TRANSCRIPT
On the run and heavily armed, Dezi Freeman sent the rural Victorian town of Porepunkah into lockdown.
After allegedly gunning down three police officers and killing two, the 56-year-old fled the scene and remains at large in the Victorian bushland.
Community members say Freeman held views consistent with what's known as the sovereign citizen movement.
Now, he's somewhere in the Victorian bushland, an area police say he knows extremely well.
Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Mike Bush says they are putting in every effort to find him.
"Anything is possible. He knows that area. Even though we have experts in the area, he will know the area better than us. So, that's why we are putting in every expert, and supported by local knowledge."
It was a scene described as eerily similar to those in the rural Queensland town of Wieambilla in 2022, when two officers were ambushed and killed by a family of religious extremists on a rural driveway.
This time, police were executing a search warrant on Freeman's property, related to the Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Teams.
Known well to police, Freeman has previously aired out his issues with authority, referring to police as Nazis' and terrorist thugs.
Freeman was also involved in an attempt to have former Victorian Premier Dan Andrews tried for treason.
So, what are sovereign citizens? And what exactly do they believe?
"So we understand sovereign citizens to be people who declare themselves sovereign in themselves, not bound by the laws and the justice system of our country as it currently exists, and they see themselves as citizens, but basically not of our legal system."
Dr Kaz Ross is an independent researcher into far-right extremism, conspiracy theories and digital activism.
According to this belief system, accepting laws means you waive your rights as a sovereign citizen.
Sovereign citizens reportedly believe that by declaring themselves 'living' or 'natural' people, they can avoid things like paying taxes and fines.
Speaking to the ABC, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke says no one is above the law.
"Any ideology that says the law doesn't apply to you, is inherently dangerous. The whole principle by which we keep each other safe and work together as a cohesive community, is the concept that the same laws apply to all of us."
Earlier this year, the ASIO Annual Threat Assessment highlighted the growing threat of extremism in Australia.
Tony Burke says movements like these are more difficult to classify as they are often a combination of radical ideologies.
"When we raised the terror alert level from possible to probable last year Mike Burgess was quite specific about the fact we're now dealing with mixed ideologies, where you used to have formal terrorist cells and people would go down a pathway of a specific ideology. Those things still exist but there is a new threat of people latching on to a piece of this ideology, a piece for another mixed ideologies, that of themselves are logically incoherent and that has changed the nature of the threat"
When pulled over by police, sovereign citizens are often very careful to avoid showing I-D and many believe that as 'sovereigns' they are exempt from needing a driver's license.
Dr Ross says a better term to describe the movement is pseudo-law adherents.
"They believe in the law and they believe in justice. They just think that our current system is wrong. And so when they get into trouble with the law and they end up in court, they start making all these kind of wacky, way out, their arguments according to their legal system. And so they've been dubbed pseudo law adherence."
During the pandemic, the wave of anti-vaccine and anti-government protests saw a spike in conspiratorial beliefs.
Kaz Ross says during the pandemic lockdown, many people lost trust in the authorities and started to look for answers outside the mainstream.
"So for a lot of those people, they'd never really thought about the government or how we were governed or the operation of police or the police powers or anything like that. And for the first time in their life, they're being told, stay in your houses, get vaccinated, wear a mask. And they're like, what's going on? They've never had to challenge authority before, and it doesn't make any sense. And so they're looking for explanations. How does this make sense in our world? How does it make sense?"
The shooting has seen renewed calls for the government and police to crack down on these lawless sovereign citizens.
Experts say the police need to come down harder when those identifying with the movement breach other laws, such as tax fraud and driving without a license, instead of waiting for them to commit a violent crime.
Dr Ross says the threat is serious.
" You can't have people running around setting up their own legal systems and enacting their own citizen justice and believing that they're above the law, that they're in their own legal system, and that it's within their rights to go and try people for treason or to protect themselves with self-defence using any means necessary. That's extremely dangerous. And we've seen the results."
