On Monday in the rural town of Porepunkah in the state of Victoria, two police officers were shot and killed – and a third injured – attempting to execute a warrant for alleged sexual offenses. The suspect in the shooting – currently still in hiding in the dense bushland of Mount Buffalo – was well known to police as an adherent to the “sovereign citizen” movement. The movement has gained notable traction in Australia and now has become a significant public security risk.
The sovereign citizen movement subscribes to a series of pseudolegal arguments that they believe place them outside of the laws of any government. They use a variety of legal-sounding concepts that have no basis in actual law. They believe that laws only apply to them if they actively consent to them. In recent years, they have also created their own “courts” and what they describe as “common law sheriffs” to attempt to prosecute politicians and implement their own interpretations of the law.
Alongside this, sovereign citizens have a broadly strange doctrine that includes believing: that people have two personas, one of flesh and blood and another separate legal personality; that writing their name in capital letters creates this separate legal entity; that money is not real; that tax laws do not apply to individuals; that they do not need a driver’s license or a vehicle registration plate; and that governments are actually corporations pretending to be governments. They refer to themselves by a variety of names designed to indicate a status outside of the law, including “private persons,” “natural people,” or “living people.”
In recent years, sovereign citizens have become vexatious litigants in Australian courts, clogging up the legal system with spurious cases, wasting court and police resources, increasing costs, and making it harder for courts to function efficiently and fairly. None of the arguments derived from their belief system has ever succeeded in an Australian court. This is also true for similar countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand, where sovereign citizens are also active.
The COVID-19 pandemic super-charged the movement in Australia. Public health orders designed to protect people from infection were seen by the movement’s members as part of a nefarious conspiracy to control the public. This combined with an online environment that actively corrodes trust in institutions to attract adherents to the movement and amplifies their distrust and fervor. As more people join the movement the intensity of belief compounds into a nearly religious devotion to their ideology.
Due to the police being at the frontline of enforcing laws, sovereign citizens tend to have a deep suspicion of law enforcement. This stems from their behavior often attracting police attention. Their use of their own unofficial vehicle registration plates guarantees they’ll be pulled over by police, and their refusal to provide a driver’s license escalates the situation. The suspect in this week’s police shooting had a string of driving offenses to his name, and expressed his hatred of the police both inside court rooms and in online posts.
The recent shooting has now transformed the movement from an easily mocked sideshow of deeply misguided people into something far more dangerous. Sovereign citizens are unique among dangerous groups in that they are so confident in their beliefs that they openly advertise their activities. An Australian Federal Police briefing on the movement highlighted: “This deeply held belief in the legitimacy of their cause means that they are less concerned with using traditional criminal or terrorist tradecraft, such as concealing identities or discrete planning.” However, it may be this very openness that disguises their threat.
Their openness reveals the key delusion at the core of their ideology. Other extremists groups maintain an inkling that their behavior is wrong by virtue of their operating in the shadows. Sovereign citizens, by comparison, exhibit a form of collective psychosis, where they are unable to distinguish between what is real and what isn’t.
This presents a wider problem than just for security agencies and legal systems in Australia, as it demonstrates that there are people who have been poorly equipped by education systems and social structures, leaving them without the basic capabilities to navigate the world as competent adults. This makes them highly susceptible to a range of misinformation and disinformation online that can lead to extremism.
The best way to combat such ideological extremism is to build media and online literacy into every aspect of the education system. This is something the Finnish government has done well and created a model to emulate. The best form of public security is to provide the public with an immunity to nonsense.
