Didn’t work out as she’d hoped I guess ?
The trial heard the “statement of notice” the woman handed to the care worker asserted she was “a living being sovereign to this land” who “hereby renounce and reject my former engagement with the courts… and their kronies (sic)… and disregard all orders as null and void”.
Throughout the trial the woman regularly interrupted the proceedings, resulting in Judge Haesler finding her in contempt of court.
“[She] repeatedly interjected, directed personal insults to me and others, harassed witnesses (including her own [children]), refused my directions and orders and talked over me excessively,” Judge Haesler wrote in a scathing judgement.
This is just really sad honestly.
I mean it’s fun to make fun of sov cits but I suspect that this woman is more of a victim of the movement than a proponent.
She likely has a range of substance abuse and mental health problems, gets her kid taken away, and then someone tells her all about how the govt doesn’t have the authority to do that.
The judge implied the same when he said that her ideology is a panacea to solve the loss of her child.
She might not be a very nice person, but I think she’s worthy of compassion.
All self confessed sovereign citizens should be outlawed ie. cease getting protection and benefit from the state.
I believe she was in state housing. Classic sovshit shitfuckery.
Why was the kid taken from her custody in the first place? Article doesn’t say but I suppose it is easy to imagine several scenarios given her kookiness.
Yeah but general kookiness isn’t enough.
There would need to be a demonstrated and ongoing threat to the wellfare of the child. Even then, resources for caring for children in that situation are limited, so they’re prioritised.
Obviously I can’t speak to this specific case but generally you’d only see a child being removed for any length of time where there was either substance or physical abuse.
We do call them cookers for a reason.
I didn’t know this flavor of dumbass was international, I thought we only grew them in the US. Though, given the beliefs, I suppose it really could be adapted anywhere.
Tom Tanuki created a two-part summary of the two main Aussie SovCit movements:
p1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea_7jUU489g
p2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIrcWtuLkdA
A couple of interesting notes I remember:
- Being more closely tied to British monarchy, our versions seem to stem more from the Canadian variant than the US, but there’s def plenty of crossover.
- Not sure if this is a big factor in the US movement too, but there’s a big focus on the family courts, so plenty of them are disenfranchised divorced parents who lost custody and have engaged in collective harassment of ex-partners and legal workers like judges.
- One of the main SovCit movements comes from an indigenous liberation perspective. It’s just as much a scam and stands in the way of actual resistance efforts, but there’s more to it than just ultraliberalism (e.g. US Libertarian ideology) and contrasts with the US SovCit White supremacy tones you mentioned.
We import all sorts of fringe political positions from the US.
Including the not-so-fringe idea that voting for a minor party is a wasted vote.
For what it’s worth, plenty of the Australian SovCit stuff was also thieved from Canada (given our similar situation with UK legal history).
We may have actually exported it to the rest of the world! In 1970, we had the Hutt River Province secede from the nation of Australia. To be fair to old Prince Leonard - he had valid grievances and was not just a nutter. The Australian Government was imposing wheat quotas on him when he was just about to harvest, and frankly didn’t exactly offer him much in the way of services.
According to my 2-minutes of Wikipedia research (which makes me an expert on this topic, don’t you know?), the Soverign Citizen Movement appeared in the USA in the “early 1970’s”. Which sounds to me like it may have drawn inspiration from the waves that Prince Leonard was making in Western Australia.
Some more “research” materials regarding unrecognised “micronations”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicronationAs usual, Australia punches above its weight in this regard…
Interesting. I know in the US they are closely tied to white supremacists, though there’s been some branching out.
I’ve seen it cited that the sovcit movement exists in 26 countries
It exists wherever they say it does surely?
I think you most commonly encounter them in tax-related situations.
I know someone who works for the local government and issues notices for local taxes. In some ways it’s a fairly natural progression to go from not wanting to pay your taxes to inventing some bonkers ideology explaining why you in fact do not need to pay taxes.
Comically, the city’s first move with delinquents is to simply stop their refuse (garbage?) collection service.
There’s a few in Perth. They occasionally paste some laughable text in the local papers proclaiming that they are sole bodies and not beholden to taxation. Or some other bumph. It’s odd that all sovshitness seems to come down to not paying taxes, while still using all the facilities that taxation provides.
I wonder where this sovereign state was.
Suspended on the underside of the flat earth.
@hanrahan
and how long till she is released and awarded the Medal of Valor…
.
Perhaps not, it’s not as if she was a white middle aged male…
