Already and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense. Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Monday, the first of September.
I'm Lucy Tassel and I'm a Cholla Rock.
Last week, two police were shot dead while trying to serve an arrest warrant at a rural property near the northeast Victorian town of Poor Punker. A third was wounded and is recovering in hospital. The man police alleged murdered their colleagues is believed to be a sovereign citizen, a person who does not believe in standard laws and governments. In today's episode, we'll explain what you need to know
about sovereign citizens and their beliefs. Before we get into it, a quick word from our sponsor, Lucy.
You and I have been researching sovereign citizens this week, following those developments in Victoria that you mentioned. Before we get into who these people are and what they believe in, can we talk about what brought this to our attention?
Yeah? Absolutely. This came to our attention as a few kinds of stories do, which is that we saw it come up on the TVs that we have mounted on the wall of the newsroom that we have multiple channels running on all day, every day, and all we need to start with was that there was a police operation
happening in northeast Victoria. Now that caught my attention because big news networks don't typically cover police operations while they're happening unless something really big is happening, like something has been leaked that suggests that there's a really big deal happening.
Possibly someone has been killed, someone has a weapon. That's the sort of thing that tends to pass the threshold for Australian news networks to be like, there's a big police operation happening right now and we don't know much more about it than that. So that immediately kind of tipped me and the whole newsroom off to the fact that something really big was happening.
Now, I remember that day. It felt so chaotic and so much was happening. Now, when did we start understanding what exactly was going on?
Yeah, So, over the course of the day we got little dribs and drabs of information from the police in various forms. Understandably, the situation was developing. They could only give us so much information. But by that night, that's Tuesday night, we had a press conference from the chief
of Police in Victoria. He said that ten police officers had gone to a property in northeast Victoria to execute a search warrant, that seven of those officers were physically okay, but had been traumatized, that two had been shot dead, and that a third was wounded like a gunshot wound, so quite serious. And then he started talking about someone that he at that point only referred to as the offender.
Now, can you break down what we do know at this stage about what police are calling the offender.
We know his name is Desi Freeman. We know he's fifty six years old. We know he has a and kids because they actually presented to police officers later on that Tuesday night. And crucially what we know is that he is someone who is called a sovereign citizen. And we also know that in the past, this belief system that he subscribes to has led to him being involved in an unsuccessful attempt to sue former Victorian Premier Dan Andrews for treason in twenty twenty one.
Now, I feel like we've heard the word treason a lot, but what does that specifically mean? Yeah.
Absolutely. The crime of treason is maybe the most serious crime there is other than murder in terms of how the legal system treats it in Australia. It can cover a range of fences. It could include killing the head of state. It could look like launching war against Australia as an Australian or helping an enemy of Australia to harm Australia. Sorry to say Australia so many times, but it really is about nations and what you, as a citizen of a nation do to that nation. Victorian law
talks specifically about killing the sovereign, harming the sovereign. They keep saying, quote the sovereign, maiming, wounding, imprisoning, restraining the sovereign.
I've lost count of how many times you said sovereign. Yeah. But under the Victorian legal context, who specifically is that referring to.
Yeah, So that's referring to King Charles the Third, who is our head of state. His power is exercised by Governor General Sam Mostyn. So under Australian law, the sovereign that phrase means the king or the Queen of the day. There's also this idea that a nation can have sovereign tea so basically control over its own government, setting its own rules. In Australia, this manifests as we have our own independent government. We're part of the Commonwealth, but we
still we have our government. It makes its own rules and its members are elected by us. So in a sense, the nation of Australia has control over the nation of Australia. Another country invading us to take over would be a violation of sovereignty. And there's another context. You might have heard the word sovereignty or sovereign and that's in the phrase sovereignty was never ceded, So that's referring to the fact that Australia's first nations never agreed to hand over
their land to the British Empire. That, of course, is a legitimate idea, while sov CITs ideas are not.
So to bring it back to the topic of today's podcast, Yeah, what would you say are the top three things people should know about sovereign citizens?
So sob CITs we can call them solvi sits. That's probably just faster. They have this idea of sovereignty that is somewhere between the ideas of sovereignty being a single person and sovereignty being something about government power. So I think that's part of the first thing that I think people should know, which is they should know about their ideology and where it came from. Second, I think the listeners should know about what they're up to in Australia.
And third, I think TDA listeners should know how and why this belief system could lead to violence against police officers specifically, since that's kind of what's brought it to our attention this time around.
