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