How does a man who allegedly murders two country cops then abandons his family to avoid facing justice become a modern-day folk hero?

Why is a father who shot a policeman after forcing his children to live in the wilderness for four years admired as some sort of martyr?

There is clearly nothing noble about Dezi Freeman or Tom Phillips – their crimes have rightly appalled most Australians and New Zealanders – yet each has his own deluded fan club.

Experts suggest such misguided admiration is most likely to be expressed by people who are already anti-authoritarian and feel persecuted, as well as those suffering Covid-19 hangovers.

Freeman fled into bushland in Victoria’s high country after he allegedly shot dead Leading Senior Constable Neal Thompson and Senior Constable Vadim de Waart-Hottart, and wounded a third officer.

Thompson, de Waart-Hottart and eight colleagues had attended Freeman’s property at Porepunkah on August 26 to serve a warrant over sexual assault allegations involving a minor when the 56-year-old opened fire.

Freeman is a self-proclaimed ‘sovereign citizen’ who does not accept Australian laws or respect government authority. He has called police ‘frigging Nazis’, ‘Gestapo’ and ‘terrorist thugs’.

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Dezi Freeman (above) allegedly shot dead two policemen at his Porepunkah property in Victoria’s high country then fled into bushland. He is considered a folk hero by admirers

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Tom Phillips (above) was shot dead by police on Monday when he shot an officer on New Zealand’s North Island. He had spent four years with his three children on the run

Online, his fellow sovereign citizens have portrayed Freeman – whose name was previously Desmond Filby – as a freedom fighter waging guerilla warfare against tyranny and injustice.

Phillips and his three children disappeared from Marokopa in the rural Waikato region of New Zealand’s upper North Island amid a Family Court custody battle in December 2021.

Daughters Jayda and Ember were aged eight and five respectively, while son Maverick was seven. For the next four years they lived in hiding, deprived of proper food, shelter, education, and any contact with their mother.

Phillips was shot dead in front of 12-year-old Jayda on Monday about 30km north of Piopio in the Waitomo district after the 38-year-old shot and seriously injured a police officer.

Ember, now nine, and Maverick, 10, were found at a remote campsite about 2km from where their father was killed. Some details about what happened while they were held captive by Phillips cannot be published due to a court order.

Yet on social media, Phillips continues to receive praise from supporters who see the cop shooter as a protective dad and resourceful survivalist.

‘RIP, Tom,’ one admirer wrote. ‘You taught your kids how to survive out in the bush and live off the land in those four years. You should be proud of that for teaching them at a young age. That’s solid as.’

‘A national hide-and-seek champion,’ another wrote. ‘Today will be remembered in history as the day we lost a good one, a bloke that captured the nation, the Where’s Wally? of New Zealand.’

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Freeman is a self-proclaimed ‘sovereign citizen’ who does not accept Australian laws or respect government authority. Police are pictured hunting for him

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Police form a guard of honour for slain officer Vadim de Waart-Hottart, who has gunned down by Dezi Freeman

A third said: ‘Did they have to kill this guy? What crime did he commit other than removing his children from the insane world we live in?’

Victorian police have had to address similar sentiments about Freeman, who they say has had help evading capture.

‘People know the whereabouts of the person who has killed two cops,’ Superintendent Brett Kahan said one week into the search.

‘You are committing an extremely serious crime by harbouring or assisting in the escape of Dezi Freeman.’

New Zealand Police Commissioner Richard Chambers is fed up with Phillips being considered a sympathetic figure within a small segment of the community.

‘He’s not a hero,’ Chambers told Newstalk ZB’s breakfast host Mike Hosking.

Police Minister Mark Mitchell went further, labelling Phillips ‘a monster’.

‘This is a guy that has taken his children into abysmal conditions,’ Mitchell has said. ‘He has kept them away from education. He has kept them away from medical support.

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Phillips’ children Ember and Maverick were found at a remote campsite (above) about 2km from where there father was killed and are in government care

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Tom Phillips’ three children (L-R) Jayda, now 12, Maverick, 10, and Ember, 9, are in the care of New Zealand’s Ministry of Children, known as Oranga Tamaraki

‘He has taken them and used them as human shields in violent criminal offending, and he has put his daughter in harm’s way when he tried to kill a police officer.

