Why the sovereign citizen movement is no longer a fringe curiosity
Sovereign citizens have become an influential faction of Australia’s far right.
Scobie McKay
Aug 28, 20253 min read
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Alleged Porepunkah shooter and sovereign citizen Dezi Freeman (Image: Supplied)
“He was within his rights to shoot anybody who comes onto his property,” declared Mike Holt, leader of the pseudolaw group Common Law Australia, after
two Victoria Police officers were gunned down in Porepunkah. Holt, who claims to have known the alleged killer — 56-year-old sovereign citizen Dezi Freeman, who is still at large — insisted Freeman was merely defending himself.
“Dezi was in fear of his life, and he told me this a couple of weeks ago,” Holt claimed in a video posted online. “So don’t come telling me that he’s a murderer — I think he was defending his rights”.
Holt is one of only a few sovereign citizens to speak publicly about the shooting, giving the impression that the ideology belongs to a handful of crackpots hiding out in the bush. In reality, it has become an influential faction of Australia’s far right — one that will be on full display this weekend at the
March for Australia rallies across the country.
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The movement first emerged in 1970s America, where tax protesters and white supremacists devised new ways to “opt out” of what they called a “Jewish-run” financial system. When it arrived in Australia, it took shape through self-declared
“micronations”, set up by disgruntled farmers and small business owners hoping to secede to dodge taxes and regulations.
At its core, the ideology rests on a fantasy: that ordinary people can voluntarily withdraw from the laws of the state. Adherents argue they’ve been coerced into an unwitting contract with the “corporation of Australia”, and can therefore refuse to pay tax, register vehicles or even hold a driver’s licence.
Many sovereign citizens tend to become known to Australians in viral videos of traffic stops where they recite rehearsed scripts of pseudolegal jargon at impatient police, while others
crash council meetings or even
try to run for local office. None of it works; magistrates, now trained to identify and handle sovereign citizens, always dismiss their arguments as nonsense. The only real effect is wasting time,
clogging the courts, and escalating otherwise routine encounters into dangerous ones.
Indeed, some wind up in the morgue. The ideology has been linked to violent attacks in the United States, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, and more recently the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, when sovereign citizen rhetoric was everywhere from placards to livestreams.
In Australia, the most notorious example came in 2022 at Wieambilla, where two Queensland police officers and a neighbour were murdered by Gareth and Nathaniel Train, with Gareth espousing online a
belief in sovereign citizen ideology. Other cases barely make the news. In Warwick, Queensland, that same year, self-styled “constitutional historian” Steven Harrison died by suicide after a
10-hour police siege. Like many adherents, he died terrified, paranoid and alone — the very mindset that makes sovereign citizens both vulnerable and dangerous.
www.bbc.com
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