Sue is angry. She can’t remember when it started. Maybe it was when she moved out of the city and bought a lifestyle block in the country with her husband. But she doesn’t think so. In her now hazy memory, the first few years were good. They escaped the rat race and bought five acres and some animals and spent a couple of years doing up a draughty 1930’s villa.
It was all good until the council told them
they couldn’t get access to the town’s water supply. Then that “bloody goofy
toothed” woman became Prime Minister and in Sue’s mind the whole thing went to
shit.
All the environmental laws that the new Labour
government brought in seem to be targeted directly at Sue. And after all the
hard work that she and husband had done, the layabouts and work shy people
seemed to be winning out.
Then Covid came along and Sue disappeared
entirely down the rabbit holes that the pandemic offered. She was already
suspicious of anything Jacinda Ardern said. She was trying to ban cows after
all and was poisoning the land with 1080 bait. And Sue had moved to the country
to immerse herself in the freedoms that New Zealand life is supposed to offer.
The freedom to slaughter your own animals, to own as many vehicles as you like,
and to beat your kids if you saw fit.
Ruby was one of the first people that Sue had
met when she visited the local farmer’s market on her first weekend in the
country. She was a naturopath and a life coach and had sold Sue a home-made remedy
that cured the hay fever that several Auckland doctors had failed to mend.
She had never been sick since, so she wasn’t
going to listen to some bloody woman in Wellington telling her what to do.
Particularly when it came to wearing a mask in the supermarket. Sue didn’t even
wear shoes when she went there and was often in her pyjamas.
It was a short trip from hating Covid rules to
liking Trump conspiracy theories on Facebook and believing that Pfizer had
secret plans to buy the South island to house the illuminati after the vaccines
had killed off all the regular people.
Then in February 2022, Ruby invited Sue to a
demonstration in Wellington. Three weeks later Sue was throwing bricks at the
police and setting fire to tents. She got home and was fully radicalised and
started reading parts of the Internet you can’t find with a google search.
Ruby was the first to mention the term
Sovereign Citizen. Sue embraced it enthusiastically. She stopped paying her
rates, car tax and rego. Sent back every letter that came from a government
department, with a message that they had no authority over her.
I belong to the side of politics that laughs at
people like Sue. I’m a city living liberal, who wouldn’t know the right end of
a cow to milk.
But when I was younger, I dabbled with left
wing politics. We were the ones who wanted to overthrow the state. We believed
that society was rigged against us. That it was controlled by hidden forces in
dark rooms, smoking large cigars in their stuffed waistcoats.
I realise now that these are the same arguments
that Sue makes on Facebook. Except these days the arguments come from the right
and not the left. I guess the other difference is that our heroes were trade
unionists and revolutionaries that lived in bed sits. Sue’s heroes are
billionaires like Trump or Alex Jones. We also liked to protest by joining
marches and picketing visits by foreign leaders that we disagreed with. We
still paid or taxes and fines. We wanted to build a better society and not to
withdraw from it.
Sue wants to withdraw from society, not to
change it. Every country has its own version of sovereign citizens, but I
sometimes wonder if New Zealand has more than its fair share. Unlike Australia,
which was colonised by convicts who didn’t want to be there and rapacious gold
diggers, New Zealand white settlers came from British and Irish people
searching for a bucolic lifestyle. They wanted to escape from the smoke filled
cities of Victorian Britain and to live out their lives on the verdant pastures
of the Southern Isles.
The reach of Government was pretty thin back
then. She had to home school your kids and rely on family remedies and the
kindness of strangers if anyone got sick. It bred a culture of independence.
Many city dwelling Kiwis have a desire to move to the country and live ‘off
grid’.
Most of Sue’s friends have taken that first
step to live outside the real world. Unfortunately, they have also tapped into
feelings of neglect and despondency within the Maori community. This is a
country built delicately on the foundations of a treaty signed in 1840. It’s a
treaty that hasn’t always been adhered to and it has built up a culture of disconnect
between many Maori and the state.
The sovereign citizen movement was quick to
ferment this disconnect and like many revolutionary movements and governments
for that matter, they are quite happy to use Maori as the muscle in their
clashes with authority.
We live in strange old world now. Nationalism, nativism
and isolationism is rampant throughout the western world. It’s like we’re
living in the 1930s again and that most people have ignored the past and are
now condemned to repeat it. Sue doesn’t like being called a Nazi, but that’s
what she is. I just hope she never needs a state provided hospital or has to
drive her untaxed car on government built roads. I hope she never has to post
her toxic messages on Facebook that connects to a Government built cell phone
tower. She also doesn’t like being called a hypocrite. But then neither did I
when I was a young radical who wanted to work for American Banks.
