There is a peculiar modern reflex in which any man or woman who asks a government agency, politely, in writing, to show its authority, is promptly issued a diagnosis. Not a legal diagnosis. A social one. “Sovereign citizen,” they are told, usually by someone who has never read the Act in question and is relying entirely on vibes.
It is worth being clear about what this actually is. A sovereign citizen argument, properly so called, holds that a man or woman can declare himself outside the reach of Parliament by force of vocabulary alone; that he is one entity and his name in capital letters is another; that a maritime flag fringe changes the jurisdiction of the room. These arguments have been placed before Australian courts on numerous occasions and have been rejected every time, generally without much ceremony.
Asking “which section, and who signed it” is not that. It is, in fact, the single least exotic thing a man or woman can do when a letter arrives asserting a power over him. It is what he does when the bank calls claiming a debt he does not recognise. It is what he does when a tradesman invoices for work never ordered. It is what any competent solicitor does before advising a client to comply with anything. Somewhere along the way, doing this to a government agency specifically got recategorised as fringe behaviour, which is a strange place to have landed, given that governments are precisely the bodies whose power is supposed to be written down somewhere and checked.
There is an old and useful maxim for this: qui quaerit, non regnat. He who asks, does not thereby rule. Asking a purported governing body/agency’s office to confirm it is, in fact, a de jure office of the Government, is not a coup. It is Tuesday.
The label, when used this way, tends to say more about the labeller than the letter. An agency confident in its authority produces the delegation instrument in the time it takes to open a filing cabinet. An agency that reaches instead for a label is, whether it intends to or not, answering a different question than the one it was asked.
Nemo dat quod non habet: no one gives what they do not have, including an official who cannot show where their power came from, and no amount of eye-rolling changes that arithmetic.
See also: Sovereign citizen BS
Last Updated 4 weeks ago
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