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August 28, 2025 15 mins

The man alleged to have killed two police officers in the Victorian town of Porepunkah this week self-identified as a sovereign citizen.

Dezi Freeman’s hatred of police and rejection of government and the law are well-documented in social media posts and court documents.

Like many in the movement, Freeman’s views reportedly became more radical during the COVID-19 pandemic. During that time, he built a public profile, sharing his views on vaccinations, lockdowns and face masks.

Investigative reporter Mahmood Fazal has documented the rise of the sovereign citizen movement for the ABC’s Four Corners program and says the beliefs held by this community pose a significant threat to Australia.


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Guest: Four Corners reporter Mahmood Fazal 

Photo: AAP Image/Supplied by Youtube, Prime 7 news

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
My mood.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
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

(00:35):
like to say I felt vindicated, but to be honest,
I felt sick.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
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

(01:03):
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

(01:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
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.

(02:17):
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

(02:40):
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.

Speaker 4 (02:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
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.

Speaker 4 (03:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
And they aim their kind of threats towards what they
see as oppressive government institutions.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
So can we just unpack the word sovereign in particular?
Why is that the word that is being used here.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
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

(04:26):
considered the authority. So there's a lot of kind of
semantic games being played for different agendas.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
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?

Speaker 1 (04:43):
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.

(05:03):
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

(05:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
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

(06:08):
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,

(06:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
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

(07:12):
with what you've observed.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
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

(07:35):
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

(07:56):
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

(08:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Who's got all the guns and it's now time in
history as a population boom disarmed as they're not being genocide.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
What do they mean by genocide when they're referring to
their rights.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
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

(09:12):
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

(09:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
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,

(10:26):
courts or political parties.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
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

(11:04):
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

(11:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
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

(12:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:46):
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,

(13:08):
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

(13:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Mamie. Thank you so much for your time.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
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

(14:17):
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

(14:40):
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

(15:01):
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,
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