Case Explained:This article breaks down the legal background, charges, and implications of Case Explained: The sovereign citizen ‘workshops’ clogging up Australian courts – Legal Perspective
David Heilpern was going undercover. A New South Wales magistrate for 22 years, and now dean of law at Southern Cross University, he wore a flannelette shirt and broad-brimmed hat to better disguise himself. His quarry was a notorious pseudo-law “guru”, a man who travels the country giving paid workshops to people desperate to avoid various legal consequences – often traffic infringements or asset seizures.
The man is not a lawyer. He is not licensed to dispense legal advice, and his website – where he solicits membership fees for his “club” – is filled with suspiciously verbose disclaimers regarding his liability. Nonetheless, he receives money for spouting arcane “gobbledegook” to credulous audiences. “The number of these profiteers is increasing,” Heilpern tells The Saturday Paper. “And they are performing to full audiences. They offer subscription-based services and they claim to have tens of thousands [of members]. This is a commercial venture, and they’re making money from others’ misery. State governments and consumer affairs bodies should be protecting people.”
The self-described “gurus”, he says, “are selling a method of dealing with criminal matters that will only lead to longer disqualification periods and greater fines and even imprisonment. But their sales pitch is: ‘it works’. It’s not just obtuse but fraudulent. They tout successes that don’t exist.”
This is the strange world of sovereign citizens, pseudo-law and the profiteers who offer bizarre, vexatious and fatally flawed legal advice to the aggrieved and desperate. The strong anecdotal evidence from magistrates across the country is that “warfare by paper”, and the prevalence of hostile sovereign citizens representing themselves in courts, is quickly increasing and placing enormous pressure on an already strained judicial system.
Grasping the logic of sovereign citizens is much like wrestling a column of smoke, but at its most basic it’s a selective rejection of state authority, which is often described as both tyrannical and legally baseless. Sovereign citizens will often refer to two versions of themselves: a “straw man” and their real, flesh-and-blood self. The straw man is a legal construct – it’s often likened to a corporate identity – that the state imposes on individuals at birth. In their peculiar attempts to squirm free of this authority, sovereign citizens will invoke their flesh-and-blood selves as distinct from and superior to the supposed straw man.
Clear? If not, don’t worry; it’s often not clear to magistrates. In the matter of R v Sweet (2021) in the Queensland District Court, the applicant invoked the “straw man” argument in an attempt to escape drug charges. The presiding judge wrote: “some of the language used, and documents relied upon, resemble spells or incantations”.
“With the global financial crisis of 2007, this American idea sort of went global,” says Harry Hobbs, an associate professor at UNSW Sydney, who edited Pseudolaw and Sovereign Citizens, an anthology published last year. “There was great uncertainty. People feared losing their home. People did lose their home. And pseudo-law popped up again as an idea: well, actually, you don’t need to pay a mortgage. It’s all fake anyway. And we saw at this point gurus who make money selling these schemes started travelling from the United States, travelling to Australia, travelling elsewhere to kind of seed it and to find consumers who are willing to pay for this stuff.”
Hobbs says the Covid crisis and the resulting conspicuous exercise of state authority regarding lockdowns and vaccination supercharged the popularity of the idea. “Covid was another structural crisis and it exploded in popularity again. And while this pseudo-law never works in court, it can make someone feel empowered in an alienating and uncertain environment. Covid felt like a natural vector for it.”
There’s no shortage of “gurus” and websites, often requiring membership fees, offering gibberish as legal wisdom. One popular site is Know Your Rights, once endorsed by the former One Nation senator Rod Culleton, who was convicted last year for providing false information to the Australian Electoral Commission. You can find here advice that “personal tax is voluntary” and “speeding fines, parking fines, red light camera fines … are ALL completely illegal”.
The latter advice was disastrously relied upon by a Queensland woman last year, who cited it – and invoked the straw man/flesh-and-blood distinction – in a letter to the Queensland Police Service that declared her refusal to pay her speeding fine. Recognising the woman’s arguments as being those of sovereign citizens, and sensitive to the movement’s links with violent extremism, the police sought to revoke her firearms licence.
