Australian Authorities Continue to Ignore Sovereign Citizen Threat

The question as to how Dezi Freeman was able to ambush ten Victorian police officers attending his residence, an old bus on a compound with various residents at the end of a dirt track, located on Taungurung and Gunaikurnai land in the northeastern Victorian town of Porepunkah, in order to execute a warrant in regard to historical sex crimes on 26 August 2025, remains unanswered.

But the fact that Freeman was seemingly privy to the arrival of VicPol meant that he was able to catch state law enforcement by surprise and take the opportunity to gun down two police officers, which was of no surprise to those who knew him, as Crikey has exposed, the man had been posting on social media about his desire to murder police for the past seven years.

Freeman is now on the run from the authorities in bushland surrounding the town of Porepunkah, and VicPol is concerned that the man is being assisted by other people sympathetic to his cause, as Dezi has played a leading role in the local sovereign citizen movement since 2019, and it has been associated with the Australian Freedom movement that mobilised during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Four Corners documentary on the sovereign citizen movement aired on 18 August, seemingly forewarned of the Freeman murders a week later, as journalist Mahmood Fazal highlighted that despite the extreme far-right libertarians that comprise sovereign citizens seemingly having faded away post-COVID, these actors are actually operating and escalating in regional Australia.

The renewed interest in the threat of the sovereign citizen movement over the last fortnight has too coincided with a reinvigorated Freedom movement that mobilised, at times violently, right across Australian capitals on 31 August, and it is within the ranks of this far-right movement, which tends towards ‘Aussie white supremacy’, that characters, like Freeman, have developed a following.

White men killing freely

“Post COVID, the sovereign citizen movement isn’t fringe anymore,” Southern Cross University Dean of Law Professor David Heilpern told Four Corners. The former magistrate further recalled that it was back in his days on the bench, when he was first accosted by people in the NSW Local Court, who appeared to be spouting an “entirely different legal language” to that he usually used in the chamber.

The professor has been warning about the rise of sovereign citizens ever since the lockdowns, as has ASIO director general Mike Burgess, who, over the pandemic period, tracked the rise of these far-right actors online, who consider that Australian statutory law doesn’t apply to them, and instead follow a “pseudo-law”, which often comprises of relying on rare provisions within common law.

Sovereign citizens started making a splash on the Australian setting during the COVID pandemic, as many locals were confronted with the overbearing use of laws, to ensure that people did not leave their premises and that they must undertake a vaccination, for the first time, and these actors did so amongst the broader Freedom movement that again mobilised en masse last weekend.

During his 2022 Annual Threat Assessment, Burgess described the motley far-right crew that did develop online in suburban bedrooms across the nation, as comprising of “antivaccination agendas, conspiracy theories and antigovernment sovereign citizen beliefs”. And the top spy added that these individuals hold to a “cocktail of views, fears, frustrations and conspiracies”.

Burgess added that the domestic spying agency was expecting “to see more of this behaviour in Australia in the medium term”, and that “protests driven by diverse specific-issue grievances will be part of our security environment for the foreseeable future”, and he expected some of these protesters to advocate for the use of violence, and in some cases violence would be used.

The ASIO threat assessment of three years ago appears to foretell of the potential for events, like the Freeman murders and the December 2022 sovereign citizen killings on Kabi Kabi land in the Queensland rural locality of Wieambilla, which involved the Trains, two brothers and one wife, shooting and killing two Queensland police officers and a neighbour, before killing themselves.

A product of an exploitative system

The Freeman murders indicate what the Four Corners episode warned of a week earlier, that the Wieambilla sovereign citizen killings having occurred at the butt end of the COVID lockdown saga did not mark the end of an aberration that coincided with the pandemic, but in fact, as indicated more so by last Sunday’s mass freedom fighter rallies, these far-right actors are here to stay.

The sovereign citizen movement was first established, unsurprisingly, in the United States by William Potter Gale, who was an adherent of the Christian Identity belief system, which considers white people superior to nonwhite people. So, to attempt to associate the rising far-right actors of the moment as adhering to a mismatch of left and right ideologies is somewhat misguided.

Sovereign citizens prefer to be called living people and they’re antigovernment in stance. Adherents to its pseudo-law believe that statutory laws, the laws passed by parliaments, don’t apply to them, and neither does the paying of taxes, while they also appear to have a particular gripe with driver licence laws.

These libertarians rather consider common law, the law that’s arrived at via the judgements of courts, to uphold rare old laws that can be applied now to supersede current statutory law. They also have a keen belief in the power of the Magna Carta, a 1215 British royal charter of rights that was a precursor to laws like the US bill of rights, to uphold their rights in modern Australia.

There can be a tendency amongst the commentariat to lump in the First Peoples sovereignty movement with the sovereign citizens, which should be avoided. Sovereign citizens are, for the most part, European descended individuals, who don’t want to abide by the social contract that underpins western society. Sovereign citizens are part of and empowered by the society they are rejecting.

Worldwide Socialist Website journalist Oscar Grenfell points out that the extreme forms of far-right individualism that sovereign citizens adovcate for, or the right to do whatever they please regardless of societal consequences, actually constitutes what happens when the right to exploit all and sundry for profit that is espoused by the capitalist system is taken to the nth degree on an individual level.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were living on this continent for 60,000 years prior to white invasion, there system of law predates western models and to consider any rejection of the Australian state as some form of sovereign citizen movement is an attempt to erase the historical event of invasion, in the same manner that the neo-Nazis attempted to erase Camp Sovereignty.

Turning a blind eye to confused far-right actors

Prior to Sunday’s outpouring of Southern Cross flags on streets across the continent, there had been indications in the state of NSW that far-right agitators were on the rise due to a series of lone wolf actions that took place mid-last year. These incidents were noted by Burgess, when he and PM Anthony Albanese raised the National Terrorism Threat Level to probable in August 2024.

The first incident involved a 19-year-old Anglo Australian entering the Newcastle office of a NSW Labor MP in June 2024, holding a knife with the intent to behead the politician, before abruptly exiting. This was followed by a white 14-year-old stabbing a 22-year-old Chinese man at Sydney University the following week, which was the case that saw authorities starting to blur the lines.

Former NSW police assistant commissioner Mark Walton said at the time that the teenager was hard to label as the ideology he followed was “categorised as mixed and unclear”, adding that he was “not religiously motivated”, and he concluded that the man adhered to “a salad bar of ideologies”, which means that he had an interest in both left-wing and right-wing ideas.

Australian authorities have long been considered to either harbour sympathies for white supremacist extremists or at least, to look the other way when they are around. The reason behind this would appear to be that the nation of Australia was founded upon First Nations land, such as that of the Eora Nation, where the settler colonial city of Sydney is currently located.

The focus on the confused ideologies of violent far-right actors over the past 12 months appears to be Australian authorities once again attempting to do little or not much in regard to those who have taken white supremacy to the extreme in the Australian jurisdiction that once considered itself a purely white nation, in a similar manner to other ethnonationalist states.

But the turning of a blind eye to the rising white horde is to let far-right actors, like Dezi Freeman and the NSN’s Thomas Sewell, gain even more traction amongst the fringe dwellers in the white supremacist movement, which was seen on Sunday when thousands mobilised, and Freeman was heralded a hero by some, while the chief neo-Nazi was permitted to give the final address.

Main image: Photo of Dezi Freeman from his Facebook page