The modern sex industry exists almost exclusively as a counterpoint to organised religion. It’s the only industry that is wholly based on the principle of ‘forbidden fruit’. With no vice, scandal, guilt, shame or prohibition attached to sex, nobody would want to bite into the apple anymore. If organised religion had placed a prohibition on ankles or elbows years ago, ordered that they never be exposed in public and deemed them as inherently sinful parts of the body, guess what most porn magazines and websites would be offering? You got it. Elbow porn. Crinkly ones, smooth ones, young ones, hairy ones, even deformed ones. Penises and vaginas would be treated like ears and fingers.
People in the sex industry have long understood this phenomenon, and although anti porn campaigners can damage the personal lives of people in the sex industry, their efforts at prohibition mostly advertise what’s on offer. It’s something religious campaigners don’t like to acknowledge because it’s a no-win situation. They’re damned if they do protest and damned if they don’t.
Religion provides the high-octane fuel that powers the sex industry’s growth. This was classically illustrated in Australia during the late 1970s when the 8mm sex-film business started to morph into the new X-rated video business. ‘Stag’ movies, as the name implied, had been secret men’s business for twenty years and had limited appeal as far as sexual entertainment went. Women just did not want to go to football clubs for the obligatory drunken prawn and porn night. Neither did a lot of men, for that matter.
In the mid- to late-1980s, however, when Australia’s churches started to campaign strongly against the new portable ‘couple’s porn’ being produced on video cassette, all they did was to alert women to the fact that they could now watch porn in the privacy of their own homes with their partner. And they did. Not since The Beatles visited Australia in the mid-1960s, when we saw thousands of sexually mature girls and women wet their pants and have multiple orgasms over the sexy quartet, had there been such a mass outbreak of female lewdness. Of the over one million regular buyers of X-rated videos in the 1990s, Eros surveys showed that 70 per cent were being purchased by couples.
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The Welsh philosopher Bertrand Russell once said of Church clergy: ‘Any average selection of mankind, set apart and told that it excels the rest in virtue, must tend to sink below the average.’ For the victims of paedophile priests in Australia, Russell’s words could not have been more apposite. For people working in the sex industry from the 1980s, they also struck a nerve. Although not victims of actual physical abuse, sex industry employers and employees nonetheless suffered constant emotional abuse and character assassination from church lobbyists. When religious investigators and government inquiries look to the causes of the abuse epidemic, they still fail to see the relevance of the sex industry in the debate.
David Marr’s Quarterly Essay on George Pell, ‘The Prince’, from 2013, was probably the first belated acknowledgement of the role that Australia’s sex industry played in bringing religious abuse into the public eye. The real story behind that ‘outing’ was never told but is integral to any proper understanding of how and why the churches conspired to cover up their abuse and their motivation in carrying it out.
As isolated sexual assaults by clergy started to appear in the media in the mid-1980s, church leaders became worried and quietly began work on a strategy to deal with the fallout. They needed to find a large corporate or institutional scapegoat. The emerging X-rated video industry, with its associated sexual goods and services, was the perfect choice.
Between 1984 and 1987, the mainstream churches simply looked on as Fred Nile and the Festival of Light misled the media debate about how adult pornography was leading to an increase in child sexual assault. Although Nile had a different motivation from the churches, his rhetoric was perfect for them. He was concerned that permissive parents would allow their children access to porn, but his favourite chorus line was: ‘It’s damaging to children’ and ‘We’ve had reports already of them hanging themselves. Murders and violence are increasing.’
Really? Kids hanging themselves because they saw a porn magazine under their parents’ bed? This invocation of death and suicide would prove to be a constant theme in Nile’s religious lobbying of state premiers and they all fell for it, never questioning his sources or his reliability. Even as late as November 2017, Nile was still lying when he told the NSW Parliament that voluntary assisted dying laws had been responsible for doctors asking family members to hold people down while they were injected with lethal drugs against their will. On this occasion however, he was forced to recant, instead blaming his God for ‘prompting me’ to say such bullshit.
In late 1987, the Catholic bishops joined Nile’s bandwagon and pressured the Catholic attorney-general, Lionel Bowen, to ban X-rated videos across the nation. Given that Bowen’s predecessor, Gareth Evans, had only just legalised them in 1983, this was always going to be a hard call, but the campaign waged by the Catholic Church received plenty of media. At this point, the church’s PR machine went into overdrive and began an almost daily condemnation of porn, adult shops, brothels, gay and lesbian sex, and all other manner of adult entertainment. Mainstream film releases, like Hail Mary and The Last Temptation of Christ, allowed the church to further obfuscate on the issue of child sexual abuse.
