In 1960, trade union membership was at record highs in Australia, with around 60 per cent of all employees unionised.27 Wearne was able to leverage the threat of industrial action against businesses in return for guaranteed advertising space. Doug Moon described it as ‘legal blackmail’,28 telling Hubbard, ‘He would sell on an “or else” basis and he was doing quite well in his chosen rackets.’29 Roger Meadmore described Wearne’s operation as a form of psychological blackmail. ‘Businesses felt if they didn’t advertise they might be given a hard time.’30
In 1960, the year after he first visited Melbourne, Hubbard decided to expand his influence and launch a counteroffensive against his critics. In June, Scientology’s Melbourne headquarters published Hubbard’s latest bulletin, an ambitious call to arms titled, The Special Zone Plan: The Scientologist’s Role in Life.31 Hubbard urged Scientologists to infiltrate spheres of influence including governments. ‘Get a job on the secretarial staff or the bodyguard,’ he advised. ‘Don’t ask for permission. Just enter them and start functioning to make the group win through effectiveness and sanity.’32
Two months later, Hubbard announced he was setting up the Department of Government Affairs.33 Australia came under its jurisdiction, with Denny Gogerly appointed as local Director. The goal of the new department was ‘to bring the government and hostile philosophies or societies into a state of complete compliance with the goals of Scientology’. Hubbard’s aims were clear. ‘Introvert such agencies,’ he demanded. ‘Control such agencies. Scientology is the only game on Earth where everybody wins.’34
Hubbard advocated crushing Scientology’s critics. ‘Don’t ever defend,’ he wrote. ‘Always attack. Don’t ever do nothing. Unexpected attacks in the rear of the enemy’s front ranks work best.’35
It seems Hubbard’s decision to set up the Department of Government Affairs was influenced to a large degree by criticism he was receiving from medical authorities in Victoria. Hubbard’s call to arms made a series of references to the peak doctors’ group in Victoria at the time, the British Medical Association of Victoria:
‘Example: BMA attacks Scientology in Australia via the government. Answer: throw heavy communication against the weakest point of the BMA – its individual doctors. Rock them with petitions to have medical laws modified which they are to sign. Couple the BMA attack with any group hated by the government. Attack personally by threats or suits any person signing anything for the BMA.’
Phillip Wearne took up Hubbard’s rallying cry and designed his own zone plan. His goal was to take over the Australian Labor Party and run it along Scientology lines. In January 1961, Wearne wrote to Peter Williams, the head of Scientology’s Melbourne headquarters, outlining his plans:
My goals for the Zone Plan are to make my organization a Scientology Organization with all executives HPA graduates, to use our publications to improve administration, management and communication in the Labor movement and interest the Australian Labor Party and Trade Union officials in taking scientology training.
The Australian Labor Party as an organization using scientology principles would soon win a [sic] Government as soon as the next Federal election.
