Scientology's Australian 'child labour camp'

Right in the middle of a quiet suburb is a place where children are separated from their parents, and forced to work full time for no pay, and live in squalid conditions.

Those who've survived this place say they were brainwashed into believing they could not leave. They say the did not deserve the shocking treatment dished out.

A young man who escaped the place with the help of his father, Shane Kelsey says “I lived in that garage for about a year and a half, maybe two years.”
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Shane is now 21-years-old. Until just over a year ago he had never used the internet, watched television or followed the media.

“You're not allowed to read any books other than scientology books, you can't read newspapers, no radio, no movies, nothing,” Shane said.

Shane says he was held captive and groomed to see all of us on the outside as pathetic, useless and stupid.


“So I lived in a garage until that got flooded by a storm, and my mum got really pissed off and said 'what the hell' and so I got moved into a closet. It is a closet under the stairs - maybe two metres long and a metre wide,” Shane said.

The true Australian headquarters of the Church of Scientology are located in the Sydney suburb of Dundas. The RPF base - which stands for Rehabilitation Project Force - is where Scientologists are sent for punishment and training, for crimes that most of us would regard as trivial.

More than 50 requests for interviews on camera with representatives from the Church of Scientology have been flatly refused.

The bottom line is they don't want people to know what's going on inside the centre, and those who've lived in there, like Shane, say it's like a gulag, or a prison. Yet it's in the middle of a suburb, which could be any suburb in Australia.

People would he horrified to know what has been going on in there for so many years, and continues to this day.

Shane Kelsey's mother and father were dedicated Scientologists in Sydney, so they put their son Shane into its highest core at the age of six - little Shane moved into a tiny room with eleven other children.

By the age of seven Shane says “we'd go down the streets and there'd be eight of us, ten of us, young as, and we'd go down and pledge people up to ‘drug free lives’.

“I signed my contract when I was eight-years-old. It was a billion-year contract, which means you're volunteering or servicing the Church for the next billion years,” Shane said.

“We used to do marching, close order drilling, things like that. Just because it was a form of discipline,” he said.

Shane saw his parents once a week. His mother and father would soon separate, and his dad Adrian moved overseas, and then left Scientology.

Meanwhile, the work schedule for children was fulltime, hard and without reward.

Working 35 hours a week when he was eight-years-old, by the time he was fourteen, the work changed to kitchen duty.

A military muster every morning required marching and saluting to the cause of saving mankind from the intergalactic ravages, described by the Church’s science fiction founder L Ron Hubbard.

The kids wore all black uniforms, and were always required to run, never walk.

So-called home schooling was provided in fits and starts, taking a back seat to hard labour and brainwashing.

[link to au.news.yahoo.com]