Who are Sovereign Citizens in Australia??

The BBC reported that two police officers who were shot dead while on duty in a rural Australian town have been named, as a massive search continues for their alleged killer. Victoria Police identified the victims as a 59-year-old Detective a local officer nearing retirement, and 35-year-old Senior Constable. The pair had travelled to the property in Porepunkah, in rural Victoria north-east of Melbourne, alongside 8 colleagues to execute a warrant for alleged sexual offences. Another officer was seriously injured in the shootout but was taken to hospital for surgery. Police say the suspect, a local man aged 56, is heavily armed and still at large several days later.

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Mike Bush said the devastating loss of the officers struck at the heart of both the broader policing family and the Porepunkah community. “It is not lost on me that our members take a risk every time they go to work to protect the Victorian community. While we all live with the knowledge that the worst could happen on a shift, we don't expect it to”, he said.

The suspect has previously described himself as a Sovereign Citizen, referring to a person that falsely believes they aren't subject to Australian laws and government authority. His hatred of authority has been well documented in online posts, videos and court documents. Police have said it is too early to answer questions about the suspect's beliefs but the incident has revived questions over how authorities deal with extremists views. Other questions remain: how did an Australian who is not a policeman or army member, get hold of guns? Did the tiny rural town of Porepunkah not know about the guns? Did the police not know about the suspect’s openly published views on killing police? He called police "terrorist thugs", compared them to Nazis and tried to arrest a magistrate during court proceedings.

Australian media reports that the suspect described himself as a sovereign citizen, who typically believe they are immune from government rules. In Australia, the movement saw a particular boom during the Covid lockdowns of 2020. Victoria's then-Chief Police Commissioner Shane Patton said at the time that officers were forced to smash the windows of cars and pull people out to provide details after they refused to answer questions or show documents. An Australian Federal Police briefing note from 2023 said the movement had an underlying capacity to inspire violence.

Protesters demanding an end to Covid lockdowns

Melbourne 2023, The Age

In 2021, the suspect was involved in an attempt to have then-state Premier Daniel Andrews tried for treason. The suspect was arrested outside a court in Victoria, where c250 anti-government protesters had assembled. The Sovereign Citizen Movement is growing group of people who believe that laws do not apply to them threatens police and law enforcement around the world, experts and officials say. So-called sovereign citizens believe they are immune from government rules and in some cases - including recently in Australia and the US - have violently confronted police. Coronavirus mitigation measures, including mandatory social distancing and mask wearing, may also have fuelled the anti-government conspiracy and spreading its message to a global minority that view the deadly pandemic as a hoax.

The FBI has described the movement as domestic terrorism in the US and calls followers anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or sovereign from the US. The ideology hatched in the 1970s and grew out of Posse Comitatus, a US anti-government group that contained many followers who were anti-Semitic and believed governments were controlled by Jews. Sovereign citizens and anti-government groups became familiar to Americans in the 1990s. But any sympathy the wider public may have had towards such movements evaporated after the horrific Oklahoma City attack. Now there are signs that their ideas are catching on again. In the late 1990s, the ideology reached Canada through anti-tax groups, before later going to Australia and then the UK and Ireland. In Australia, police attributed a dangerous rise in people resisting Covid lockdown orders, sometimes violently, to the sovereign citizen movement.