Freemen movement targets Indigenous Australia | The Saturday Paper

6.9.14

Freemen movement targets Indigenous Australia | The Saturday Paper: In Australia, a burgeoning faction of Freemen is targeting Indigenous audiences. A taste of the subculture can be gleaned online, in groups such as the Tribal Sovereign Parliament of Gondwana Land, the Original Sovereign Tribal Federation (OSTF) and the Original Sovereign Confederation. The last of these repeats the now-familiar admiralty law myth on its Facebook page and urges members to carry an “Affidavit of Truth” outlining “their desired relationship with the colony known as Australia”. Another Facebook page – Vote ‘NO’ to Constitutional Change – claims that constitutional recognition of Aboriginal Australians is a trick to “surrender sovereignty”. Everything, it alleges, is a Trojan Horse. The Recognise campaign’s “R” logo really stands for the Crown, as in “R v Defendant”. Welcome to Country ceremonies aren’t merely figurative but form “the only legal footing the Government have [sic] for so called Jurisdiction”. Native Title secretly means “Slave’s Title”, while a “traditional owner” is someone who has given up their property, at least in tenuous Latin cherrypicked from Black’s Law Dictionary.