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As the search for sovereign citizen Dezi Freeman expands into the largest ever tactical deployment of police, a profile is emerging of an ideology that excuses murder in the name of resistance. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.

The rise of sovereign citizens and the hunt for Dezi Freeman

The search for fugitive Dezi Freeman continues.

Credit: Victoria Police

Throughout history, the former detective and police negotiator tells me, there have been seven basic motivations for crime. Lust, greed, egotism, anger, revenge and plain excitement. That’s six. The seventh, he says, is the rarest and hardest to negotiate with: political ideology.

“What sets Dezi Freeman apart from all those other people who might be motivated to take a hostage, say, is that it’s difficult to negotiate with someone who has a political ideology, because the enemy is the state,” says Vincent Hurley, a New South Wales Police Force veteran and now a lecturer of criminology at Macquarie University. “It is the government, it’s the police, it’s the courts, so you cannot give them anything tangible that will ever satisfy them.”

On August 26, Dezi Freeman is alleged to have fatally shot two police officers, injured a third, taken their guns and fled into the dense bushland at the foot of Mount Buffalo
in Victoria’s Alpine region. He has not been seen since.

On that day, 10 police officers arrived to serve Freeman with a warrant for historic child sexual abuse. The number of officers, I was told, should suggest the seriousness with which they approached him.

With his wife and young children, Freeman lived off the grid on a property owned by someone else. Their home comprised an old bus, shipping containers and a small marquee tent – in a state of squalor or modest simplicity, depending on who you speak to.

Heavily armed and possessed of advanced bush skills, Freeman is now the target of a historic, 450-member manhunt that includes tactical officers from every state’s police force. For three weeks now, police have navigated gorges, caves, mine shafts, heavy bush and snowy mountains. They have crossed rivers and searched behind waterfalls. In the first week, they did so in storms and heavy fog.

For now, Freeman is Schrödinger’s sovereign citizen: he may be alive or dead. If alive, he may have secreted himself within the vast Mount Buffalo National Park, or left the area or even the state, though police consider this highly unlikely. He may be sheltered in someone’s home, though more than a hundred have now been searched, or he may have long ago prepared a cave or an abandoned mine shaft in anticipation of an escape or the apocalyptic Rapture that Freeman’s local priest has said the fugitive was increasingly invoking.

For many who knew Dezi Freeman, born Desmond Filby, Covid was a transformative moment. Like many others, he came to see the Victorian government’s response – strict lockdowns, shuttered businesses, mandatory masking and vaccinations – as a sinister form of authoritarianism. The chief villain was then premier Daniel Andrews.

Freeman didn’t simply believe the state had dramatically overreached – he argued that all state power is invalid. The sovereign citizen’s hostility for authority is not a matter of degrees but of category: democracy is an illusion and its falsity can be exposed – and this is the really strange and exhausting part – through the arcane use of legal filings, name changes and quirky grammar. Not only can the fiction of state power be revealed by this eccentricity but one can also be exempted from its overbearing laws and taxes. Various courts are clogged with what’s now known as “paper terrorism” – a flood of arcane or vexatious filings.

According to Father Tony Shallue, Freeman’s Christian faith had also darkened. Shallue is the pastor of the church, Our Lady of the Snow, that Freeman and his family frequently attended for Sunday mass. The pastor would not speak to The Saturday Paper – an intermediary said he’s both distraught and sensitive to the possibility of further public statements becoming unwittingly inflammatory. A fortnight ago, though, he shared with media outside his church that Freeman had, in recent months, wondered to him if the newly elected Pope Leo XIV was the Antichrist and the End Times were approaching. “It’s dangerous thinking, because you can fulfil your own prophecy,” Shallue said.

To better understand Freeman’s mentality, I called the evangelical pastor Paul Furlong. Furlong leads the Christian Revival Church in Narre Warren in the outer south-east of Melbourne. On Facebook, a platform from which a court banned him in 2021, he wrote that the media’s descriptions of Dezi Freeman and his alleged crimes were propaganda, an attempt to “remove more of our civil liberties and paint all freedom fighters as conspiracy theorists … It is in fact the government/police that are operating above and outside the law!!!! I am not condoning the death of 2 police BUT i can understand the incessant harassment and threats and wicked way drive you to your wits end! Which is exactly the story here!!!”

In 2021, Furlong was arrested for breaching lockdown restrictions when he opened his church to maskless worshippers. At the time, he shared with his congregation his belief that the virus was a hoax, a way of diminishing civil rights across the globe and replacing it with a new and godless world order. Furlong spent 16 days in a cell in a Melbourne remand centre – where, he proudly tells The Saturday Paper, he converted several prisoners to the word of God. He says the size of his church increased substantially.

