One of the fun things about living in Australia is that the kind of nutso whackjob idiocy that the Sovereign Citizen movement has tried cut and paste from America, doesn't really fit here at all. A favourite line of attempted defence when coming before the law is to say that they do not consent to the law, as if their consent actually mattered in an actual sovereign nation. The truth is that there is not right not to follow the law.
On the other hand as we do in the remnants of Empire, then occasionally people who claim to be Sovereign Citizens will try to throw legal treacle at the wall and hope that anything sticks. I have heard people claim that Australia is a corporation which is registered in the United States and ceased to be a country during the Whitlam Government, I have heard entire diatribes explaining how because the Commonwealth of Australia Act was passed in the United Kingdom Parliament at Westminster it doesn't apply here, but the favourite piece of legal treacle is to claim something vague about Magna Carta as though it was like some magic words.
The truth is that Magna Carta was a chart of rights in 1215, which the Archbishop of Canterbury helped to draft as a kind of appeasement covenant, to try and stop a revolt from the English barony who had both the means and the animal spirits to run through the king with many many swords. Having basically sequestered King John and transported him to a fairly anonymous field in Runnymede, the barons put forward their BIG CHART (Magna Carta) of demands, and threatened to turn John into smaller bits of delicious meat for their dogs.
The real irony was that none of the rights demanded would make any kind of sense or even necessarily apply to the kinds of people who decide to self identify as Sovereign Citizens. Most of them at best would likely have gained the franchise with the Reform Acts of the 1830s, or maybe even later with various Representation of the People Acts. As far as Australia goes, with the exception of Aboriginal peoples who some cases didn't get the franchise until 1962, most people in Australia had the franchise in 1902; which is still vastly different from claiming that Magna Carta, which wasn't even an Act of Parliament at the time, somehow applied some 687 years earlier.
What's also ironic is that neither the 25 barons who threatened to go stabby-rip-stab-stab on the king, or the king, stood by their commitments and the whole thing was annulled by Pope Innocent III; which eventually led to the First Baron's War, six months later. So much for Big Charters.
The current text dates from 1225 when Henry III reissued it, hoping to quell another revolt; and the formal confirmation of the text as received law in 1297 when Edward I "inspected" it as the Inspeximus issue.
Often when these Sovereign Citizens try to wave Magna Carta all over the place like a banner, judges who are legally trained (obviously) will often ask what these people rely on at law. The answers proffered are often vague and silly, and collapse to the Dennis Denuto school of legal practice of relying on "the vibe".
But what is particularly singular is that what is often the case, is that as Magna Carta is absolutely irrelevant in Australia, and in any legal context here, judges themselves have often never read it. Why would they need to? Judges having never read Magna Carta is like me never having read any of the Medici's treatises on Accounting. Sure, they might be fun to read but why bother?
That last question answers itself. Sure, they might be fun to read but why bother? Why bother? Precisely because it's fun to read. So then, without further adieu, parte the first of Magna Carta - Inspeximus issue of Magna Carta (1297).
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Edward by the grace of God King of England, lord of Ireland and duke of Aquitaine sends greetings to all to whom the present letters come. We have inspected the great charter of the lord Henry, late King of England, our father, concerning the liberties of England in these words:
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The beginning preamble to the 1297 text, explains that Edward has "inspected" the charter and intends to reissue it. What makes this particularly interesting is what you can not see in this text. Edward is King of England and can not speak English. The text of Magna Carta was written in Latin as that was the official language of the law and the inns at court. Meanwhile John, Henry and now Edward, like all the kings who followed in the wake of the Norman Conquest of 1066, all spoke French. The first English king to speak English was Henry IV who only came to the throne in 1399.
At this point, Edward is still very much a Gallic king and this 1297 text reflects the fact that he has a boot on Ireland, another boot in French Aquitaine, and still looks down upon England as though it was a thing which is very much beneath him. It should be pointed out that England is not the world superpower that it is going to be by a longshot, though in comparison to the many many kingdoms, fiefdoms, duchies, and city-states of Europe, it is quite stable. It is also a prize worth having because that stability lends itself to a reliable extraction of taxation.
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Henry by the grace of God King of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and count of Anjou sends greetings to his archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, sheriffs, reeves, ministers and all his bailiffs and faithful men inspecting the present charter. Know that we, at the prompting of God and for the health of our soul and the souls of our ancestors and successors, for the glory of holy Church and the improvement of our realm, freely and out of our good will have given and granted to the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons and all of our realm these liberties written below to hold in our realm of England in perpetuity.
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Herein lies the reason for the existence of the Magna Carta in the first place. In 1215, you had an English populace being ruled by an extractive French monarchy, from outside of England. It took a few generations for the English to regroup but by the beginning of the thirteenth century, they had amassed enough of a force that they could make the French take notice.
Henry III's concession in 1225, which is reaffirmation of Magna Carta in this paragraph, happens while Henry is just 17 years old. Again, this was a case of the barony of England trying to secure for itself rights and concessions, while the king was still a minor. It must be said that as the king grew up, assumed the age of majority and actually could command the field in his own right, his ability to extract taxation from the English also grew. The 1225 addition to the text which seems quite lovely, probably also belies the fact that they English baronry was still very much prepared to engage upon a policy of stabby-rip-stab-stab on the king at a moment's notice. Generally speaking, being stabbed and cut into pieces is suboptimal.
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