With Australia led by a government employing scientology principles we should soon have a civilization which can extend influence overseas.36
Wearne’s plan met with Hubbard’s approval37 and the publisher started placing Scientology propaganda in his journals. The April 1961 edition of his national publication Reality urged the trade union movement and the Labor Party to adopt personality testing and EMeters.38
In the same year, Wearne published a journal called Probe39 aimed at spreading Scientology techniques and principles into the federal public service. To help further his Zone Plan goals, Wearne sent his executives off to do the Hubbard Professional Auditor course and to have Scientology processing. Included was his Managing Editor, Harry Holgate, a future Labor Premier of Tasmania.40
Despite his intentions, Wearne was unable to follow through with his plan to infiltrate the Labor Party and the trade union movement. On 11 July 1961, he quit the ALP in dramatic circumstances, describing himself in a letter as having changed into a ‘reactionary Tory Conservative’ who had voted Liberal at the state election that month.41 He would later blame Scientology auditing for changing his political beliefs.42
It wasn’t just Wearne’s political beliefs that were falling apart. His business soon went belly up as well.43 Wearne claimed Scientology auditing had sent him mad and rendered him incapable of running his publishing business. Doug Moon felt auditing was to blame, but for different reasons. In a letter to Hubbard, Moon wrote, ‘Soon after auditing he began to feel he should be more ethical, tried to be and went broke.’44
Despite Moon’s assertion, the credit squeeze of 1961 and the chaos in Wearne’s personal life seemed to have played a more critical role in his fall. Wearne had separated from his wife, who was the financial brains behind his business,45 and by the time he resigned from the ALP, he’d stopped publishing trade union journals, the core part of his business. This was partly, he said, due to his new political beliefs, and partly because ‘it became unimportant with the importance of Scientology’.46 Wearne did the HPA course and became a professional auditor.47 He claimed that after hundreds of hours of processing he was given ‘clear’ status.48 He worked as an auditor at Scientology’s Melbourne office for a fortnight in early 1963 before having a mental breakdown.49
AS WEARNE’S WORLD WAS falling apart, Hubbard was under siege from the US authorities. On 4 January 1963, the Food and Drug Administration raided the Church of Scientology in Washington, DC on the grounds that they were selling EMeters which had false and misleading labels attached. This was no ordinary search and seize mission. Police blockaded both ends of 19th Street, while FDA agents and plain clothed US marshals jumped out of unmarked vans and stormed the building.50 Employing tactics more commonly deployed on gunrunners, drug dealers or bomb makers, the FDA’s actions only fuelled Hubbard’s growing paranoia.
The FDA boasted it had seized more than three tons of literature and equipment.51 In the end, the FDA won its case to have the E-Meter labelled as ineffective in the diagnosis or treatment of disease,52 but the raid was a public relations disaster for the authorities. Hubbard was able to portray himself as a religious martyr, accusing the US government of burning books, attacking religion and ignoring the First Amendment.53
The Washington raid reinforced Hubbard’s commitment to intensify the portrayal of Scientology as a religion. A week after the FDA’s seizure of books and EMeters, the Hubbard Communications Office in Melbourne issued a ‘Stop Press’ memo:
L. Ron Hubbard has cabled for us to sue the press, TV and radio.
The FDA USA case is easily won and the meters and books will probably be returned in a few days.
A MILLION DOLLAR DEFENSE FUND is already in view for defense.
The Founding Church of Scientology of Washington, DC has just purchased all HASIs [Scientology Franchises]. We are to get its name on the door of every Australian office and issue Minster’s certificates to all auditors.54
Calling themselves a church, and ordaining ministers, would go against everything Australian Scientologists had been advocating. The Melbourne office described itself publicly as ‘non-profit, non-religious and non-political’.55 Elizabeth Williams, the Melbourne secretary, told the head of ASIO, Charles Spry, they were not a religious organisation.56 In the short term at least, it seems like Hubbard’s orders were ignored. The Melbourne organisation continued to call itself an Academy of Scientology, but not a church.57 Six months after Hubbard made his declaration, Communication, the official journal of the Melbourne Scientology headquarters, published an article that described Scientology as being ‘in a different realm from religion’.58
It was around this time, while working in the Melbourne office, that Phillip Wearne claimed he had an epiphany. He was auditing a young ‘preclear’ who was having financial problems and had made it his
goal for that session to make more money. Wearne later said, ‘I realised then how ridiculous it was that I had had this goal for hundreds of hours auditing and been reduced from a very wealthy person to making £4 a week working for Hubbard. So perhaps sanity started to shine through then.’59
The truth is that nearly a year earlier Wearne had started writing to the Melbourne office and to Hubbard asking for refunds.60 He complained about threats of physical violence61 and pointed out inconsistencies in Scientology texts.62 Wearne claimed in a letter to Peter Williams, which he copied to Hubbard, that processing had led him to a ‘complete mental breakdown’ in February 1962 that had rendered him ‘apathetic, sick at heart and completely incapable’.63 Wearne was offered more processing and his thoughts about refunds dissipated. ‘They processed me on that,’ he later testified, ‘and that went out of my mind.’64
But hostilities resumed in April 1963, when Wearne fired off a telegram to Hubbard threatening legal action:
HASI [The Melbourne office] postponed auditing before end of intensive and refuse repair work or refund. My communications ignored by Assoc Sec. Only your direct intervention before Tuesday will prevent litigation.65
Hubbard was in no mood for conciliation responding:
Dear Phil,
You be good, or we won’t give you any more auditing ever.
