Speaker 1: My mood.
Speaker 2: What was your reaction when we started the here reports
Speaker 2: this week that a man, Deisy Freeman, who self identifies
Speaker 2: as a sovereign citizen, had allegedly shot dead two police officers.
Speaker 1: Initially, like everyone, I felt for the families of the
Speaker 1: two police officers and it really highlights the sacrifices our
Speaker 1: first responders make to keep our community safe. But personally
Speaker 1: it was a real shock. Just a week ago I
Speaker 1: was being called alarmist, a fearmonger, and a government propagandist
Speaker 1: for exposing the severity of the sovereign citizen threat. I'd
Speaker 1: like to say I felt vindicated, but to be honest,
Speaker 1: I felt sick.
Speaker 2: Ma mud Fazl is an investigative reporter with four Corners.
Speaker 2: For months, he's been investigating Australia's sovereign citizen community and
Speaker 2: what he's found is a growing movement fueled by distrusting government,
Speaker 2: the law and police overseas. This movement has been designated
Speaker 2: a terror group and experts here are sounding the alarm,
Speaker 2: saying if more isn't done to stop them, more attacks
Speaker 2: like the one allegitly carried out by Desi Freeman are inevitable.
Speaker 2: I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven AM today
Speaker 2: Mahmud Fasel on the sovereign citizen ideology behind Australia's most
Speaker 2: wanted man. It's Friday, August twenty nine. Where did your
Speaker 2: interests start in all this? My mood tell us about
Speaker 2: how you began looking into this movement, who you met
Speaker 2: and what they told you about what they believe.
Speaker 1: So at Four Corners we were digging around for a
Speaker 1: story and heard of a police shooting in North Morton
Speaker 1: in Tasmania earlier this year.
Speaker 3: Colleagues around the country are tonight morning, a veteran policeman
Speaker 3: shot dead while serving a warrant in rural Tasmania. Comestable
Speaker 3: Keith Smith is being remembered as a dedicated.
Speaker 1: North Morton in Tasmania is a known so pseudo law hotbed.
Speaker 1: We found the shooting that occurred there wasn't inspired by
Speaker 1: sovereigns cities and ideas, But what was striking was that
Speaker 1: everyone who held those sorts of beliefs in the area
Speaker 1: was convinced that it actually might have been one of them.
Speaker 1: They weren't surprised that one of their own might have
Speaker 1: killed a cop. So we started to speak with experts
Speaker 1: and began teasing out how volatile this threat was. We
Speaker 1: met with a group called the Sovereign People's Assembly of
Speaker 1: Western Australia in Perth. It's important to note that they
Speaker 1: say they always come in peace and are nonviolent. They
Speaker 1: believe the government is illegitimate and people should live under
Speaker 1: a natural, God given law that is superior to any
Speaker 1: of the rules that really govern society.
Speaker 4: It loves to put the word authority on all of
Speaker 4: its on the end of all of its departments. It's
Speaker 4: not the authority, it's the public servant. Where the authority,
Speaker 4: the people are the authority working in law.
Speaker 1: And they use what's called pseudo law, which is a
Speaker 1: collection of legal sounding concepts and arguments that have no
Speaker 1: actual basis in law.
Speaker 4: It is simply the architecture between law and legal So
Speaker 4: if again, if we look at our diagram, the sovereign
Speaker 4: lives here in the living in law evidenced by the
Speaker 4: breath that is the ultimate evidence of living breath.
Speaker 1: And they aim their kind of threats towards what they
Speaker 1: see as oppressive government institutions.
Speaker 2: So can we just unpack the word sovereign in particular?
Speaker 2: Why is that the word that is being used here.
Speaker 1: I think in their view people are sovereign. The state
Speaker 1: isn't sovereign, and so they want to essentially bring that
Speaker 1: power back to the citizens.
Speaker 3: Through unconscionable use of the They dog Latin gloss of fraud. Therefore,
Speaker 3: I'm canceling pair of attorney of my legal persons and
Speaker 3: all relevant trade names to the perman domicile of the
Speaker 3: land and sold jurisdiction of Terrestrales.
Speaker 1: So they don't believe in a monarch They believe that
Speaker 1: people should be the sovereigns of the state. And they
Speaker 1: also in Australia play on you know, First Nations struggles
Speaker 1: for sovereignty and argue that you know, sovereignty was never
Speaker 1: seated here and therefore the government shouldn't be shouldn't be
Speaker 1: considered the authority. So there's a lot of kind of
Speaker 1: semantic games being played for different agendas.
Speaker 2: What do you think it draws people like Dizzi Freeman
Speaker 2: into this kind of thinking, into this kind of movement.
Speaker 2: What is it that attracts people like him?
Speaker 1: In my experience from out reporting, it's often people who
Speaker 1: feel as though the law has been unfair to them.