And to bring it back to your first point, what do self sits believe in?
Yeah, there's a variety and a diversity of beliefs, but I think broadly speaking, they reject government authority and the rule of law, and they don't participate in traditional societal structures. They instead perpetuate this thing called pseudo law, so fake law, which is like a mishmash of legal jargon that can kind of differ from person to person or from group to group. It has, though a fundamental lack of clarity that is quite easy to identify once you know what
you're listening for. There are certain catch phrases and words like obviously sovereign, things like natural person, things like saying I'm traveling instead of driving. That it's kind of hard to get into and it's quite complicated, but basically you'll know it like you know when you hear it. There are lots of examples online of that, primarily from so of CITs who have been pulled over by police for
various traffic violations. And then again, I would say, another crucial aspect of the belief system I would say is this idea that at some point in history, governments, starting with the US government, took away or sold the rights
of individual citizens and became corporations. Sovereign citizens tend to believe that they have figured out a way to get their original rights back from before governments became corporations, and that this means that they don't have to pay taxes or comply with laws, because all of these things are part of the fake corporation government, not the true government.
Now, Lucy, you've touched lightly on the historical context of this movement. Can you tell us a little bit about where this ideology came from.
Yeah, it came from a few different groups in the US in the mid twentieth century who were generally speaking against paying taxes. It also stems from a group called Posse Commatatis, which is a far right extremist, antisemitic, aca and racist group that formed in the late nineteen sixties. That group's beliefs were also strongly anti government and anti laws, and involved the idea that the US Constitution was being wrongly interpreted and that the government had no rights over
sovereign individuals or the money they earned. Again coming back to paying taxes, So there's these kind of different streams of ideas that are fairly united by this idea that we shouldn't have to pay taxes to a government that has no control over us.
So you've broken it down in the US context and bringing it home here in Australia, how has that manifested?
So something that was really interesting to me, the kind of sovereign citizen idea, came broadly to Australia in the late nineteen nineties, which is also around the time that I realized I first heard of things like sovereign citizens. But it was sort of presented to me as a fun fact because I was thinking about the idea of principalities or mini nations within Australia. I remember learning as
a fun fact in primary school. Oh there's a man in this state and he calls himself the prince of some made up nation, and he rules over a patch of land, or he has an island. So that was always presented to me as very lighthearted, like, there's this guy, he lives in this place and he says he's the prince.
During the COVID nineteen pandemic, particularly during the lockdowns which forced people online as their primary form of socialization, that's when kind of SOBCIT ideologies really flourished in this country. It was a kind of a perfect storm. The isolation combined with repeated government orders to stay inside, as well as a significant amount of mis and disinformation about the safety of vaccines and government orders to get a vaccine and tell the government so that you could participate in
public life. All of this kind of combined to for a lot of people pushed them towards this anti government, anti law ideology. And as I've said, it was during that time that we saw that attempt to sue Dan Andrews, so late twenty twenty one.
See, now that's one kind of attempt on authority. Yeah, and last week we saw another, you know, a very aggressive one, the killing of two police officers, So what do we know about sob CITs and the police that relationship there.
In last week's case, the man suspected of killing those officers had made several anti police social media posts over the years. I think the first time this kind of broke into the public consciousness though, was the terrorist attack on police in Queensland in December twenty twenty two. The attackers in that case believed SOBCIT ideologies. They also had beliefs associated with Christian extremism which led them to murder
two police officers and their neighbor. But just to say that sovereign citizenship was part of that.
As you've mentioned, we've seen multiple examples of these attacks against police officers. Why do you think that, you know, these beliefs have led people to extreme violence against them?
My kind of thinking, my analysis is that police are the most visible and like accessible representation of everything that sovereign citizens don't believe in, the fake government, the laws that they don't accept, even like the tax dollars that they refuse to pay. Because obviously police are a state entity that gets government funding, which and government funding comes from our taxes, so I can understand why in their ideology. Police would be kind of the most visible representation of
everything they're against. The other thing about police is that they're accessible. You can call them, They're visible on a street corner, and as we've seen happen tragically now in Queensland and Victoria, they can come to your home. They can have a legitimate reason to come to your property.
Wow, that's really interesting. Thank you so much for explaining that to us, Lucy.
Thanks Atop.
We'll be back again this evening with the day's headlines and then with another deep dive tomorrow morning. Until then, have a great day. My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Aranda Banjelung Kalkadin woman from Gadighl country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torrestrate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.