What the State Inquiries Found, and What Followed

Before the courts began deciding what this movement was, governments commissioned people to go and look. For about a decade the answer they came back with was uniformly hostile.

The Anderson Board of Inquiry sat in Victoria from December 1963 to April 1965, took evidence across 160 sitting days and reported against the movement in terms that left no room for qualification. Victoria passed the Psychological Practices Act 1965 in response, Western Australia legislated in 1968 and South Australia in 1969. In the United Kingdom the government announced in July 1968 that it considered the practice socially harmful and refused entry to foreign Scientologists.

The unwinding took longer than the prohibition. Sir John Foster reported to Parliament in December 1971 and declined to endorse the ban. His objection was that excluding people from the country for their beliefs made little sense when nothing in law stopped those same people becoming British citizens. The entry ban was not lifted until 1980. In Australia the reversal came from the bench rather than the legislature, when the High Court held in 1983 that the movement satisfied the legal test of a religion.

Two things are worth taking from the sequence. The inquiries were about practices, money and the treatment of members rather than about doctrine, which is why their findings survived into legislation while saying almost nothing about belief. And they were close to the last occasion on which a Western government tried to settle the question by investigation. Almost everything afterwards happens in courtrooms and administrative files, on questions framed by whichever side moved first.