By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
THE ABC’s recent online and TV coverage of the growth of so-called sovereign citizens groups has again shown the organisation to be at their political core, a government propaganda outlet.
Back in June, when the newly-elected Tasmanian independent MP Craig Garland spoke at a Unity in Community meeting Ulverstone, a local “award winning” ABC reporter Adam Holmes launched a paranoid hit piece against him.
Holmes did his best to imply that it was somehow scandalous that a state MP attended and spoke at a political meeting attended by – shock and horror – “sovereign cititizens”.
The meeting had been arranged by prominent Launceston community activist and former councillor Shayne “Cush” Allison, and also featured as a speaker Darren Bergwerf from the Frankston My Place group in Victoria. This event also featured on ABC’s Four Corners documentary “LawFare”.
Ironically, the word “lawfare” refers to legal action taken by some rich and powerful entity with the objective of harrasssing and bankrupting its target. It does not apply to community-level legal action.
“Lawfare”, which ran during the week, featured various law activists across Australia including the Sovereign Peoples Assembly of Western Australia. The reporter Mahmood Kazal, seemed to have a listening ear, but in the wash-up it was legal establishment 1, the people 0.
The various activists were given reasonable time to put their views as were various law professors including David Heilpern, former NSW magistrate-turned Dean of Law at Southern Cross University.
Unsurprisingly, these mainstream legal practitiioners and academics were unanimous in their condemnation of the various arguments raised in courts by so-called sovereign citizens or freemen. The simple reason is that these arguments usually do not align with legal practice and/or court procedures.
Whether or not strawman or “commerce” arguments align with existing law is debatable, but telling a court that you, as a living breathing man on the land are not operating in commerce and are therefore not subject to the state’s legislation, is simply outside the scope of the legal system as we know it. Such arguments in Australian, UK and US courts are now routinely dismissed.
A more practical approach is to work within existing law as done by groups like Aussie Speeding Fines and KnowYourRightsGroup.com.au. We are also aware of people who use the private commercial notice system promoted by various gurus, although we are yet to see hard evidence of a government body directly responding to them.
Some of the greatest legal battles by freedom-loving Aussies have been fought in the courts using existing law. Darryl O’Bryan, the founder of the Melbourne group Community Law Resource Group, has much to say on that, as do former Senators Rod Culleton and Len Harris.
As for WA’s Sovereign Peoples Assembly (SPA), they were likened to a cult by one of the establishment observers featured by Four Corners. It’s difficult to see how their approach of running their own common law courts will ever be accepted by mainstream society and courts established under existing state and federal Constitutions.
SPA and others maintain, of course, that the system is inherently corrupted and broken, therefore they have no option to take the course they do. This is debatable, a debate that Cairns News is willing to air and make public.
However, the fact that SPA is doing what it does in running common law peoples’ courts, indicates the frustration many have with a system that frequently reveals corrupt and dictatorial tendencies and is distant from the people it is supposed to serve. SPA might be better off pushing for Citizens’ Initiated Referenda to be legislated into WA law.
We should note that the legal establishment itself is aware of encroachments by governments on traditional rights and freedoms and has produced a substantial report on that very issue called Traditional Rights and Freedoms—Encroachments by Commonwealth Laws (ALRC Report 129). It should have been extended to state governments.
Four Corners seems to infer that the court system in Australia is somehow above reproach. This is the same court system that on several occasions, somehow justified the draconian and unlawful actions of the NSW government in riding roughshod over historic rights and freedoms during Covid.
Among other outrages such as lockdowns and travel restrictions, the State Government of NSW (and other states) forced employees to take Covid- 19 injections or face dismissal from their jobs. As noted on the Law Reform Commission’s own website, people have a historic right at common law to informed consent for medical treatment, but this was simply cast aside by so-called government “orders”.
The judges were informed of these grievous breaches of historic civil and individual rights but that went over their heads. Essentially, their rulings were based on the spurious “supremacy of parliament” doctrine that infers if legislation says the government can impose a dictatorship, then it can.
And while this court system allowed Queensland doctor William Bay to regain his registration after being suspended by the dictatorial Australian Health Practitioners Agency (AHPRA), the courts in VIctoria upheld the same agency’s destruction of other Victorian doctors for merely giving advice and exemptions from government Covid dictates.
The ABC showed video footage of various people challenging cops during Covid enforcement operations. Some of it sounded a little hysterical and over the top, but there was no mention of an actual government-endorsed police state violating everyday rights and freedoms. Four Corners implied that it’s somehow outrageous and scandalous for people to resist police-state powers.
At a basic level the ABC missed the mark. In the words of Mahmood Fazal “these groups …. operate in an alternate reality where people have ultimate authority over the state”.
Neither Fazal nor his producers appear to have read the Preamble to the Commonwealth Constitution which, in accordance with the underlying principles of English law and natural law, opens, stating “WHEREAS the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established:…”
The people, and their sovereign, initiated the Federation of Australia and the rules of state, just as the people, or at least one particular group of English people, initiated the Magna Carta to curb the power of a ruling king.
Even today in the grounds at Parliament House, Canberra, there is a special area set aside to note the significance and place of the Magna Carta in our system of government.
The background article on the monument notes: “The effects of the actions of the English nobles at Runnymede have rippled out across the world and over time. Magna Carta gave us these concepts:
Justice for all. Freedom. Rule of Law (meaning that the people and the government agree to be ruled by law but that this law must be such that the government and the people are able and willing to obey it) and Trial by Jury.
Cynics have suggested it’s actually a memorial for something long dead. We hope otherwise.
