In Sill the Court states
In the course of his journey to this Court, the applicant has raised issues concerning the constitutionality of various State and Commonwealth Acts, the validity of the appointments of certain state governors (including the present governor), allegations of treason and assertions that various courts are either unlawful, unconstitutional, illegal or star chambers.The Court went on
During the hearing, the judge very patiently sought to extract from the applicant the points the applicant wished to make in support of his application and the merits of his proposed appeal. Reference was made by the applicant to, amongst other things, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Commonwealth Constitution and the King James Bible. Ultimately, the judge teased out and then identified six points advanced by the applicant as follows:
(1) The Court is an administrative court, and is therefore unlawful.
(2) The Constitution Act 1975 (Vic) is not a valid Act. The applicant asserted that this Act has never been validly signed or assented to. The Act was also said to be invalid because it was brought into existence without a referendum.
(3) The Royal Style and Titles Act 1973 (Cth) is invalid. In support of this submission, the applicant contended that the Queen of Australia[3] does not exist. This Act was described as a treasonous Act, having no basis and also one requiring a referendum before it could have any validity.
(4) Relevant governors of the State of Victoria had not been lawfully appointed. As to the present governor, the applicant submitted: I don’t know if the impact of that means anything to you, but it means a lot to me, that she [the present governor] is acting in a royal position without authority and she’s not taking orders or recommendations from our Sovereign. So if she’s been thrown out of this country by so-called legislation, we have to go looking for the people who institute all this treasonous — because it is treason. It’s no good beating about the bush, if you try to get rid of the monarch, it’s a treason against the people and treason against the monarch.
(5) Letters patent are unlawful: because they didn’t come from the Queen, they came from Bob Hawke, he rewrote it and he’s got no right to do that.
(6) The applicant is a human being, not an entity.
In the course of argument, the judge attempted to unravel some of the applicant’s more opaque submissions. When confronted with legislation which suggested there was no merit in one of his arguments (for example, s 143(1)(a) of the Evidence Act 2008), the applicant’s response was that the legislation had not been validly assented to, was unlawful or was treasonous.
Similarly, when confronted with authority that was at least arguably inconsistent with the maintenance of one of the applicant’s argument, the applicant sought to contend that the relevant decision was unlawful, or the court was unconstitutional or otherwise lacked validity. So, for example, when the judge raised with the applicant the decision of Hayne J in Rutledge v The State of Victoria as authority for the proposition that the Bill for the Constitution Act 1975 was assented to in accordance with law (and the Act was therefore valid), the applicant said: With Rutledge, it was a single court judge, therefore it was a star chamber. ... A High Court judge, if he says it, doesn’t necessarily have to be correct because we have also got the evidence we have got under the Constitution may not have been put to him because if it was, he couldn’t make that presumption and obviously he rode over the top of that, made the decision, and as I said, in an unlawful court, it doesn’t matter if it’s the High Court or a Magistrates’ Court, if it’s a single court judge, under the Magna Carta, the 1688 Bill of Rights, all says that a single court judge or a star chamber is unlawful.
During the hearing, the applicant submitted to the judge that the City of Wodonga did not exist and that the enacting of Local Government Act 1989 was unlawful. His argument was that the failed 1988 referendum on constitutional recognition of local government resulted in local government being unlawful. The applicant developed this submission by saying that the failed referendum was binding on the Victorian Parliament, and the enactment of the Local Government Act 1989 was therefore treasonous.
During the course of his argument before the judge, the applicant occasionally diverted himself to the proposition that the judge (and more generally the judges of the Supreme Court of Victoria) had not taken valid oaths of allegiance. This proposition was advanced by reference to the so-called non-existence of the Queen of Australia. ...
Contrary to the applicant’s submissions, s 143(1) of the Evidence Act is not unconstitutional. As the judge observed, the section precludes arguments of the kind made by the applicant which have as their foundation a requirement for proof of the existence of the Act or its coming into operation. The section does not preclude the taking of legitimate arguments about the constitutionality of a particular statutory provision. Arguments, however, about whether there exists a copy of an Act ‘bearing a “wet ink signature of the Governor and a wet ink signature with the Royal Seal of Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second” ’ (whatever that might mean) are precluded. The judge was undoubtedly correct when, having considered all of the applicant’s arguments, he said that the applicant had failed to establish the invalidity of any relevant legislation or appointment.