Speaker 1: They've been hard done by the law. So they join
Speaker 1: these groups as a way to convince themselves that they
Speaker 1: were actually in the right, and just because the law
Speaker 1: said they were in the wrong, that wasn't actually the case.
Speaker 1: These are people who might be running from historical sex offenses,
Speaker 1: They might be facing a custodial sentence, they might be
Speaker 1: having their homes repossessed, or they might have just copped
Speaker 1: a fined for not wearing a mask when they were
Speaker 1: told to. So it's that angst or you know, feeling
Speaker 1: as though the law has wronged them and they're trying
Speaker 1: to fight back and convince themselves that actually they're in
Speaker 1: the right. They're beliefs because there's more faith than there
Speaker 1: is fact. They can't be falsified. They're not testable, which
Speaker 1: is why what they're saying isn't true.
Speaker 2: And they are beliefs and our theories and there are
Speaker 2: ways of thinking. But what kind of real world impact
Speaker 2: are these groups having here in Australia.
Speaker 1: In Victoria, sovereign citizen linked groups of overwhelmed local governments
Speaker 1: with petitions and protests, forcing event cancelations and public bands
Speaker 1: at meetings, but they gaining momentum and enacting kind of
Speaker 1: changes through local councils. So in Western Australia, groups have
Speaker 1: pressured over a dozen councils to our state and federal
Speaker 1: governments to consider banning further COVID vaccines. In New South
Speaker 1: Wales and Queensland, another sovereign citizen group has gone as
Speaker 1: far as walking into council offices and police stations declaring
Speaker 1: they no longer hold any jurisdiction. One of the experts
Speaker 1: we spoke to, doctor Joe mcintoe, has just written a
Speaker 1: book on pseudo law and the sovereign citizen kind of phenomena,
Speaker 1: said that these groups are affecting our institutions of law
Speaker 1: and the efficacy of our law, and therefore it's impacting
Speaker 1: upon our society. So there is real world threats and
Speaker 1: all of this is just contextual in the wake of
Speaker 1: what we've experienced over the last few days.
Speaker 2: Coming up how we and bill A shootings changed the
Speaker 2: sovereign citizen movement. Mami. We've heard from both ASIO and
Speaker 2: the Prime Minister and they said that they take the
Speaker 2: threat from sovereign citizens seriously. How does that tell you
Speaker 2: with what you've observed.
Speaker 1: I just hope they start responding to all extremists with
Speaker 1: the same forensic lens, especially when there's precedent globally, questions
Speaker 1: need to be asked. You know, why has the FBI
Speaker 1: classified sovereign citizen extremists as domestic terrorists? And even after
Speaker 1: that classification, just last year there were five separate police
Speaker 1: shootings by these groups in the United States. What's tricky
Speaker 1: for the authorities here is that these groups are connected
Speaker 1: via the Internet and really in tune to how they're
Speaker 1: being perceived abroad. A lot of them don't self identify
Speaker 1: as a sovereign citizen, and there's a lot of disparate
Speaker 1: groups that believe sort of similar things. A lot of
Speaker 1: people prefer the term pseudo law adherent I think, you know, personally,
Speaker 1: that's a bit soft. It seems to be playing into
Speaker 1: what these groups want in a way. They're aware of
Speaker 1: the terrorism label, and many distance themselves from any label
Speaker 1: that might be prescribed as a terrorist. But if we
Speaker 1: look at what their beliefs and aims are and the
Speaker 1: distance they're willing to go to achieve their aims, I
Speaker 1: believe a trend will emerge.
Speaker 2: One of the things that sort of I struggled to
Speaker 2: deal with in your excellent report was the use of
Speaker 2: the term by some of these people using the term genocide.
Speaker 1: Who's got all the guns and it's now time in
Speaker 1: history as a population boom disarmed as they're not being genocide.
Speaker 2: What do they mean by genocide when they're referring to
Speaker 2: their rights.
Speaker 1: I think they quite literally mean a genocide will occur.
Speaker 1: A recurring theme in our conversations with members of these
Speaker 1: groups is this fear of being disarmed. They believe that
Speaker 1: when a government takes the guns of a population away,
Speaker 1: genocide will ensue. I mean, even when I was having
Speaker 1: conversations with these people about their so called whistleblowers, they
Speaker 1: would totally convince that if you stick your head too
Speaker 1: far above the surface and expose these kind of quillanon
Speaker 1: conspiracies about tunnels with children, or being disarmed, or the
Speaker 1: COVID vaccine, or if you're too vocal about these conspiracies,
Speaker 1: you could be executed. And they had a list of
Speaker 1: people who had died as a result of an interaction
Speaker 1: with a police officer, which they interpreted as a kind
Speaker 1: of martyrdom, as a type of execution that had happened.
Speaker 1: For the truth, I found that stuff quite terrifying, and.
Speaker 2: It's easy to look at this police shooting and see
Speaker 2: it as a result of fringe ideology. But how far
Speaker 2: has the movement infiltrate into mainstream politics.