Apart from the established churches, the campaign was also championed by half-a-dozen old-style moral campaigners. Chief among them was the lay Baptist preacher and federal ALP Member for Capricornia, Keith Wright. His campaign went under one of two names, depending on who he was trying to influence: The Porn Free Zone Campaign or Save the Children. He was backed up by a US evangelist and former McDonald’s manager, Jack Sonneman, who led the Australian Federation for the Family. The Logos Foundation chief, Howard Carter, was in the mix as well, as was Family Association chief, Bill Muehlenberg. Two other politicians felt the need to use their offices to defend a moral position on porn—the ACT’s Dennis Stevenson and, of course, the king of morality campaigners, the old independent from Tasmania, Senator Brian Harradine.
In 1995, and as a direct response to the formation of the Eros Foundation by Australia’s sex industry, John Gagliardi, the leader of a large Pentecostal church in Brisbane, along with two Baptist ministers in the mould of Fred Nile, formed the Australian Christian Coalition. They based themselves within a stone’s throw of the Eros office in Canberra. Their immediate purpose was to provide a foil to the dialogue on public morality that Eros had started a couple of years before and to continue the lie that the sex industry was harming children. Later, in 2001, they adopted the more political title of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL), which still functions today.
However much the ACL, the Catholic Bishops Conference and the phalanx of individual moral campaigners issued pubic edicts on porn and forced religious positions on abortion and the growing LGBTIQ movement, they could not control the growing number of paedophile priests starting to appear before the courts. In 1990, the emphasis had shifted from unknown priests to high-profile campaigners. After moving its ministry to Toowoomba in the early 1980s, the strident anti-porn, anti-abortion and anti-gay Logos Foundation was gathering considerable support. Then its charismatic leader, the Reverend Howard Carter, became embroiled in a series of adulterous affairs that destroyed the group’s integrity. He was also found to have led an extravagant lifestyle, squandering church funds. Logos fell apart soon after, but many of those who left ended up finding a new home with the emerging Family First Party and the ACL.
Then, in 1993, Keith Wright, was jailed for raping an underage girl in his parliamentary office and at the girl’s home. The anti-porn movement’s favourite son was also found guilty of sexually assaulting another underage girl. Wright, born and bred in the morality campaign’s ‘breeder’ town of Toowoomba in Queensland, had come within a few thousand votes of becoming Queensland premier in the 1983 state election.
Soon after becoming the federal member for Capricornia, his proclivities quickly became known among his Labor colleagues, who gave him the nickname of ‘Elmer Gantry’—the main character in a Sinclair Lewis novel about a hypocritical evangelist in the US during the 1920s. Appallingly, many Labor members turned a blind eye to Wright’s behaviour. He refused to admit guilt over the rapes and indecent assaults and was sentenced to nine years in jail. The damage to the morality campaign was palpable in the community, but for the remaining religious lobby groups it was business as usual. They offered no explanation as to how or why their colleague had managed to fall so far. After all, there was never any suggestion he viewed pornography. He was only ever an assiduous Bible reader—even in jail.
By the late 1990s, the number of charges against church clergy had reached the 100 mark. If there had been the same number of used-car salesmen or plumbers up on sexual assault charges, there would have been an immediate inquiry. But still the political establishment fell in behind the churches. They ignored the public humiliation of Keith Wright and Howard Carter, as well as the overseas fallen angels like the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart and the Reverend Jim Bakker.
In 1997, I issued a media release saying court records now showed that the conviction of priests for child sexual abuse was running at four to one against all other occupations. This meant that the church and religious orders in Australia could be producing up to approximately one-third of the nation’s paedophiles.
In 1999, Robbie and I looked at the evidence that was staring everyone in the face and decided to publish a list of all paedophile priests who had been charged over the past decade. It was a huge task and took over a year to complete. It meant employing a researcher and spending nearly $50,000 to publish and distribute 30,000 copies of a full-colour book called Hypocrites to every church, media outlet and politician in the country.
