When Police Become the Enemy
Two deadly shootings, one broken system—and a growing belief that the state no longer serves the people.
By Nick Holt
The Modern Enquirer
In 2022, at Wieambilla in Queensland, four constables arrived to carry out a routine welfare check. Ninety seconds after climbing a locked gate, two were dead.
Then, on August 26, 2025, at Porepunkah in Victoria’s alpine country, detectives came with a search warrant linked to firearms and historical offences.
Again: gunfire. Two officers dead.
These events—one still unfolding—blanketed the news cycle in images of chaos and loss. But behind the saturation coverage, few asked the harder question: what changed?
Even the most routine acts of policing—serving a warrant, conducting a check—can now ignite deadly resistance. A pattern familiar to Americans—Waco, Ruby Ridge—but foreign to Australia. Until now.
But the danger isn’t firepower. Australia now has more privately owned guns than it did before Port Arthur—yet gun deaths have fallen. Stricter laws didn’t reduce weapons; they restricted access. Fewer people own more guns, and most do so under tight regulation.
The real danger is conceptual: a growing minority no longer recognises the authority behind the warrant.
The law is losing its weight.
It didn’t happen overnight. It happened over years. Trust collapsed. And when trust collapses, law becomes threat. The badge represents an entirely different symbol.
During COVID, Australians watched the state torch its own legitimacy—in real time. Borders were sealed, families split apart, small businesses shuttered by decree; mounted police stormed parks, protesters were beaten, fined, and pepper-sprayed, while the military occupied streets in the name of public health.
This wasn’t safety. It was coercion. And everyone saw it.
Policing only works when the people believe in the system behind it. But when legitimacy gave way to force, and trust gave way to fear, the contract broke. The state didn’t evolve into a tyrant. It revealed it could always become one.
That’s what happens when obedience is demanded without legitimacy; it invites defiance. Because trust cannot be compelled—only fear. And fear, unlike legitimacy, is always temporary.
The damage, however, wasn’t temporary. It wasn’t just institutional. It was personal—and it didn’t end with the restrictions. It sank deeper: into memory, into instinct, into the place where trust used to live.
What replaced it was something older.
History tells a clear story about what happens when legitimacy collapses. In Rome, the forum gave way to the emperor. In Weimar, law yielded to decree. In colonial Australia, the badge meant not protection, but punishment.
We weren’t conquered by Caesar—but the dynamic was familiar.
A frightened population accepted control. A bureaucratic class grew bold.
Amid uncertainty, fear, and shifting rules, the state believed in only one thing: the legitimacy of its own authority.
Not truth. Not trust. Not consent. Power alone.
And that legacy runs strongest beyond the cities.
Outside the metro belt, the state is not seen as guardian. It arrives uninvited. Regulates from afar. Punishes up close. The state is a stranger on the land—unfamiliar, untrusted, and armed with authority.
That’s the legacy behind the tragic loss of life in Wieambilla and Porepunkah.
Officers arrived with paperwork. But the people inside saw a threat—because once the state is no longer seen as protector, its presence feels like provocation. When trust collapses, law becomes language, the badge becomes cloth, and the knock at the door no longer opens dialogue—it invites defence
When the very idea of the state’s authority is no longer accepted, tactics don’t matter. The operating premise has collapsed. The belief that a uniform and a warrant guarantee compliance—that the state has the right to knock, and the door will open—no longer holds in some places.
At Wieambilla, the constables weren’t seen as officers. They were seen as targets. At Porepunkah, the warrant held no authority—because the shared reality that gives law its meaning had already collapsed. And when that happens, there’s no negotiation. Only firepower.
Neither shooting happened in the heart of a city. Both took place on the frontier—not just geographically, but politically and culturally.
That distance matters.
In cities, the state is constant. Courts convene daily. Institutions are visible. Backup is close. Authority is woven into the rhythm of life. But in rural areas, government arrives sporadically: a permit rejection, a tax bill, a speeding fine—or a knock at the door in uniform.
If that’s your only contact with the state, suspicion isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition.
And the numbers support the intuition. Rural Australians report lower trust in government and feel less represented. Firearm ownership is much higher—6 to 8 percent in cities, 20 percent or more outside them. Unregistered weapons push the total even higher.
These aren’t signs of extremism. They’re conditions. Conditions under which legitimacy is harder to earn—and easier to lose.
At Wieambilla, the Trains dug hides, cut sight lines, and funnelled police into exposed ground. At Porepunkah, Freeman vanished into bushland he knew better than anyone. Four hundred officers were mobilised, but they weren’t hunting in a city grid. They were outsiders, in hostile terrain.
After both shootings, institutions did what they always do: they reached for labels.
At Wieambilla, the coroner called it terrorism. At Porepunkah, police named Freeman a sovereign citizen. The language was neat. Political. Reassuring.
But it didn’t answer the question.
Why did two teams of officers—armed with lawful authority—end up dead on rural properties?
“Terrorism” justified extraordinary powers. It made the violence pathological, removing the need for introspection.
At Porepunkah, Dezi Freeman called himself a sovereign citizen. That part wasn’t imposed—it was claimed. He believed the state had no legal authority over him, and acted accordingly.
But once that label entered media and official statements, it did more than describe his beliefs—it framed the act itself as fringe, imported, and exceptional.
Like the coroner’s “terrorism” ruling at Wieambilla, it gave authorities a shorthand—one that explained away the breakdown as ideology, not symptom. And in doing so, it spared the system from deeper scrutiny.
The label “sovereign citizen” gave the media and the state a simple explanation—one that Freeman himself had used, making it easier to present the event as fringe, foreign, and disconnected from the broader public. It offered comfort: this wasn’t about Australia, it was about one man. An outlier. An extremist.
But that framing starts to fall apart when the pattern repeats. When officers are met not with confusion or resistance, but with weapons drawn, it becomes harder to insist these are isolated incidents. Harder still to argue they’re imported.
Eventually, the question shifts—from what these individuals believe, to what they no longer believe.
And in some places, the answer is clear: they no longer recognise the state’s authority.
Police have become politicized - look no further than Melbourne, to see the different responses to "good" and "bad protests. Good are BLM, MeToo, pro-Palestine,: bad are anti-lockdown, anti-immigration. Double standards encourage distrust.
I couldn’t agree more. Not to mention so much of this recent event is sketchy as hell!