The applicant appealed to the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal but soon became contrite. She had been “naive” and “stupid”, she admitted, and did not identify as a sovereign citizen – she thought she was merely citing the Constitution.
This would be an example of the “naive” adherent, Hobbs says. There are other types, though. There are the “mercenaries” who cynically file voluminous nonsense with registries and petulantly deny the authority of courts in order to gum up the process. And there are “true believers” who sincerely hold fantastical views of the law.
Writing anonymously in an edition of the Journal of Judicial Administration last year, an Australian magistrate offered a personal account of the phenomenon. “Dealing with people who have pseudo-law beliefs is the most stressful and unpleasant part of my job as a Magistrate,” she wrote. “Sadly, more and more people with pseudo-law beliefs will be clogging up the Magistrates Court in the future.”
The magistrate, in fact, went further: she described a faintly sinister atmosphere, and wrote of one man who frequently sat in her courtroom and glowered at her. “I did think it was intimidating and unstable behaviour from someone who may have been particularly angry with me because I had [once] remanded him in custody,” she wrote. “I was concerned about whether he might be dangerous, particularly as I was a woman living alone in a regional town. His behaviour made me fearful not just of a physical assault, but also of a possible sexual assault.”
The magistrate subsequently changed her habits. She stopped walking to work, fearful she would be followed home. In her article, she observed: “There appears to me to be a direct relationship between anti-government, anti-authoritarian, disruptive pseudo-law adherents and misogynistic beliefs. The fact that a female judicial officer is presiding seems to make them particularly angry and aggressive.”
If this was once considered by some judges and lawyers as merely an eccentricity, as one lawyer suggested to me, it’s no longer dismissed as harmless. There’s the spectre of Dezi Freeman, a self-declared sovereign citizen who allegedly shot three police officers in rural Victoria last year, two of them fatally; and the Train family who fatally ambushed two police officers and murdered a neighbour on their remote Queensland property in 2022. The state coroner found the Trains collectively experienced paranoid delusions; the Queensland Police Service argued their actions were religiously motivated terrorism.
As such, the security of courts and their officers has become a more urgent matter. “I’ve had conversations with court security staff and court administrators and they say if they know someone is a pseudo-law adherent then they have to roster on more security,” Harry Hobbs says. “So there are concerns over security, particularly in the lower local courts in regional centres where there isn’t security, or there isn’t consistent security. I’ve had conversations with judges where people have turned up with a pistol in their bum bag – but happily they were turned away.”
Judges are now receiving specialised training in dealing with sovereign citizens in their courts, and legal conferences are now increasingly dedicating sessions to the phenomenon. For David Heilpern, the affronts are multiple. There is the acute displeasure of engaging them in court; there is the exploitative guru circuit; and finally, there is the extraordinary cost in court time and resources. “Of course, at the back of the judicial officer’s mind is the thought that this is all a colossal and onanistic waste of time,” he wrote in a 2025 journal article “Reflections on Pseudolaw and the Local Court”. “The outcome of guilt is almost certain yet child sex victims wait years for hearings, domestic violence matters are delayed and the business of the court grinds to a halt.”
Heilpern tells me that, regardless, one must have saintly patience – and respecting and supporting self-representing litigants is a bedrock principle of our judicial system. But the pseudo-law practised by sovereign citizens – whether they be naive, mercenary or fanatically sincere – is enormously costly. Matters that should last one minute can last 30; matters that should take one hour can now take several days.
“Dezi Freeman’s conversion to hardcore sovereign citizenship occurred over a series of traffic matters,” Heilpern says. “And the time he took up in court fighting traffic matters – it’s hundreds of hours. And the magistrates I speak to say that this problem is massively increasing.”
When Heilpern attended the gurus’ workshops incognito, he found a depressing credulity among the audience and a corresponding slickness in the gurus’ performance. “[The audience] weren’t there to question anything,” he says. “They were there to absorb. They were accepting of this gibberish. And there’s some charisma to these people. It’s a serious problem. There’s no other cult that I know that’s led to the death of four police officers.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
February 7, 2026 as “The straw man cometh”.
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