By Phil Jarratt
It was hard to find a common element amongst the 25 or 30 people who accepted an invitation, circulated on social media, to be part of a “self-organised collective” staging a cleanup of the decommissioned TAFE site at Tewantin on 5 January to prepare it for a transition to a camp for the homeless.
There seemed to be two basic groups present – people of goodwill who had taken the invitation at face value and simply wanted to do something to ease the plight of our growing number of homeless, and a noisier crowd who wanted to confront independent Noosa MP Sandy Bolton on the much broader issues of sovereign rights versus native title, the incompetence of governments at all levels, and maybe a bit of anti-fluoride, 5G towers and the Smart Cities conspiracy for good measure.
For Ms Bolton, who has spent years as a councillor and then an MP fighting for a sensible transition of the falling-down, fire risk TAFE into a space that meets genuine community needs, and has put far more hours into finding solutions for the homeless than any of the party pollies of either side, the unfounded flak she had to cop on both issues was a double slap in the face. But as she told Noosa Today in the hours after the confrontation, “There is something not right here. Who are these people?”
It is a good question, and the deeper you dig, the further down the rabbit hole you get. This much we know:
During the first few days of January, Noosa resident Debra Walz began sharing, on local opinion social media pages like Noosa Community Notice Board and Residents For Noosa, invitations to concerned residents to help clean up the TAFE site on behalf of organisers Community Village and the Queensland Homelessness Working Group. On its popup and rather basic website, Community Village explained its presence at the TAFE site: “The Caretaker Notice of appointment over this sacred ceremonial land is pursued in a spirit of partnership and mutual respect with the community. The Community Village project to assist the homeless in the region, is therefore supported by the sovereign (non-corporate) Kabi Kabi Peoples.” Noosa Today could find no proof of the existence of the Queensland Homelessness Working Group.
It was a busy holiday period for Ms Walz, a double cancer survivor, who in addition to providing a deputation to Noosa Council on the evils of fluoride in early December, had also, between Christmas and New Year, started a petition on Change.org to get rid of the People’s Park at Main Beach (it was going on 7 January anyway, its trial period complete) and promoting a series of “Town Hall Meetings” at Tinbeerwah Hall and other venues, starting 24 January, on behalf of something called Noosa Peoples Council.
That’s a lot of on-line activism over a few short weeks, and there is more to come. Ms Walz declined to be interviewed by Noosa Today but revealed that she would be presenting another deputation to council’s ordinary meeting on 18 January, this time “addressing my perspective of what happened at the TAFE site … and the intention of the Community Village and the community support surrounding it.”
Three days before the TAFE confrontation, a new version of an older player in the sovereign and conspiracy theory community emerged locally. According to Noosa Today’s informants, MyPlaceNoosa, part of a national My Place network founded by Melbourne man Darren Bergwerf as an anti-vaxer on-line community at the start of the Covid pandemic, had been around for more than a year, with about 400 members. But on 2 January those members were locked out of the site until they rejoined and committed to “participate in community events”. The first of these was the TAFE working bee.
In Victoria, My Place had quickly established a presence at community events and markets, as the ABC’s 7.30 reported early last year: “The scene at Frankston, about 40 minutes from Melbourne CBD, seems like any other Sunday market – until you spot the anti-5G posters or understand the symbology of the red flag flying in the main hall. The red ensign – Australia’s maritime flag – has become a defining symbol of sovereign citizens … [Bergwerf] is a sovereign citizen, meaning he does not believe Australian laws and institutions are valid and subscribes to the conspiracy theory that a global cabal is plotting to remove ordinary citizens’ freedoms.”
Interestingly, Debra Walz was an early sharer of My Place ideas, and, while trying to placate some of the more hostile activists at the TAFE site, was heard telling them: “I’m on your side, a sovereign citizen.”
But MyPlaceNoosa, whose tagline is “putting unity back into community”, was quick to explain its motivation: “The goal for My Place is to implement a project that allows us to step away from the current systems that are not serving our best interests. As we all come together and share our skills, knowledge, and support, we can gradually build individual sectors where the services can be accessed by all. ‘Rather than fighting the old, we walk away and create the new’. This now creates an opportunity for all of us to be actively involved in creating our future.”
