Political rallies. Football games. Gun clubs. Run clubs. Look around and you will find one thing in common: the tribe. It is a primal instinct to belong, and what greater fishpond to find your people than the internet. But what happens when that tribe takes you down a rabbit hole you might not easily be able to dig yourself out from? Nor want to.
It is easy to dismiss sovereign citizens as conspiracy theorists, tinfoil-hatters, or anarchists. But step inside their orbit and you soon find they simply do not care what label you give them. They have all but closed ranks and rejected society as we know it – the mainstream media included. So, after months of negotiations between 7NEWS Spotlight producer Gareth Harvey and the Sovereign People's Assembly of Western Australia (SPAWA), I was stunned when they gave us permission to film with them – and agreed to sit down for lengthy interviews.
The Pandemic as a Tipping Point
The common theme throughout almost every conversation was COVID-19. They were enraged by the government's response, the vaccines, and the entire notion of a pandemic. They call bullshit on the whole thing. As they were talking, I could not help but think back to 2020. I remember those early weeks reporting on the pandemic in America. I watched – and photographed – hospital staff in hazmat suits wheeling the deceased into mobile morgues in New York City. I had seen the images on the front page of the New York Times and, on a rather morbid fact-finding mission, needed to see it with my own eyes. We embedded with a team of paramedics and watched patient after patient gasping for air as this mystery virus ravaged their lungs.
Back then, I really did not know how contagious – or dangerous – COVID was. So, I wore a pair of ski goggles into an apartment with paramedics responding to a welfare check on a COVID patient at home. Who knows if the goggles did anything to protect my eyes from the airborne virus. They certainly did not shield me from the stench of the decomposing body they had just found in an apartment. It was confronting then. And it is confronting now to hear it labelled a hoax.
Clearly, COVID-19 was a tipping point for many Australians. Having a police force dictate where they could travel or what they could do was jarring, and they made their voices heard. But six years on, the pandemic still appears to be at the heart of this breakdown of trust between governments and certain sections of society who simply refuse to acknowledge their authority or live by the rules.
Tax is Voluntary
Tax is voluntary, Mandy Seneno told me confidently, sitting alongside three other SPAWA-appointed sheriffs. They do not tell you that. Instead, the group promotes common lore and believes – with unflinching conviction – we have all been sold a lie and the government holds absolutely no authority over the people. So convinced the COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous, they have started deploying their sheriffs, clad in purple polo shirts, to serve warrants on suburban pharmacies across Perth. To what end? I am not entirely sure. Apparently, in their version of utopia, they will all be locked away in prisons, sharing a cell with former Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
If you had never heard of the group, I would imagine it is quite intimidating to receive their wad of paperwork and hard drive of evidence. WA Police Commissioner Col Blanch slammed their actions as outrageous and dangerous. It is not a proper argument, he said. It is not a proper opposition to ideas. It is fundamentally rejecting what we have all accepted is the way we should live together as a community, and it extends out to pharmacists. These are educated good people trying to help our community.
Gun Licences Under Scrutiny
This is a group united by grievances and a deep distrust of the government. So, it begs the question: are they fit to hold a gun licence? It is a hard no from Commissioner Blanch. WA's top cop, who has been on the receiving end of sovereign citizen threats, has seized guns from some 70 SPAWA members and associates. In his eyes, Dezi Freeman is the canary down the coal mine, along with other deadly ambushes like Wieambilla, Queensland in 2022. For our country to lose six officers in four years, it just shows you the scale of risk, he said. He is not prepared to lose another.
