Hague Kevin: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 09 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:2096. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 There is a particular spot on Queen Street in Auckland—or at least there used to be—where a bunch of smiling young people with clipboards accost those who are going past and invite them to participate in a personality test. I watched for a while and the people they approach are invariably those who are alone who look perhaps a little vulnerable or who are perhaps in particular Maori and Pacific Island people. Strangely enough those who take the personality test invariably find that the solution to the problems with their personality lies somehow in the Church of Scientology. 
 More recently viewers of Maori Television will have seen advertisements for a drug-free world. School pupils—some 230000 of them—have received leaflets from Drug-Free Ambassadors. There is a group of bereaved family members of people who have killed themselves who have been befriended by a group called the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. The Foundation for a Drug-Free World the Drug-Free Ambassadors and the Citizens Commission for Human Rights are all fronts for the Church of Scientology as is Criminon as is Narconon as is RehabilitateNZ as is the World Literacy Crusade and many others. I am not a person with a religious belief myself but I do not object to churches providing social services provided that the church connection is transparent and that the service is not a front for recruiting into the church. It seems to me that the Church of Scientology fails on both those fronts.  
As many people will know scientology was invented by the science fiction author L Ron Hubbard. There is a lot of dispute about some of the basic facts but at its heart is the quote from Mr Hubbard at an authors’ conference in 1948: “Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars the best way would be to start his own religion.” Mr Hubbard’s religion has an evil intergalactic overlord named Xenu who solved an overpopulation crisis by rounding up aliens transporting them to Earth and killing them in extinct volcanoes with hydrogen bombs. The souls of those aliens then came to haunt human beings and they are called thetans. The way that the distorted thinking that results from being haunted in this way can be resolved is actually by an expensive process involving audit by a senior Scientologist. In fact the Church of Scientology came 4 years after the science of Dianetics also invented by Mr Hubbard—a science of mental health that he described to his publisher as one with tremendous promotional and sales potential.  
So why is it a problem? It is a problem because in addition to the repugnance of deceiving exploiting and often brainwashing and fleecing the vulnerable and desperate the Church of Scientology has also a very strong opposition to the use of medicines and psychiatry. Its drug-free programmes are smokescreens for this anti-psychiatry agenda. Members of Parliament will have received this DVD from in fact the Church of Scientology in the guise of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. It is called  
Dead Wrong: How Psychiatric Drugs Can Kill Your Child 
.  
It is evil to try to persuade people with a mental illness to avoid proper health professional services and the treatment that they need. What is especially concerning is that these programmes are now increasingly being funded by taxpayers’ money through the Community Organisations Grants Scheme and other community grants schemes. A number of these front organisations are registered with the Charities Commission and there is increasing evidence that they are being funded. I say to the Minister of Internal Affairs please follow through with the investigation promised by the department back in February. The New Zealand public is owed that.