Sincerely,
Ron66
Like two hotheads on opposing football teams, Hubbard and Wearne were magnetically drawn to each other. Wearne was initially attracted to Hubbard’s ideas simply because he thought they would make him more money. When the scam artist became the scammed, Wearne wanted a refund and revenge. Hubbard, by now used to subservience and sycophancy from his followers, could not abide Wearne’s insolence. Instead of giving him a refund and shutting up a potentially dangerous critic, an arrogant Hubbard showed poor judgement, ignoring Doug Moon’s advice that he pay Wearne off.67 That decision would prove costly for Hubbard. The ensuing unnecessary dispute with Wearne kickstarted a chain of events that would lead to his own isolation and exile.
Wearne, furious with the dismissive tone of Hubbard’s latest letter, fired back another missive to Saint Hill Manor. The businessman gave Hubbard both barrels, calling him on his authoritarianism, his deceits and his paranoia, and flagging the complaints that he would soon take to the authorities in Australia. Hubbard, who was used to being able to control his followers, could not control Wearne. He was the aggrieved customer from hell, and by letter he delivered Scientology’s founder an epic smackdown, a taste of the grief that was coming Hubbard’s way.
Dear Sir,68
In reply to your letter dated 26th April 1963, I agree that you won’t give me any more auditing – ever.
Auditing is a covert form of brainwashing which uses repetitive commands to establish obedience, repetitive questions to elucidate confessions, and many forms of subtle suggestion and dogmatic assertion systemised into ceremonial rites, which implant a belief in the goodness, infallibility and desirability of scientology. There is no reasoning with this belief – after sufficient indoctrination adherents are deaf to argument and blind to refuting evidence.
The grandiose delusion that you are the focus of a concerted action to save the world from Communism and insanity and your organisation of deluded followers in terms of a paranoid pseudocommunity of ‘mest clears’ ‘theta clears’ and ‘operating thetans’ will soon be exposed as symptoms of a psychopathology cloaked to a disarming degree by an impressive façade of reasonableness, earnestness and normality.
Your suspiciousness of ‘undercover’ agents attempting to enter your organisation, persecution by governments, and your jealous protection of scientology dogma have developed over the past five years and gradually increased in number, breadth, systemization and improbability. Your early feelings of being slighted by the medical profession, unappreciated by universities and disregarded by scientists have developed into suspicions of being spied on by psychiatrists, slandered by journalists, plotted against by communists and covertly attacked by doctors. This requires ‘explanation’ which has resulted in exalted ideas of great power, religious grandeur, irresistible purpose, psychic ability, spiritual superiority etc.
It is interesting that you ascribe to others the deception, irresponsibility and scathing criticism which you deny in yourself by affirming the opposite. This mechanism of ‘projection’ is particularly evident in your use of ‘security checks’ where questions of sex, sadism, guilt, betrayal etc. are asked over and over.
You will regard any legal action as a natural outcome of the great but unrecognised destiny of scientology and of the envy and malice of an indifferent world.
But the result will be a breaking of the perpetual obsession which binds your sycophantic followers and keeps them hypnotized within a mystic circle of authoritarian doctrine and ritual.
Yours faithfully,
PB Wearne
Within months, Wearne took the grievances aired in this letter to a range of authorities in Victoria. He sent what he called a ‘detailed description of the hypnotic and brainwashing techniques of Scientology’69 to the Attorney-General of Victoria, the Mental Health Authority, the Australian Medical Association, the College of Psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society, and the Psychology Department at the University of Melbourne.
