25-03-2025
Driver's bizarre number plate prompts $933 fine warning: 'Not legal'
Most Aussie drivers do their best to avoid being pulled over, but some choices on the road are bound to attract the wrong kind of attention. That was the case in Adelaide this week when a Toyota driver was spotted with a bold, customised number plate simply reading "PRIVATE," above smaller text "Special Trust Security."
A keen-eyed local photographed the strange-looking plates and posted images online, asking "what the F are these? Surely [they're] not legal?".
People from all around the country weighed in, with one person's response in particular generating a lot of traction. "They're plates which will guarantee SAPOL will pull them over at their first opportunity," they wrote. Another suggested the plates belong to a member of a so-called "sovereign citizen" movement — a growing group of fringe conspiracists, who believe laws don't apply to them and can be opted out of.
Speaking to Yahoo News Australia, a spokesman for SAPOL confirmed the plates in question are highly illegal, and in fact, can attract an on-the-spot fine of $933. "These plates appear fake and are not plates that have been issued by SA Department for Infrastructure and Transport," he told Yahoo.
People online criticised the driver's decision to boldly break the law. "It's the best way to show off your dreadful understanding [of the law] to an already disinterested person," one person said. "You found a sovereign citizen in the wild," another commented. "Those are the 'please pull me over plates', otherwise known as sovereign citizen plates," joked a third.
It's not the first time the scenario has emerged on Australian roads. A photo, captured in Queensland in 2023, earlier showed the rear of a Holden with a plate that features the text "Private Property Non-Commercial, Living Woman, Terra Australia Incognito", along with an incorrect claim that removing the plate "incurs a $50,000 fine".
Bizarrely, it also contained a legitimate registration number in extremely small text. Some followers of the sovereign citizen movement can actually pose a serious threat. In 2010, a father-son team in the US murdered two police officers with an assault rifle after being pulled over.
In NSW in recent times, a police officer was forced to smash a car window after a "sovereign citizen" refused to get out of her vehicle and claimed she was not in the officer's jurisdiction.
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Speaking to Yahoo News Australia, Dr Ben Rich, co-director of Curtin University's Curtin Extremism Research Network (CERN), said police and intelligence agencies around the nation are concerned about the "sovereign citizen" movement. "The injection of increasingly extremist American ideas reflecting that country's own internal dysfunctions has caused the overall movement to take a darker turn over the past decade," Dr Rich earlier said.
"The Covid-19 lockdowns were a real catalyst for Sov-Cit political mobilisation in Australia, and we saw many of them turning out in anti-lockdown and anti-government protests in unprecedented numbers with their distinctive iconography."
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