Brisbane, Australia
—
The alleged killing of two police officers who attempted to serve a warrant on a self-proclaimed “sovereign citizen” in Australia shows how a movement that originated in the United States has taken root in the country and now carries the threat of violence, experts say.
Hundreds of police officers, dogs and helicopters in the southern state of Victoria have spent days scouring dense bush in freezing conditions for “Dezi” Freeman, who fled on foot after allegedly shooting dead two officers on Tuesday when they attempted to serve a search warrant on his property over alleged sex crimes.
Freeman, previously known as Desmond Filby, was known to authorities after years of railing against the police, who he’d previously called “Nazis” and “terrorist thugs” in evidence submitted to court when he tried to overturn a 2020 conviction for traffic offenses.
Sovereign citizens don’t believe the law applies to them and commonly deploy pseudo-law to challenge the authority of police, lawyers, judges, and other representatives of a system they say is illegitimate and corrupt.
For decades, sovereign citizens largely flew under the radar in Australia as relatively harmless eccentrics with a special interest in conspiracy theories. But this week’s shooting has focused national attention on a worrying trend highlighted earlier this year by the country’s spy chief.
“We are seeing an increase in issue-motivated extremism, fueled by personal grievance, conspiracy theories and anti-authority ideologies,” said Mike Burgess, Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), in February.
Terrorism experts say Australia’s strict Covid restrictions – which closed state and territory borders for months – amplified distrust among people already open to suggestions that the government was a malevolent force.
Freeman’s alleged killing of two police officers represents a tipping point for the movement in Australia, said Marilyn McMahon, Dean of Deakin Law School at Deakin University.
“In the United States, you’ve got a history … That’s very different to this country,” she said, putting a rough estimate of 2,000 on the country’s so-called “SovCits.”
“We had an attempted arson at the old Parliament House… We have had death threats made against politicians by sovereign citizens, and we’ve had assaults, but we haven’t had anything really close to this.”
One of Australia’s first sovereign citizens, Alan Skyring, made his presence known in the 1980s, when he started arguing in the country’s courts that only gold and silver coins were legal tender.
Decades later, he was declared a vexatious litigant by the High Court, Federal Court and Queensland Supreme Court, a label that barred him from filing any more claims.
Skyring died in 2017, but his struggle is well-known among observers of the country’s sovereign citizens – as is Prince Leonard, who presided over his own self-declared micro-nation in Western Australia for nearly 50 years.
Both waged their wars against officialdom in the court system, using “paper terrorism” – reams of complaints, court actions and arguments – to push specific causes. Prince Leonard, for example, challenged the state government’s wheat production quotas.
However, experts say Covid-19 restrictions and post-pandemic pressures – rising living costs, higher mortgage rates and a housing shortage – are creating the right conditions for the movement to spread with the enticing notion that mortgages, taxes and fines don’t need to be paid.
Keiran Hardy, an associate professor at Griffith University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said researchers tried to estimate the total number of sovereign citizens in Australia through a Facebook survey last year.
While the survey, which returned 1,600 responses, wasn’t representative of the general Australian public, over 40% of respondents agreed that “the Australian Government does not have the right to legal power over its citizens if they do not consent.”
“I’m not suggesting that all these people are likely to be violent at all, but we were shocked at the number of people who were agreeing at least somewhat with some very specific sovereign citizen questions in our survey,” said Hardy, a member of the Griffith Institute of Criminology.
“We actually had to stop the survey from going to so many older white males and try and get a better balance in the in the respondents,” he said. “That probably tells you a bit in itself, around who holds these views.”
The pandemic creates new recruits
Unlike cults, whose followers tend to idolize a leader and cut themselves off from society, sovereign citizens operate independently and hold different views about which laws apply to them.
Some rebel at traffic stops – promoting their resistance on videos posted online – or defend themselves in court with pseudo-laws they’ve learned from self-styled sovereign coaches, sometimes through expensive courses.
“Prior to Covid-19, when sovereigns were meeting in person, it was for sovereign training, when an American sovereign salesman came over and taught them how to essentially get out of paying their mortgage,” said Kristy Campion, Senior Lecturer in Terrorism and Security Studies at Charles Sturt University.
“During Covid-19, we suddenly see them meeting in person. They’re dropping pamphlets, and they are connecting in new and different ways, but they’re also connecting with new and different people.”
McMahon, from Deakin Law School, says that while Australia’s early sovereign citizens relied on compatriots in the US for training, “there is no doubt that it is becoming more homegrown now.”
“I think that what’s happened is it’s taken root in Australia, and it’s adopted local conditions and issues,” said McMahon.
The closest previous instance of violence fueled by conspiracy theories in Australia occurred in December 2022, when two police officers and a neighbor were killed in an ambush at a rural property in Wieambilla, Queensland.
A coronial inquiry heard the three offenders adhered to a Christian fundamentalist belief system known as pre-millennialism, and believed there’d be a final battle before Christ’s return. When police showed up at their property to do a welfare check, they were ready for a fight.
The court heard the trio was influenced by a mix of conspiracy theories, including some espoused online by American sovereign citizen Donald Day Jr., who is facing separate charges in the US related to making threats and gun possession.
The rejection of laws by Australia’s sovereign citizens means the country’s tough rules around gun ownership are often ignored.
Police searching for Freeman in northern Victoria say he’s “heavily armed,” knows the area well, and has the skills to survive in the bush for some time – though he’s not thought to have taken any supplies.
Residents of the small town of Porepunkah, where police attempted to carry out a search warrant on Freeman’s home, have been advised to stay indoors, where possible.
Media have been advised of the risks of operating in the area, and tourists who had planned to visit the Alpine region, which is popular with skiers, have been urged to stay away.
Police say they won’t stop searching for Freeman until he’s found and have appealed to the fugitive to give himself up.
McMahon said this week’s events give authorities “a multiplicity of pauses for reflection,” and one outcome will inevitably be the closer scrutiny of Australia’s sovereign citizens by police.
Hardy from the Griffith Institute of Criminology says researchers are studying how police can deescalate interactions with sovereign citizens, who may view them as frontline enemies.
Preventing people from becoming vulnerable to sovereign citizen ideology in the first place poses more complex questions around disadvantage, isolation and trust, experts said.
Campion said once sovereign beliefs take hold, it’s all but impossible for authorities to combat them because the ideology maintains that the government is evil.
“Anything coming from the government is going to be viewed as a malevolent deception by sovereign citizens,” she said. “So, it is one of those situations where I believe the government is damned if they do, damned if they don’t.”
