Anti-immigration fanatics, including neo-Nazis and white nationalists, prepare to “March for Australia” around the country this weekend.
The pro-gun lobby celebrates a comeback for firearms, nearly three decades after the Port Arthur mass shooting prompted a national crackdown.
Today a heavily armed alleged police killer, who self-identifies as a law-rejecting “sovereign citizen”, is still at large in mountainous terrain in northern Victoria.
These incidents inevitably lead to the wider politics of societal harmony, public safety and the rule of law. If conservative Coalition politicians aren’t worried about how some in their ranks have been increasingly sucked into, or willingly dived into, the weird parallel universe of sovereign citizens and other fellow travellers in the far-right ecosystem, they should be. And so should their more moderate colleagues.
Bye law
How high the stakes can go is made clearer by the tragic circumstances of Porepunkah. On Tuesday morning Dezi Freeman allegedly ambushed and shot dead two police officers and wounded another before he fled into dense bushland. Freeman has been treated more as a pest than a menace by officialdom. But now a major re-evaluation of the sovereign citizen movement unfolds in real time.
The challenges are reinforced by the chillingly timely ABC TV Four Corners episode on August 18 titled “Lawfare”. It delved into the strange and scary alternative reality of the pseudo-law-evangelising sovereign citizens. What’s been revealed is an ideological and legal twilight zone with a political bleeding edge.
Just 18 months ago, more than a quarter of the 40-plus speakers featured at a heavily televised, day-long anti-renewable energy rally in Canberra were elected politicians from the Coalition. While portrayed as a farmers’ rally, its mainly anonymous “organising committee” was convened by the sovereign movement-adjacent, far right-aligned National Rational Energy Network (NREN), which first appeared as a private Facebook group in 2023.
Gospel according to nuke
NREN’s rise coincided with the emergence of the Coalition’s anti-renewables and pro-nuclear energy crusade, and has been closely connected to key conservative propaganda outfits Advance and the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). The Australia Wide Freedom Rallies & Community Events Facebook page, which promoted NREN events, features a banner image of an assault-rifle-carrying hooded man holding the red ensign flag and a message: “The revolution is coming.”
The usual suspects from the Coalition were speakers, including Barnaby Joyce MP and senators Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Matt Canavan. The most senior of them was Nationals leader David Littleproud, who issued a supportive media release. Littleproud shared a platform with One Nation founder Pauline Hanson and others of her ilk.
Right/wrong
There was a time when Nationals led the charge against far-right extremism in the regions. A Queensland conservative political legend, senator Ron “Boz” Boswell, campaigned relentlessly in the 1980s against the Australian League of Rights and the Citizens Electoral Council, forerunners to sovereign movement ideology. He also spoke out against One Nation when it emerged in the 1990s, and maintained the rage in following decades, made clear in his 2023 book Ron Boswell: Not Pretty, But Pretty Effective.
A bit of public online searching would have easily warned Littleproud and his Coalition colleagues that they were headed down a far-right rabbit hole. The NREN chairman/president and key rally organiser Grant Piper had posted a video on YouTube a week before the event, calling for peaceful protest while flagging the potential for “provocateurs”. He summed up with:
“Let’s just put the pressure on the government and the parliament and the bureaucracy, because they are our true enemy. Repeatedly they do the wrong thing by us, so they need to change their ways.”
Earlier, in equally classic “sovereign code”, he said:
“We’ve also got a lot of interest from other groups that have other issues that they’re upset about. And this goes, you know, whether it’s the digital ID, whether it’s the misinformation bill, whether it’s the COVID royal commission, whether it’s the war on cash and the whole banking crap. I mean, there’s so many things everywhere you touch and interact with supposedly your government and bureaucracy. It just doesn’t work, and it is nonsensical on so many levels, and we need to change all that. But, you know, a war is won one battle at a time.”
It’s a war? With the system of government the enemy?
Pay the Piper
Early this year, seeking to capitalise on the perceived agenda-setting success of the 2024 Reckless Renewables Rally, Piper and his network promoted the next iteration, a “freedom rally” to be held in Canberra in the first parliamentary sitting week of the year. But this time it would cover a wider suite of extremist causes, as well as “reckless renewables”. It was to be accompanied by a sovereign citizen-style “treason trial”, alarmingly similar in format to the faux legal proceedings revealed in Lawfare.
This nihilistic rejection of established legal systems and government authority, and its replacement with bogus alternatives, is central to the sovereign citizen phenomenon. For the planned “People’s Court Grand Jury Indictment of the Australian Parliament and Government Corporation officialdom”, the made-up charges listed included treason on the people, major fraud, insurrection, child abductions, human trafficking, genocide/democide, referendum frauds and more.
A Facebook post over Piper’s name and contact details, as NREN president, started with a self-outing link to the sovereign movement:
“AUSTRALIA NEEDS YOU, Save the date The Sovereign Australia Network Inc — a subsidiary of National Rational Energy Network Inc (NREN) is planning a huge anniversary Freedom Rally in Canberra on Saturday February 8th, 2025, and we would love your group to be involved.”
With the 2025 election just months off, it’s reasonable to assume alarm bells went off somewhere in Coalition ranks. By mid-January, the rally had been officially postponed, effectively cancelled, with minimal explanation. Piper insisted online that the treason trial would go ahead, and it did, as Guardian Australia reported. About 50 people gathered in the courtyard of Old Parliament House. But that fizzled out too.
Starved for news
Then a curious conspiracy theory came to life. An extreme far-right niche media outfit in the NREN orbit, Cairns News, based in the troppo climes of far-north Queensland, told its readers:
“Organisers said the response has not been as expected so it will be postponed to a date to be advised. Liberal-National Party members of the organising committee were not happy with protesting over constitutional matters and will set another date.”