Furlong says he was apolitical before Covid. Like Freeman, it was a transformative moment – something that radicalised him or, in his words, had reinforced his commitment to obeying God before a “wicked and evil” government. “I just lived the normal life [before Covid],” he says. “I’ve never been political. I’ve never, not even in the slightest terms, gone down any type of rabbit hole.” He says that “the minute I stood up for freedom”, the media labelled him a conspiracy theorist. “The media for the most part is propaganda and a tool of the government and controlled by the government.”

Furlong says he was incessantly harassed by police, and that his aquarium business – Lots of Fins, also based in Narre Warren – suffered from searches and closure. For his court appearances, Furlong dumped his “useless” lawyers and represented himself, another similarity with Freeman. “Seeing the video of Dezi in court, other than arresting the magistrate, the way he represented himself and stood up to the magistrate and the perversion of justice – it is exactly the spitting image of how I’ve learned to stand up for myself in court,” Furlong says.

That court appearance of Freeman was in 2019, in the Victorian County Court of Wangaratta, when he was disputing a matter of public access to Mount Buffalo National Park – the one now being combed by the largest tactical deployment of police in Australian history.

Freeman’s court hearings were numerous. Appearing on matters ranging from trespass to driving without a licence, he had become notorious within the County Court circuit for representing himself – and doing so with an implacable hostility and baroque, often insensible, arguments.

But Furlong sees a “freedom fighter”, a man “pushed to such an emotional place” by the serial harassment of police. He has doubts about the alleged shooting – that is, about whether it even took place – but when I ask him if he believes the Bible ever sanctions murder, he offers a chilling distinction. “I can answer that,” he says. “If you do a study on the Ten Commandments, that word ‘Thou shall not kill’ – it didn’t say that, it said ‘Thou shall not murder’. Big difference, right there. I think that answers your question.”

Furlong ends our long conversation with his belief in the imminency of Armageddon, though he doesn’t like that word. He prefers The Rapture or the Great Snatching. Regardless, it’s striking how calmly Furlong speaks about “the great judgement of God pouring upon the Earth” and how soon it will be imposed.

Last week, Victoria Police softened their travel advice for the Porepunkah area. Local businesses have experienced losses from depressed tourism, a fact recently acknowledged by the Victorian government with a modest sum of compensation.

In the same week, Victoria Police released a clutch of photographs of the search. They were dramatic and professionally composed, and made even more compelling by the natural environment. Here was public confirmation of the scale and sophistication of the manhunt, and I wondered if it didn’t also provide Freeman and his ideological comrades with some romantic iconography – all this for one man?

Meanwhile, police are studying his criminal file, social media and medical records, and contemplating his psychological qualities in preparation for discovery. That said, police negotiation is often intuitive and sometimes improvised, according to Vincent Hurley. “One of the things you must have as a negotiator is that instinctive ability to be able to communicate with people there on the spot,” he says. “Surprisingly, not many negotiators have any formal tertiary qualifications in psychology, because the situation doesn’t lend itself to that. You can’t stop and think: ‘Well, now they’re exhibiting signs of grandeur so now I need to do this.’ If you did that, then you would lose the momentum and that would be detrimental. So, it has to be a communication. It has to be intrinsic in the negotiator to be able to pick up on subtleties.”

Hurley says that should police find Freeman alive, there will be no rush to go in. If he’s discovered alone in the wilderness, as most assume, then the threat he poses will be trained exclusively upon police and not the public. Thus, police can work without urgency to isolate and surround him.

Hurley has thought about Freeman’s presumed egotism and implacability, and says he would approach him gently in negotiation. “You’d have to take cues from him,” Hurley says. “I wouldn’t even start with what his motivations were, or what he wanted. I’d ask him how he got to where he got, in the physical sense. How did you escape, and where did you go, and what did you do? That way, you’re not focusing on his ideology. You’re just giving him the opportunity to boast to the police.”

Allowing Freeman to describe his achievements to his alleged tormentors might offer some emotional disarmament. Hurley sees “an excuse to strike up conversation, as well as looking for possible inroads into his mind, or how you might be able to resolve this. A big ego like his, you wouldn’t immediately go to the issue because that would prove absolutely futile.”

One Australian Federal Police officer with experience in counterterrorism operations and the monitoring of political extremism expresses a more general anxiety to me about the scope of Freeman’s cause. “The increased use of social media and distrust of governments since Covid, like-minded individuals in the movement can mobilise more efficiently, and have their beliefs validated, which directly motivates some individuals to violence.”

With the weather improving, and the police’s progress made somewhat easier, the search continues.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 20, 2025 as "Enemy of the state".

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