Speaker 1: You know, some of the people we spoke to in
Speaker 1: this movement were actually at one time One Nation candidates,
Speaker 1: or they were launching their own parties. These groups are
Speaker 1: growing in sophistication. They no longer want to create a
Speaker 1: parallel system. They want to dismantle or erode the current
Speaker 1: system as it stands, be that through local councils or magistrates,
Speaker 1: courts or political parties.
Speaker 2: And tragically, this is not the first time a police
Speaker 2: officer has been killed at the hands of someone identifying
Speaker 2: as a sovereign citizen. There was, of course, the win
Speaker 2: Biller murders back in twenty twenty two. What impact did
Speaker 2: the Willi and Bella killings have on the movement in
Speaker 2: the intervening years.
Speaker 1: Well, in the conversations that I had with people, they
Speaker 1: saw that as a targeted execution of a whistleblower. That
Speaker 1: was literally the way that they would explain the wyn
Speaker 1: Billa shootings. They had this conspiracy that one of the
Speaker 1: trains was about to leak a list of names of
Speaker 1: politicians who were involved in sex scandals with children, and
Speaker 1: as a result of that potential leak, they were executed.
Speaker 1: This was a conversation I had repeatedly across the country,
Speaker 1: in Queensland, in Tasmania, in Adelaide, in Western Australia. I
Speaker 1: was hearing the exact same theory. So that's the effect
Speaker 1: that it's had on groups like this. It's heightened the paranoia.
Speaker 1: It's created a more of a distrust and more of
Speaker 1: an anxiety for when the police do come knocking at
Speaker 1: their doors about what might potentially happen.
Speaker 2: I mean, the thinking around that, my mood says a
Speaker 2: lot about the alternative reality that so called sovereign citizens
Speaker 2: are living in and the difficulty then not getting them
Speaker 2: to reconsider their belief, does it not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly right. They're living in this almost alternate reality.
Speaker 1: That's why they say we're not awake yet they're awake.
Speaker 1: They're living in this other world that we haven't yet
Speaker 1: understood or been exposed to or seen the light of.
Speaker 1: But the way in which any move that the government
Speaker 1: makes is interpreted in the worst possible way, and it
Speaker 1: only fractures these interactions that could happen with police people
Speaker 1: are getting more and more paranoid of one another, and
Speaker 1: I think there needs to be some way of creating dialogue.
Speaker 1: I don't know how that had happened.
Speaker 2: There seems to be a particular hatred for police amongst
Speaker 2: some of its members. Do you think we're at risk
Speaker 2: of seeing more police being killed or injured on the
Speaker 2: front line as they tried to tackle some of these groups.
Speaker 1: I hope not. I hope not. But all the experts
Speaker 1: we spoke to were deeply concerned about how this group
Speaker 1: was evolving, and looking abroad, there has been an escalation
Speaker 1: of violence. So we can only hope that the police
Speaker 1: tightened their risk assessments when they're approaching these kinds of situations,
Speaker 1: and the Attorney General really considers how to classify these groups.
Speaker 1: We had the Chief Justice of Western Australia highlight the
Speaker 1: concerns we raised in our program the day after broadcast,
Speaker 1: because this is a top concern for the judiciary, and
Speaker 1: now two police officers have been killed. So experts are
Speaker 1: raising their concerns, the judiciaries raising their concerns, the police
Speaker 1: are certainly concerned. The government should listen, look at what's
Speaker 1: happened abroad and assess with urgency.
Speaker 2: Mamie. Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Also in the news, there are renewed calls for a
Speaker 2: national fire arm register in the wake of the murder
Speaker 2: of two police officers in Northeast Victoria. Media reports suggests
Speaker 2: that suspected shooter Dessi Freeman were stripped of his gun
Speaker 2: license last year. Labour MP and former Olympic shooter Dan
Speaker 2: Repercoli is urging state and territory governments to come together
Speaker 2: to work on the proposal, and former UK Prime Minister
Speaker 2: Tony Blair has attended a meeting at the White House
Speaker 2: to discuss plans for post war Gaza. It comes as
Speaker 2: Israel launches a new offensive in Gaza City, where approximately
Speaker 2: half of Gaza's two million residents have been living. All
Speaker 2: members of the United Nations Security Council except for the
Speaker 2: United States, this week released a drone statement that famine
Speaker 2: Gaza is a man made crisis, calling for an immediate,
Speaker 2: unconditional and permanent ceasefire. Seven AM as a daily show
Speaker 2: from Solstice Media. It is made by Atticus Bastow, Chris Dangate,
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Speaker 2: zon vet Jo. Music is by Ned Beckley and Josh
Speaker 2: Hogan of envelop Bordier. We'll be back tomorrow with a
Speaker 2: bonus episode covering a huge week for our national security
Speaker 2: agencies and the politics of it all. See you then,