Warning: the following article contains disturbing content.
It took a little over a year for Robert Sudy to realise the pseudo-law movement he had been a part of - which shared similar ideas about legal rights with the sovereign citizen movement in the US - was futile.
“I was being led into something that wasn't really going to work legally,” he told The Feed from remote NSW, where he lives off-the-grid.
The former pseudo-law adherent, who wasn’t part of any organised group, had been lured into the broader movement after he searched online on how to contest his driving offences in 2011. He now dedicates his time to research and is an expert on the movement.
But he says contesting a legal matter such as this was the entry point for many people.
Pseudo-law expert Robert Sudy describes the sovereign citizen movement as having a "mind virus". Credit: Supplied
But now Mr Sudy is concerned by the broadening spectrum of followers.
That concern was reaffirmed following reports that one of the Queensland police shooters, who gunned down two young police constables on Monday evening, was linked to conspiracy theory websites and the sovereign citizen ideology.
“Now it's become like a social phenomena, a type of a tool in which people can exert their feelings of disenchantment with the government,” Mr Sudy said.
"And I brought this to the attention of authorities in 2014."
Who are 'sovereign citizens' and what do they believe?
They are people who subscribe to various pseudo-law concepts – some organised in groups and some not - and believe they are not under the jurisdiction of the federal government and claim to be answerable only to their particular interpretations of the common law.
In Australia, people who follow a similar ideology to sovereign citizens sometimes refer to themselves as 'Freemen of the land', 'living people' or 'sovereign people'.
Though the 'Freeman on the land' movement is more prevalent in Commonwealth countries, the original Sovereign Citizen movement first appeared in the US during the 1970s.
Sovereign citizens were involved in 15 per cent of the 84 FBI-designated domestic terrorism incidents in the US between 2015 and 2019, according to a report citing FBI figures in May 2021.
Lockdown protests in Australia supercharged the sovereign citizen's movement as members could "network" with other protestors. Source: AAP / Mick Tsikas
Dr Kaz Ross, an independent researcher of far-right extremists and conspiracy groups, told The Feed since their emergence in Australia in the 1990s, sovereign citizens have become "more anti-authority, anti-government, anti-police, anti-media”.
Are they an organised movement or a small group of believers?
The movement has different ‘denominations’ with different leaders, or ‘gurus’, who head their own slice of the wider group, Mr Sudy tells The Feed.
Dr Ross pinpoints Queensland and Western Australia as the two main centres of the sovereign citizen movement in Australia. In Queensland, she said many followers are ex-military or ex-police officers, with one of the key local figureheads being a former police officer himself.
A year ago, the 'leaders' met with one another over Zoom to network and share ideas.
“They are organised groups. In Perth and in Queensland during the pandemic, they actually got little badges made up, sheriff badges, and they were running around trying to arrest government officials.”
In a video found by police in 2021, a member of the group purporting to be the AFP Commissioner and encouraged others to join. Police found no evidence that the group would carry out any specific violent act, but confiscated 470 fake badges.
In February of this year, 74-year-old man Wayne Glew, a known figure in the movement, was charged for allegedly inciting others to arrest government ministers, including Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan.
A screenshot of a Twitter account titled, 'Has Wayne Glew seized the Government Yet?' Credit: Twitter
Their idea is to replace the existing government with “the people’s government", Dr Ross said, explaining there is also a lot of "fodder" in the generally non-violent mix of people.
“(Some of them) run around serving writs on the local police stations to arrest this and arrest that - and they're just like mums and dads that have just got really sucked into it,” she said.
Dr Ross said others encouraged people to defend their land with weapons and resort to violence towards politicians.
"And then people wonder why they go violent," she said.
With pandemic restrictions lifted, has the movement dissipated at all?
Cam Smith, an Australian podcaster and radio host who has been hosting discussions on conspiracy theorists and the far-right for more than six years, said lockdown protests supercharged the movement, acting as 'face-to-face networking events'.
“Since we've sort of done away with most of the COVID restrictions, it has definitely ebbed a bit, but there's still some momentum there,” Mr Smith told The Feed.
“If you look at the traffic on some of the conspiracy websites, you can see that since the last lockdowns they’ve just completely dropped off. But they're still higher than they were before the pandemic.”
Looking back only a week, Dr Ross says similar insurrections are being staged by citizen’s movements in other countries.
In Germany on 8 December, a group closely associated with the Reichsbürger movement - meaning “citizens of the Reich” - which rejects the legitimacy of the state, .
Twenty-five suspects were arrested after coordinated raids in Germany after a planned coup to overthrow the government. Source: Anadolu / Anadolu Agency
“Germany is where you end up. People with weapons, training, guns planning to take down the government,” Dr Ross said.
Mr Sudy said he warned police about the growing movement in 2014 and was shocked when their estimation of membership was lower than he expected.
"There was an investigation in NSW, which was in 2015, with the police commissioner...They said there were 300 sovereign citizens in NSW - I'd said there were already about 30,000."
Correction: This article was updated to reflect Robert Sudy's former involvement in the pseudo-law movement, which is an overarching ideology with different offshoots including the US sovereign citizens movement and Canadian Freeman on the Land movement.