When conspiracy-minded readers arced up online about politicians being involved — they typically hate Liberals nearly as much as Labor — the editor made it clear the reference was to LNP “members”, not politicians.
Can it be true NREN’s strings were being pulled by LNP players all along?
When the Coalition adopted Trumpist horseshit just before the May election, they should have expected to be hammered in the election. And so it proved to be. Now there is a brawl between the normal Liberals and the religious fruitcakes for the control of the coalition, the latter wanting to take the party further right, as advocated by people like Antic and others. That will see their demise, just like their predecessor UAP
G’day John, I don’t believe you can put religion into the equation here as our practising religion cohort in the latest census stood at 6% and in regards this sovereign citizens mob well they are unhinged as one can assume but as I live in rural Queensland surrounded by these type I can definitely guarantee none are church going and the few church goers I know in the nearest town are not aware of these extreme types or their idealogy and as you would expect the churches are full of older or even nearing end of lifers not these sovereign citizens.
Second that, Steven. Perhaps the answer is that fruitcakes are quick to cloak their ideas in religion. Plenty of us fear God, even if we don’t go to church much.
one can only hope your prognostications come true
I believe you are right Trump style extremism is being actively promoted in this country in what borders as foreign political intervention and the LNP and other parties have stepped into a trap to their detriment. We need a rational, intelligent opposition to make the most of our democracy.
Why “sovereign citizen”? Why not “outlaw”?
And ex-National MP Bob Katter, who is one of those leading the march, displayed the hypocrisy of these twerps when he went ballistic after a reporter dared to raise the subject of his own heritage. Even Bob’s sister has spoken about their grandfather’s struggle to gain citizenship, fighting against the same type of racism he now supports.
Why are all these fruit cakes so against immigrants? Everyone in Australia is an immigrant or descended from immigrants except perhaps the first nations people, and even they were immigrants 40 or 50,000 years ago. So all these crazies with immigrant heritages, often denied, witness North Queensland, are now ranting against those who now wish to follow in their footsteps and come here. Ridiculous!
It must be remembered that Bob Katter jnr is actually saner than Bob Katter snr was.
Yes, I am demonstrating my age and where I grew up.
I came down to Brisbane for a Art Holiday Workshop at University of Queensland.
I made some comment about something, “Mad as a Katter” to have my art teacher explain that it was “Mad as a Hatter” with the explanations regarding exposures to arsenic.
I made a mental note at 15, that it was “Mad as a Katter in FNQ and Mad as a Hatter everywhere else.
Bob Katter’s mother probably carried her birth certificate with her in her handbag, just as my grandmother did in those racist times.
Bob is crazy, but, he is still working the racist crowd up and he really should know better.
There has always been a Pro-Nazi and pro-Fascist element within both LNP and the right wing Catholic elements in the Labour Party, (who were pro Franco and pro Mussolini), from the 1930s, continuing into the early 1940s, when they called themselves the UAP, and the Groupers, within the Labour ranks, splitting off and becoming the DLP in 1955, and that party, Later the Liberal Party, (under both Lyons and Pig Iron Bob (Menzies) distinguished itself by sending German anti-Nazis (including Jewish people) back to Nazi Germany and Italian anti-fascists back to Fascist Italy. It also gaoled wharfies who refused to load pig iron bound for Japan, which would be used in imperialistic aggression against the Chinese workers and peasants. It was also banning anti-Nazi and anti-fascist books and films because they were offensive to friendly nations such as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy(up until 3/9/39), and examples included George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”. Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”, both book and film, and the film “Confessions of a Nazi Spy”. Also, I must not forget that in the 1930s, many UAP federal and state ministers expressed open support for Hitler, Mussolini, and Generalissimo Franco and tried to deport the anti-Nazi Jewish activist, Egon Kisch, who was also Jewish, back to Nazi Germany. So, in fact, the now thankfully departed former Premier of NSW, despicable Dominic, being revealed as wearing a Nazi uniform is not all that much out of character, going on the past history of the potato head/Dopey Dave toxic totalitarian LNP Mobsters. WE CAN ALSO ADD THAT BOTH JACINTA AND CHRIS MINNS, WITH THEIR LEMON COLOURED LABOUR JELLYFISH, WANT TO EMULATE JOH BJELKE-PETERSEN, AND ESTABLISH A JOH TYPE POLICE STATE HERE IN VICTORIA!!!!!!
Jesus wept! What will stop these nutjobs? Logic and reason clearly don’t work.
These groups are being enabled by the far right Coalition, and possibly Hanson’s lot. If somehow these political ‘outlaws or ‘disruptors’ could be banned from provoking and supporting these groups, through legislation, maybe it would quieten down a bit. Add to that legislation to criminalise far-right groups and parliamentarians benefiting financially from these groups- Advance Australia for example.
Free speech is fine until you get the extremists. Nothing is being done to curb these outspoken nascent far-righters. Action is needed now by legislation to support the AFP. The Labor government has been MIA for too long on this subject!
Yes, this fringe has been with us since the Brits raised the First Union flag in Botany Bay! 50y ago as a student doing my work experience I worked for one – lasted less than a week before getting kicked out, as I’d been raised in a family where black and white, rich and poor, all deserved respect, whereas my employer was enthusiastic about “finishing the job” of exterminating First Nations people. Bundaberg at that time was rife with “sovereign citizens” tho not called that, even one who on Saturdays (“the Sabbath”) would don his Nazi uniform and parade up and down outside the Brisbane Synagogue. No doubt historically some of the anti-government sentiment derived from the experience of immigrants with the governments they were fleeing, and some from perceptions of unfair dealings here, but it’s unequivocal that much is driven by politicians and commentators lying for their own private advantage. That, more so than discontent with government and other powerful institutions, should probably be our target in keeping fanaticism at bay.