016, 356 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Pavlovian hostility to construction industry unions, and venom-flecked hatred of the environment movement, is far from a new development amongst conservative commentators, notes James Colman (Sydney architect, urban planner and university lecturer) in his book, The House That Jack Built, on Jack Mundey, the 1970s New South Wales State Secretary of the Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF) who originated the world’s first ‘green bans’ to save working class housing, historic buildings and urban bushland from the developers’ bulldozer.

 

Colman cites the Daily Telegraph’s Miranda Devine, for example, who could simply cut-and-paste her comments (the ‘disgraced’ BLF’s ‘stand-over tactics’, ‘intimidation’, ‘greed, thuggery and graft’) from four decades ago into her jeremiads against Australia’s current construction union.

 

The object of Devine’s wrath back then was a Queensland dairy farm boy and apprentice plumber who moved to Sydney in 1950 to play first-grade rugby league for Parramatta  before finding work in the construction and demolition industry where Mundey joined the Communist Party of Australia as, in his words, ‘a militant worker who judged communists … as people who wanted to make life better for ordinary workers’.

Elected as BLF leader during a building boom, union militancy, wages and working conditions flourished under Mundey’s guidance.  Whilst his Marxism informed the traditional industrial struggle around the means of production, Mundey’s embrace of the new social movements also meant that the ends of production mattered, too.

If ‘development’ meant the destruction of city green space, working class homes and colonial-era buildings to make way for towering luxury high-rise apartment complexes, plush hotels, identikit malls and “lifeless citadels of commerce”, then Mundey’s builders labourers would try to thwart it.

 

If residents’ pleas against the despoliation of their pleasant urban landscape got bogged in ‘official channels’, then they would turn to the industrial clout of the communist-led BLF.  Since the core political value of Mundey’s socialism was democratic decision-making (in the union, in politics, in society), the BLF required demonstrated resident support and majority rank-and-file BLF endorsement of any green bans.  From 1970 to 1975, dozens of  publicly-owned or community assets were saved by the BLF withdrawing union labour.

 

The end came with the deregistration of the NSW BLF, the state Industrial Court agreeing with the black propaganda of the peak building employers' body, the Master Builders' Association (MBA), that the BLF had flouted the law and used intimidation on site.

 

Whilst the MBA may have popped the victory champagne corks in their battle with the union, however, the longer-term environmental war was another matter.  Mundey’s BLF had decisively shifted the strategic balance of forces.  Fifty years ago, heritage and environmental preservation had no standing in law or government policy but there has since been a steady accretion of legal reforms, development assessment protocols and planning statutes.

 

Mainstream politicians now find it obligatory, because there is “useful political mileage” (votes), in conservation to pay attention to environmental considerations which they once dismissed as extremist, back-door routes to socialism.  Mundey, himself, was elevated from communist villain to the chair of the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, a government body.

 

The Green Tape that has displaced the Communist Menace as the object of developers’ ire has its red roots but whilst Mundey explicitly saw a direct link between his environmental and socialist values, his chronicler, however, is more reticent.  Colman, who might be best characterised as one of the “enlightened middle class” who constituted some of Mundey’s green ban clientele, believes that conservation is now respectable and politically “middle-ground”, and this requires him to dilute its more disreputable Marxist roots. 

 

Indeed, in Colman’s book, Mundey the Marxist is rarely sighted whilst the man himself is frequently submerged beneath the history of heritage architecture.  Mundey’s textual semi-obscurity is partly his own fault (in self-effacing socialist style, Mundey requested that societal forces take precedence over the personal in his ‘biography’) but Mundey’s Marxist modesty is misplaced because, as Colman does briefly note, Mundey’s personal qualities and political beliefs ably fitted him for his pivotal historic role.

In the face of reinvigorated threats to the urban environment from the weakening of environmental laws, cuts to funding, and legislative strong-arming of uppity unions, Mundey’s red-green palette still offers much to study and to apply.