As the book was being prepared, I approached the ABC’s Four Corners with a view to exposing the contents on national television. Our book claimed that up until 2000, there had been 640 charges of child sexual assault laid at the feet of paedophile priests. When ABC researchers looked at the evidence, Chris Masters pushed the ‘go’ button on a program that promised an ‘unprecedented and dirty war between the sex industry and the church’. It even featured a debate between Archbishop George Pell and Robbie.
In the face of all the evidence our book supplied, Pell later claimed that Eros had published Hypocrites in an effort to sell more pornography. It was about as far-fetched and ludicrous a response as he could have concocted, and showed everyone that he was so detached from the issue of child sexual abuse that he should resign. The program also broadcast allegations that I was about to expose members of parliament who had double standards on censorship issues. Following the broadcast, the ABC ran an online poll asking viewers whose view they supported: Eros or that of Senator Harradine, who also appeared on the program. We received 96 per cent of the vote.
In the days following the program, I took hundreds of calls from people who claimed to have been childhood victims of clergy. We also received no less than six separate death threats, two of which were considered by the AFP to be serious enough to be investigated (one was ultimately found to have come from a Catholic priest in country New South Wales). Letters from prominent politicians flooded in. Many, like the one from the NSW Bible-bashing MP Bruce Baird (father of future premier Mike Baird) tried to trash our reputation as industry lobbyists. ‘I can inform you that your publication has caused considerable damage to your cause amongst my parliamentary colleagues,’ he wrote.
In publishing Hypocrites, I believe I was probably the first public advocate in Australia to officially call for a royal commission into child sexual abuse in religious institutions. This is what I wrote in the introduction:
Nearly 450 individual child sexual assaults by church clergy are referenced in this publication as having been dealt with by Australian courts in the short space of 10 years. This shows that, as a profession, the priesthood has lost its direction and has become a real danger to the community. The scale of this travesty is so great that only the highest-level inquiry will get to the bottom of it.
We ask for your help and support in encouraging the federal government to conduct a royal commission into child sexual abuse among church clergy and officials, immediately.
We believe the terms of reference for such an inquiry should include the following:
1. An examination of the content and practice of training programs that church and clergy officials have undergone in the past and continue to do so in the present;
2. An examination of the effects, if any, that celibacy and sexual repression have upon child sexual abuse;
3. The nature and extent of the church’s cover up of child sexual abuse within its ranks;
4. The need to reassess current government assistance to church-based education and training programs that deal with children, including taxation and other breaks, and;
5. The extent to which church leaders, who have presided over child sexual abuse cases in their jurisdiction, have affected current censorship regimes that deal with child sexuality and sexual violence in general.
Twelve years later, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced a royal commission into institutional responses into child sexual abuse, and although I felt some vindication and a degree of satisfaction, many of the issues that had led me to make that call have never been addressed in the inquiry. These still need to be investigated as they have major ramifications for the way in which establishment and ‘trusted’ groups in society can create elaborate and diversionary witch-hunts using the resources of the state.
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Having finalised the business end of the campaign, Robbie wanted to have some fun with the issue, too.
In 2001 we visited Archbishop Pell’s St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. Pell preached to his congregation here and so we thought we’d leave him a calling card next time he mounted the gothic sandstone staircase that wound its way up to the elevated pulpit. St Mary’s is designed in every way to elevate the speaker to heavenly status with the pulpit’s placement against the huge stained-glass display of saintly figures towards the end of the building. We reckoned that seeing a copy of Hypocrites (by now well known throughout most churches as the work of the devil) on the lectern next time Pell preached would send a nice personal message to him. Whether Pell ever saw the book we would never know, but it was nice to make the gesture. Robbie continued to leave books in other churches around the country.
With the genie well and truly out of the bottle, the figures in the book and the projections that it made were shocking. Hypocrites projected that 20 per cent of church clergy in Australia would eventually be identified as a perpetrator of some form of child sexual abuse. With the royal commission now identifying 7 per cent of all Catholic clergy in Australia as having been accused of raping young children, I wasn’t far off the mark.
In 2009, while launching the Australian Sex Party, I became the first political leader to call for a royal commission into child sexual abuse in religious orders. I was laughed at and ridiculed for making such an outrageous demand. Only four years later, however, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was established with many of those who had earlier scoffed at the idea now publicly supporting it. They were also hypocrites in their own right.
