The judgment states
Mr John Mathers (a pseudonym for the defendant) was born in October 1972, and accordingly is 46 years of age. He has spent most but not all of his life living in the Newcastle area. As a teenager, his unfulfilled ambition was to join the RAAF. Instead, he studied jewellery-making at TAFE, and until recently rented premises in the Newcastle suburb of Charlestown in which he conducted a small business in that regard, and also resided.
In the early part of 2017, he commenced a dispute with the real estate agent for the lessor of those premises. In a nutshell, his complaint was that mould was growing inside the rented premises, and it was affecting his health. He put forward an odd explanation as to how the mould may have got there. He hung plastic sheets around the property, in an effort to protect himself from possible infection. His emails and texts to the real estate became more and more vitriolic.
Eventually, in May 2017 police were asked to check on the welfare of the defendant. They entered the premises and spoke to him. The living quarters of the defendant have been described by police as more like those of a teenager, rather than a middle-aged man. In the premises they found quite a few prohibited weapons, including two torch batons, a number of knives (some of them ceremonial in appearance, but no less sharp for that), and a Chinese made air gun that could readily be mistaken for a handgun capable of firing a deadly projectile.
They also found that the defendant had downloaded from the internet a very large volume of written material, and printed off some of it. Much of it was to do with the so-called Sovereign Citizen Movement (the Movement).
To interpolate a concise description of the Movement based upon the expert and other evidence placed before me, it originated in the United States of America, and is based on a conception of law that rejects the current United States polity as an imposed fraud that has unlawfully and immorally superseded the original ideas underpinning the American Revolution of 1776 and the US Constitution of 1787.
Its practical thesis is that individuals are entitled to resist the enforcement of laws made pursuant to that alleged fraud. For example, the Movement began as a rejection of the proposition that a citizen of that country is required to pay federal income tax.
The Movement has its idiosyncratic features quite apart from its fundamental thesis, an example of which is the adoption of a particular form of punctuation, which is preferred by adherents of the Movement to standard English usage.
In accordance with its underlying thesis, there has been on occasion violent resistance in the United States by its members to the enforcement of federal and state law, including by way of the murder of police officers and the attempted murder of judges.
The Movement has been connected to other aspects of political thought within that country, including survivalism (which involves preparedness for a post-apocalyptic world in which organised society has been destroyed), and armed militias (whereby US citizens take it upon themselves to form armed groups, often with an eye to defending not only the constitutional right to bear arms, but also a libertarian conception of the way in which the founding events and documents of that nation are said to mandate the current organisation of its society).
Some of the ideas of the Movement have been transposed to other countries, including Australia, despite its focus on particular aspects of the history of the United States. Returning now to the search conducted by the police, other downloaded items discovered in the premises of the defendant at that stage included a lengthy article about how to make booby traps. It was placed in evidence before me, and appears to be very out of date; in my opinion, it could date from the Korean War or even earlier.
There was also located a lengthy document about how to manufacture plastic explosives.
In similar vein was a document entitled the “Guerilla’s Arsenal”.
Another document, seemingly prepared by an Australian, and to do with Australian politics, described itself as a “brief of evidence” accusing a former Australian Prime Minister of being “attainted with treason”, and is redolent of the thinking of the Movement.
So is another document authored by a person who describes himself as “Johnny Liberty”.
Other, even more radical, documents were also located. Some of them speak of Queen Elizabeth II as having been convicted by a European court of child abuse. Others speak of satanic conspiracies, and refer to the demon “Moloch”. Yet another shows a distressing image of what appeared to be mutilated human bodies being fed to children at a formal dinner (I presume that it had been “photo shopped”).
The police also located scribbled documents in the handwriting of the defendant. Some of them are illegible, some unintelligible. But some of them appear to constitute efforts to understand the statutory and common law of this country. It is possible that some of the writings relate to the dispute about the mould, because they seem to make reference to offence-creating provisions to do with the infliction of a grievous bodily disease.
After the search of May 2017, police made enquiries about the online and other activity of the defendant. They discovered that, in November 2016, the defendant had purchased a commercial pressure cooker on a website that facilitates private buying and selling (the asserted relevance of that will become apparent shortly).
In January 2017, the defendant had downloaded from the internet blueprints whereby a private individual is said to be able to manufacture plastic firearms by use of a 3-D printer. One of them was for an airgun that, according to the blueprints, looked very much like a real weapon. But others were plans for weapons that are indeed real: a plastic sub-machine gun, a carbine rifle well-known to be used by the United States Army, and a plastic semi-automatic pistol (I interpolate again that it is well known that the highly regarded Glock semi-automatic pistol is largely made of plastic).
On 6 February 2017, the computer of the defendant was used to access a YouTube video entitled “See the Difference Between Pipe Bombs and Pressure Cooker Bombs”. Separately, on 3 March 2017 two letters were discovered at the parliamentary office of an opposition member of the New South Wales Parliament (the MP). On the outside of each envelope, the following typewritten words appear verbatim:
To The Minister You are in TREASON ,,, you will be hung untill you are dead
No Mercy , No Prisoners
You are scum
Inside were located typewritten documents that provide a purported analysis of the Australian Constitution. That analysis is consistent with the approach of the Movement to such matters. The MP was understandably very distressed by the discovery, and the police were of course contacted. In due course, they located a DNA profile on adhesive tape attached to one of the envelopes that was consistent with the profile of the defendant.
As a result, he was charged with the following offences: sending a document threatening death or grievous bodily harm; two counts of possessing or using a prohibited weapon without a permit; and possessing an unregistered firearm, in the form of a pistol.
The defendant was granted bail. However, in August 2017, he failed to appear in answer to that bail, and was subsequently arrested and bail refused.
In due course, the defendant pleaded guilty to all offences. On 21 February 2018, he was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment in the Local Court. The aggregate sentence imposed comprised a head sentence of 1 year 4 months, with a non-parole period of 12 months, each to date from 19 September 2017, the former to expire on 18 January 2019, and the latter to expire on 18 September 2018.
Meanwhile, in October 2017, the digital material containing the blueprints for the firearms had been seized by police. It took quite some time for that material to be analysed, but after it was, the defendant was charged in November 2018 with offences arising from those downloads. He has always been bail refused on those charges.
In the meantime, it had been proposed that he be released at the end of his non-parole period on 18 September 2018. Once the nature of those downloads came to light, however, the State Parole Authority intervened and took steps to ensure that the defendant would not be released to parole.
His custodial position as at the date of the hearing before me, 11 December 2018, was therefore that his current sentence will expire in its entirety on 18 January 2019. He is also bail refused on the most recent charges, but of course could lodge a bail application (either to the court of charge, or to this Court) at any time. ...
It is in that context that the State of New South Wales (the plaintiff) has sought preliminary orders against the defendant pursuant to the Terrorism (High Risk Offenders) Act 2017 (NSW) (the Act).
