Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 - 1995), Wednesday 6 October 1965, page 3


Scientology evil

threat to

community, says

investigator

MELBOURNE, Tuesday. — Scientology is evil, its techniques evil, its practice a serious threat to the community, medically, morally and socially, and its adherents sadly deluded and often mentally ill, Mr K. V. Anderson, QC,

has reported.

Mr Anderson conducted an inquiry into Scientology in

Victoria for the State Government. His report was tabled

in the Legislative Assembly today.

The report said: "If there should be detected in this report a note of unrelieved denunciation of Scientology, it is becausc the evidence has shown its theories to be fantastic and impossible, its principles perverted and illfounded, and its techniques debased and harmful.

"Scientology is a delu

sional belief system based on fiction and fallacies, and propagated by falsehood and deception.

"While making an appeal to the public as a worthy system whereby ability, intelligence and personality may be improved, it employs techniques which further its real purpose of securing domination over and mental enslavement of its adherents.

"It involves the administration by persons without any training in medicine or psychology of quasi-psychological treatment which is harmful medically, morally and socially."

Mr Anderson's report recommends that a psychologists' registration board should be established as a means of controlling the practice of psychology in Victoria arid prescribing the minimum standards of registration.

Registration

board

The report says Scientology qualifications, should not entitle a person to registration as a psychologist.

Proposed legislation should prohibit generally the practice of psychology for fee or reward by people who were not registered or who were not exempted from registration.

Mr Anderson says it should be an offence for any

unregistered person to practice hypnosis, administer IQ tests or personality assessments or similar tests or assessments, or use an

E-meter or similar electrical device.

'Dubious benefit'

The dubious and temporary benefit which some people claimed to have received from Scientology processing does not justify the continuance by unskilled and ignorant operatives of practices harmful

to mental health.

"Though there was no evidence of blackmail in the popular sense, yet because of the domination which Scientology asserts over its adherents who have been persuaded to reveal their innermost secrets in the course of processing, the potentiality for the misuse of confidences reposed in the HASI (Hubbard Association of Scientologists International) is great.

The existence of files containing the most intimate secrets and confessions of thousands of individuals is a constant threat to them and is a matter of grave

concern."

Mr Anderson says the founder of Scientology. Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, an American, living in England, falsely claims academic and other distinctions, and his sanity is gravely doubted.

Many individuals had paid very large sums of money to the HASl for processing and other services, amounts of £1,000 not being uncom

mon.

The hourly rates for processing ranged from four-and-a-half guineas downwards. Frequently, courses of processing ex

tend over hundreds of hours.

Organisations

in NSW

For the six years ended June 30, 1964, the gross income of the HASl was about £250,000, on which a flat 10 per cent levy was payable to Hubbard's headquarters in England.

Mr Anderson says two organisations spreading from New South Wales have so many Scicntological features that they require individual mention in the report.

They are the American College and the Australian Centre of Applied Psychology, David Maxwell Tooley being the proprietor.