Other authorities were already aware of the activities of the Scientologists and had noted their potential for mind control. An ASIO memorandum written in June 1962 stated, ‘The Hubbard Association is not considered to be politically subversive but their activities are of marginal security interest because cranks are attracted and there is medical evidence that Scientology could establish control over the minds of some members of the public.’70 Scientology first came on the security agency’s radar in 1956 when John Farrell, the then head of the Melbourne office, asked the government for permission to publish the Scientology booklet Brainwashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Pyschopolitics.71 ASIO had kept a watching brief on them from that point on.72
In early 1962, the Department of Immigration had asked the Superintendent of Victorian Police for a confidential report on the activities of the Scientologists. The investigation found ‘these people have a habit of trying to intimidate anyone who criticises them with threats that they will inform ASIO’. The report concluded that Hubbard ‘considers himself a genius and regards anyone who is not a scientologist as an idiot’.73
In August 1963, Phillip Wearne took out a Supreme Court writ against the Melbourne office for the fees he felt he was rightfully owed.74 On 11 October he settled for the sum of £1517 3s, agreeing to conditions that he not ‘procure any adverse publicity’ against Scientology and ‘desist from soliciting any political, governmental or similar action’ against Scientology and its Melbourne headquarters.75
But Wearne had no interest in fulfilling his promise of silence. Five days after the settlement, Labor MP John Walton rose to his feet in the Victorian parliament and called on the Liberal government to take action against Scientology. In a detailed speech, Walton questioned Hubbard’s academic credentials, raised concerns about the use of EMeters for security checks, warned of the potential for blackmail through intimate details given during processing and accused the Melbourne Scientology office of practising ‘amateur psychology’ without a licence. Walton also outlined the tactics Scientologists employed to attack critics. The information quoted by the Labor MP, though not attributed, came straight from Phillip Wearne.76
The tribal Labor connections Wearne had built up through his business were now being used for all they were worth. Next, he took his grievances to Jack Galbally, Labor leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Council. Galbally was a powerful advocate and a man not to be messed with. He had played football for the Collingwood Magpies during the Depression and set up a law firm soon after, where he developed a fearsome reputation for getting his clients acquitted. As a lawyer, he was best known for representing the Wren family in the c
riminal libel case against Frank Hardy over his book Power Without Glory. As a politician, he made a name for himself with his relentless campaign to end capital punishment, introducing 15 separate bills to abolish the death penalty in Victoria.77
Most of all, Galbally loved to antagonise Victoria’s long-serving conservative Premier Henry Bolte. He introduced a private member’s bill into parliament that led to the banning of live-trap bird shooting, a sport the Premier enjoyed in the open spaces of his rural electorate. When Wearne gave Galbally his brief on Scientology, the Labor MP took it on with relish, seeking to embarrass the Premier over his inaction on the cult’s activities.
On 19 November 1963, Galbally got to his feet in the Legislative Council and moved an adjournment ‘for the purpose of discussing the deliberate and obstinate failure of the Government to take appropriate action against a group of charlatans who for monetary gain are exposing children of a tender age, youths and adults to intimidation and blackmail, insanity and even suicide, family estrangement and bankruptcy’.78 Galbally accused the government of ignoring warnings made by the influential head of the Mental Health Authority, Dr Eric Cunningham Dax, and the advice of its former health minister Sir Ewen Cameron, who wanted an inquiry into the cult.
Melbourne Scientology executives Peter Williams and Denny Gogerly hit back at Galbally and Walton, saying, ‘The ridiculous and totally false allegations of these people would be a subject for a big laugh if it were not for the fact that people who do not know anything about Scientology might believe them.’79 They described any prospect of a ban on Scientology as ‘totally fascistic’ and made the case that Walton’s and Galbally’s speeches were an unprecedented attack on Scientology. ‘No other Parliament in the world,’ they wrote, ‘has done anything even remotely resembling this.’80
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