A self-proclaimed sovereign citizen is the subject of a massive manhunt in Australia after allegedly killing two police officers “in cold blood”.
Dezi Freeman, 56, is heavily armed and on the run and is accused of shooting three police officers who were serving him a warrant for alleged historical child sex abuse at a property in Porepunkah, about 30km northeast of Melbourne, on Tuesday morning.
Here in New Zealand, intelligence groups have identified extremist violence by a sovereign citizen as a “realistic possibility”.
Massey University associate psychology professor Matt Williams, who researches misinformation and conspiracy theories, said sovereign citizens have a “pseudo-legal” belief system.
“Roughly speaking, sovereign citizens are a group of people who incorrectly believe that government statutes do not apply to them unless they consent to this.”
A Raglan couple told a judge in February that they did not need council building consent because they identify as “sovereign citizens”. They were fined $20,000.
The movement also has a darker underbelly.
In July, Te Puke man Richard Sivell was jailed for death threats he made against former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on the social media platform Telegram. The judge presiding over the case said documents Sivell filed with the court were “pseudo-legalese nonsense” linked to sovereign citizen beliefs.
Sovereign citizens are already on the radar of police and intelligence services.
“There is a realistic possibility that a threat actor inspired by SovCit rhetoric will commit a spontaneous act of extremist violence in New Zealand,” a 2021 intelligence report by the Security Intelligence and Threats Group and the Combined Threat Assessment Group said.
The report said the SovCit movement is not “inherently violent”, but individuals have been responsible for incidents of politically motivated violent extremism overseas, primarily against law enforcement.
Police revoked the firearms licences of 62 people with views linked to the sovereign citizens movement after an intelligence operation in 2024.
Williams said the proportion of New Zealanders who identify as sovereign citizens was probably small.
“But as we’ve seen in Australia, a single true believer with a weapon can produce a great deal of harm,” Williams said.
Author Byron Clark, who wrote Fear: New Zealand’s hostile underworld of extremists, said it was unsurprising to learn the Australian shooter may have been radicalised during the Covid pandemic.
“I think during the pandemic, these ideas became popular as people looked at finding a way to opt out of public health measures like vaccine mandates and mask mandates and combined with the fact that people were spending a lot more time isolated and on social media.”
Freeman, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has a history of run-ins with the legal system, including a firearm prohibition order against him, losing his car licence and being arrested at an anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protest.
While the sovereign citizen movement appears to have gained more traction in New Zealand during the Covid-19 pandemic, police say it‘s been present here for over a decade.
“Most people who hold sort of extreme beliefs aren’t necessarily going to be violent, even if they might justify the violence of others ... But there is that minority who potentially do pose a risk,” Clark said.
The author said he wondered whether what he believed was a growing rural-urban divide in Australian and New Zealand society was factoring into sovereign citizens clashing with authorities.
As well as this week’s violence, two Queensland police constables and a neighbour were shot dead on a rural property in Wieambilla in 2022 by two gunmen who had wide-ranging conspiracy beliefs, including support for the sovereign citizen movement.
“I worry about, particularly in rural New Zealand, some of these ideas appealing to people, and it’s notable that when [sovereign citizen violence] has happened in Australia, it’s been kind of people out and in more rural areas.”
If someone you know is going down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, it’s good to maintain contact with them, Clark said.
“There’s a real risk of people just associating with other people who think that way, and if they alienate themselves from their wider kind of friends and fan out, then it’s harder for them to get out of that space if they decide they want to.”
Jaime Lyth is a multimedia journalist for the New Zealand Herald, focusing on crime and breaking news. Lyth began working under the NZ Herald masthead in 2021 as a reporter for the Northern Advocate in Whangārei.