Hypocrites was a turning point in the debate over child sexual abuse in Australia. When it comes to adult sexual behaviour, repression is the regulatory model most often adopted by religious campaigners to deal with sex. For members of the adult goods and services industry, the regulatory model is more about expression. The figures coming out of the royal commission should be enough to persuade legislators about which model is best for the physical and moral health of the nation.
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Evidence of the increasing power of the religious right in Australia comes from two main areas. First, the number of registered Christian parties regularly contesting elections tends to fluctuate between four and six: the DLP, the Christian Democrats, Australian Christians, Rise Up Australia and now the Australian Conservatives. The overall number of registered parties regularly contesting federal elections is around twenty, meaning around a quarter of them are religious parties. Each of these parties might get around 2 per cent of the vote, which doesn’t sound like much, but as a block it means they’re in a position to approach both the Labor and Liberal parties at election time and offer them 6 to 8 per cent of the vote through preference deals in return for certain promises. Many seats and quite a few elections in Australia swing on far less than this percentage.
Of equal importance for secular Australians is the fact that 20 per cent of all Liberal and Labor MPs are equally committed to religion and religious morality as one of their basic reasons for being in politics. These players often have an undue influence on the rest of their party. Tony Abbott, Kevin Andrews, Scott Morrison, Barnaby Joyce, Andrew Hastie, Eric Abetz and Craig Kelly all punched well above their weight on the marriage-equality debate. For Labor, the conservative Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Union (SDA) has hung around its neck like a dead albatross for ages and was responsible for Julia Gillard’s gut-wrenching statements against marriage equality while she was prime minister. This political situation is the fundamental reason why reform of issues like censorship, drugs, abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, prostitution, sex education and gay marriage have all stalled over the past decade.
In 2010, when Robbie asked the Chair of the House of Representatives ‘Billboard’ Committee, Graham Perrett, for members on the committee to declare their religious affiliations before proceedings started, Perrett agreed to his great credit and 80 per cent of them came out unashamedly as having religious convictions. A week later, when Robbie fronted a Senate Committee on Censorship, his request for MPs on this particular committee to state their religiosity was slapped down by the religious right-wing chairman, Senator Guy Barnett. When Robbie protested that the public had a right to know whether committee members were basing censorship decisions on their religious values, Barnett told him to shut up and get on with it or risk being turfed out of the hearing. It was clear, however, that the same number of this committee was also comprised of many religious MPs.
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Jeff Sharlet’s book The Family lays out clearly how the US religious right infiltrates governments using a range of strategies such as ‘prayer breakfasts’ and how these strategies have been imported into Australia over the past decade. These prayer breakfasts are now held in almost every parliament in Australia and most capital city mayors host them annually. They provide an opportunity for MPs to wheel out their religious credentials to church leaders and do some fundraising with sympathetic business leaders.
Slowly and by stealth, Australians have been screwed by a group of flat-earthers who have skilfully infiltrated the major parties mostly by manipulating their preselection processes. Marriage equality has consistently drawn an average support rate of 65 and 70 per cent in public opinion polls and yet it took over a decade of intense lobbying, a one hundred million dollar plebiscite and any number of suicides to finally get over the line a formal relationship that is legal in 26 other countries. Legalisation of X-rated films in the Australian states has consistently drawn an average support of 72 per cent, while drug law reform polling shows a more distinct divide with country support running at around 35 per cent, while city support is around 80 per cent.
Prostitution, stem-cell research and abortion all draw majority support in the polls and yet there is no law reform. For generations of people who grew up on the ‘make love, not war’ philosophy with marijuana and ecstasy as their drugs of choice, abortion always an option as a last resort to an unwanted pregnancy and gay friends all around you, these poll results are what you would expect. Though the religious minorities who infiltrate Australian politics are almost exclusively Christian, most religions are as bad as each other when they get into politics, and the possibility of Islamic, Buddhist, Jewish or Hindu fundamentalists getting into parliament needs to be scrutinised just as much as Christians.
Hypocrites was a landmark publication. It brought the graphic nature and the true extent of church-based child sex abuse in Australia before politicians and priests in a way that they had never seen before. The royal commission was another step forward in bringing this awful behaviour to the awareness of ordinary Australians. Now we need a process that explains why it happened. People still don’t understand how or why thousands of people who were supposed to uphold the highest moral values of all, descended en masse into the depths of depravity.