We are now gathering a very large family of interlinked “sovereign tribes” here. But wait, there is more. Something called Concerned Community Group (with links to something called Commonwealth Custodians) announced an apparently unrelated “town hall meeting” at Tinbeerwah on Monday 8 January, with the group manifesto beginning: “Our concerns and investigations include but are not limited to:
• 5G
• Erosion of individual property ownership
• Attacks on farming and home-grown food
• Implementation of digital identity and their links to the destruction of the cash economy
• Implementation of a programmable Central Bank Digital Currency
• censoring of medical professionals
• continuation of vaccine mandates that have been dropped in most countries
• erosion of individual health choices
• pre-emptive programming and mind control through totally controlled media
• fake news
• fake science
• Communist controlled UN
• World Economic Forum.”
Although there is no history of the group on its website, the vaccine mandates point would indicate that it, like My Place, dates from the height of Covid. It continues: “Even with little knowledge or understanding, most Australians can perceive that something is not right.”
The Concerned Community’s manifesto is right out of the sovereign citizen handbook, from which it was no doubt adapted, and its detail is impressively frightening, but another linked group, Noosa People’s Council, takes the cake on spreading the fear and loathing the furthest.
On the Saving Noosa page of its well-designed and expensive website, the group declares:
“Noosa needs a People’s Council. Due to a lack of disclosure and adopting major changes without the consent of the people, our local representation demands to be changed, and the local council election in March 2024 provides an opportunity to create a real community-based council, with known candidates who care about Noosa and its resident community. When this comes about, we may expect to see the town returned to the people.”
Ah, so the penny drops. This is where it is all going! Electioneering. Disrupt, divide and conquer! Let’s read on: “Community feedback across the shire evidences a common ‘disdain’ for the Council, and it appears that a large portion of residents now believe the Council no longer serves the people … Are the interests of the community being subordinated to outside organisations and foreign controlled agendas?… Fortunately awareness has reached a tipping point, and is now giving way to broader community resistance. Continuing to expose the level of Noosa Council’s hidden agenda and its secret alignment many sub groups, along with its poor record of genuine public consultation, will be the catalyst for change. There can be no support for a political class which fails the fundamental responsibility for which they are elected.”
The People’s Council then goes on to describe a very long list of issues that “need to be addressed”, covering the same old “SovCit” fearmongering and localising it with borderline defamatory accusations about “unlawful activities” being engaged in by our “corporate council” and its mates. We don’t have the space to go into it here, other than to note that this august publication is on the hit list for being a “propaganda tool” for council, and
for “bias and discriminatory reporting”.
So what’s all this got to do with the Kabi Elders wanting to take possession of the TAFE site under something called Grandmother Lore? Well, it’s important to note that the future of the site, which is currently under Native Title assessment on behalf of proponents the Kabi Kabi People’s Aboriginal Corporation, could be placed in jeopardy by any such occupation. As early as 23 December, Kabi Dreaming Facebook page distanced itself from Community Village, posting: “In keeping with Kabi Djakurpa Tribal Lore/Law, Aunty Bucky Dak’khan Tuk’ku [a prominent Kabi member of Community Village, and other linked organisations including My Place] … can only speak for themselves.” Aunty Bucky also played a prominent role in a one-hour documentary called The Tyranny Ends, made in Gympie recently. According to its blurb, the video “marks the beginning of the peaceful and diplomatic taking back of Terra Australis by the Sovereign First Nations Mobs, back from the foreign invading corporation that has ruled unlawfully in tyranny, exploitation, fraud and genocide since 1788.”
Noosa Today understands that the Gympie supporters of the Original Sovereign Tribal Federation, who have fought for years to preserve sacred sites from the Gympie bypass construction, and have also been very vocal about the Cooloola Great Walk, have declined to support the TAFE “project”.
The sovereign citizen movement has a history around the world of using Indigenous issues and communities as a kind of Trojan horse, particularly in Canada and the US, where pro-Trump SovCits used undeliverable land rights concessions to win Native Americans to their cause. In Australia they have used dissatisfaction with the process of native title, a flashpoint being the 2021 storming of Canberra’s Old Parliament House with fire damage to the lobby, to the same ends.
We are all entitled to our own political views, but it’s important to realise what these are for sovereign citizens. Ella Scoles, writing in Queensland Law Society’s Proctor in 2021, offered this: “In a nutshell, sovereign citizens are people who believe that the laws of the state do not apply to them as they have revoked their ‘consent’ for this to occur. They consider themselves to be ‘natural’ persons – born with their own natural rights that are unable to be constrained by governments. Often they refer to the ‘common law’ as being the only law they recognise as legitimate. Usually they oppose the very foundations of our democracy and rely on pseudo legal language, piecemeal, cryptic and often incorrect legal arguments to assert their independence.”
