When I wrote about the “ Cavalcade of the Cretinous” in February 2022, I thought the anti-vaccination early incarnations of “sovereign citizens” were just a hopeless joke (“Summernats without the sophistication”) that would quietly go away.

The Victorian police shooting shows how wrong I was and how bad things have got in 3½ years – and how dreadfully they could yet escalate.

We can only hope, now that lives have been taken, allegedly by a sovereign citizen, that police will remain, as the former long-serving NSW magistrate David Heilpern described them recently on the ABC’s Law Report: “ever patient”.

At least one current ACT magistrate endorses Professor Heilpern’s softly-softly approach to those who believe they can opt out of the legal system, just by changing names, often to “Freeman”, the name adopted by the alleged police killer.

“It is not me, it is a construct of the government” was how one defendant put it before the ACT magistrate – but who was that on the police body-worn camera footage?

The magistrate recalled, “I just said, ‘Look at that video, that’s you. So don’t worry about all this other stuff. Let’s just concentrate on what you are doing in that.’ That pulled the steam out of it …”

The issue had been the defendant, who had no criminal history, refusing an oral-swab test for drug-driving. Guilty. No conviction recorded. Next.

“There’s no point getting in a shouting match with them because the most effective way is to just say, ‘I’m........

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