Sue, The Sovereign Citizen

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.