In addition to the very thorough reasons given by the judge for making the orders he made, one might also observe that the applicant’s arguments premised upon the non-existence of the Queen of Australia are totally without merit, flying as they do in the face of the High Court’s decisions in Pochi v Macphee and Nolan v Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. As was observed by Gibbs CJ in Pochi, ‘the allegiance which Australians owe to Her Majesty is owed not as British subjects but as subjects of the Queen of Australia’. As was observed by the plurality in Nolan, the words ‘subject of the Queen’ in the Constitution, should be treated as referring, ‘in a modern context, to a subject of the Queen in right of Australia: cf Royal Style and Titles Act 1973 (Cth)’. Put bluntly, Australian citizens owe allegiance to the Queen of Australia, not the Queen of the United Kingdom.A perspective is offered in
'A Pathogen Astride the Minds of Men: The Epidemiological History of Pseudolaw' by Donald Netolitzky, with the author commenting
Pseudolaw is a collection of legal-sounding but false rules that purport to be law. Pseudolaw has independently emerged in different countries and communities on multiple occasions. Despite that, modern pseudolaw world-wide is remarkably similar, despite that pseudolaw host populations have extremely different political, cultural, and historical profiles. What is common among groups that endorse pseudolaw is: 1) an anti-government and anti-institutional orientation, and 2) a conspiratorial world perspective.
Modern pseudolaw has spread, starting from the US Sovereign Citizen population, and then infected a succession of other communities. This progression was facilitated by key individuals and can be tracked, host group to host group.
Modern pseudolaw was introduced into Canada by one individual, Eldon Warman, who reframed its concepts to better suit a Commonwealth rather than US context. Warman’s pseudolaw variation spread into several Canadian communities with very different social objectives. The leftist anti-government Freemen-on-the-Land then seeded pseudolaw into the UK, the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and several European countries. Some of the resulting groups were stillborn, but in the UK pseudolaw has thrived, but principally as mechanism to attack debt collection, rather than to challenge government authority.
US Sovereign Citizen pseudolaw has also directly spread into the culturally distinct urban black Moorish community, and the German and Austrian right-wing Reichsbürger groups. Australia is unique in that its pseudolaw culture incorporates US Sovereign Citizen, Canadian Freeman, and domestic concepts. In other countries, the appearance of modern pseudolaw drove other pre-existing variant law schemes into extinction.Netolinzky's 'The History of the Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument Phenomenon in Canada' in (2016) 53(3) Alberta Law Review comments
This article discusses the history of the poorly understood Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments (OPCA) phenomena. Drawing from various reported and unreported sources, the author begins his review in the 1950s with two distinct pseudolegal traditions that evolved separately in both the United States and Canada. Focusing on the prominent members of each era of the OPCA movement, the author explains in depth the concepts behind the movement and what it means for the legal system in Canada today. The article culminates with an analysis of the current OPCA groups and how Canadian courts should respond to future OPCA litigants, while also giving reasons as to why it is important for Canadians to take notice of this movement due to potential security risks.His 'Lawyers and Court Representation of Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument [OPCA] Litigants in Canada' (2018) 51(2) University of British Columbia Law Review 419 comments
Litigants who advance unorthodox law-like concepts, “pseudolaw”, have appeared in Canadian courts for several decades. Courts reject pseudolaw as vexatious and an abuse of court. The motivations and characteristics of pseudolaw litigants differ. Some are principally results-oriented, seeking to use pseudolaw for personal advantage. Others ground their use of pseudolaw on conspiratorial, paranoid, and ideological beliefs.
While most litigants who employ pseudolaw are unrepresented, a significant fraction retained lawyers for some or all of their proceedings. The lawyer’s functions also vary. Some are retained to conduct ‘damage control’ after pseudolaw was used but then abandoned. Other lawyers explored dubious but arguable pseudolaw, or were temporarily retained for a specific objective, such as to obtain bail. A small number of rogue lawyers have entirely rejected legal orthodoxy and fully embraced pseudolaw, arguing these concepts for their clients and even themselves. Some pseudolaw litigants for tactical advantage use a flexible litigation strategy, and alternate between representation by a ‘conventional’ lawyer, a rogue lawyer, and self-representation. This poses a unique challenge to court function and litigation management.