‘So this guy is in no way, shape or form a hero. Quite the opposite – he’s a monster.’

Dr Josh Roose is a political sociologist and associate professor of politics at Melbourne’s Deakin University and has followed the manhunts for Freeman and Phillips.

Roose believes some of the support for both men can be attributed to ongoing resentment over Covid-19 restrictions in Victoria and New Zealand, where both jurisdictions imposed some of the world’s strictest lockdowns.

‘I think it certainly played a role,’ Roose told the Daily Mail. ‘I think you’ve got to contemplate that there was a lot of anger and resentment and anxiety in their communities.

‘We’re in a time of three or four years after pandemic lockdowns and that did an enormous amount of damage to people’s trust in government.

‘Particularly those people who are on the fringes of society who may have lost jobs and been in precarious work, and so they were looking for someone to blame for a lot of their challenges.

‘Anyone who positions himself as standing up to government or the authorities – even when they are using violence – will be by some small percentage of the population viewed as heroes or in some sort of positive light.’

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Experts suggest some of the supporters who applaud the actions of Freeman and Phillips likely feel persecuted themselves. Freeman is pictured under arrest in 2021

Roose said in the case of Freeman it was worth considering ‘the sort of culture that’s pervasive at the margins of Australian society where this happened’.

Porepunkah is about an hour’s drive south-west of where Ned Kelly and his gang of bushrangers made their last stand at Glenrowan in 1880, two years after killing three policemen at Stringybark Creek.

‘To this day, that’s celebrated by a reasonably significant portion of the Australian population as an act of independence in the face of government authority and the police,’ Roose said.

As for Phillips, a small percentage of the population would be attracted to ‘this idea of living off the land, fleeing government authority, raising his children off the grid’.

Dr Liam Gillespie, who lectures in criminology at the University of Melbourne, suggested supporters of outlaws such as Freeman and Phillips often felt persecuted themselves.

‘I think for me, the main reason that we see that occurring is when people are feeding into narratives of persecution,’ Gillespie told the Daily Mail.

‘So if they are experiencing or feeling a sense of persecution themselves in their lives, then they may gravitate towards other figures, or they may idolise other figures who seem to embody that and who seem to act upon that as well.’

Gillespie said it was ‘a common refrain’ to see certain figures who took the law into their own hands being celebrated and idolised.

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Porepunkah is about an hour’s drive south-west of where Ned Kelly and his gang of bushrangers made their last stand at Glenrowan, two years after they killed three policemen

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A farming property between Wangaratta and Myrtleford, 25km from Porepunkah, displays Ned Kelly’s image. It is not suggested that the owner of this property has any links to Dezi Freeman

‘While the sovereign citizen phenomenon is relatively new the phenomenon of actually idolising those sorts of figures itself isn’t particularly new,’ he said.

‘We can think about it in the context of Australia, with Ned Kelly, for example.’

He said the impact of Covid-19 was sometimes overemphasised when considering why sovereign citizenry had ‘skyrocketed’ since the pandemic but it had played a significant role.

‘People who probably never expected that they would be met with those kind of restrictions suddenly were met with that reality,’ he said.

‘So, all of a sudden you’re feeling like, “The state is curtailing my freedoms in all of these different ways and here is a movement that gives me a narrative that can explain that”.’

Roose said the type of person who might applaud the actions of Freeman or Phillips was likely male and aged at least in their thirties, and perhaps more likely to live in the regions or outer suburbs.

They might be under financial stress and were ‘likely to view government negatively, likely to view the police and authorities in a negative sense’.

Roose said sections of Australian society were increasingly celebrating ‘political violence’, citing left-wing reactions to this week’s assassination of conservative US activist Charlie Kirk.

‘There’s always been an undercurrent of resistance to authority, including violent resistance,’ he said.

‘We’re seeing a celebration of political violence and ideologically driven violence that we haven’t seen for quite some time, post-pandemic, and a lot of that’s driven by the online environment.

‘It’s a trend that’s not going to go away.

‘We’re moving towards a normalisation of that celebration of violence, and a big part of that’s due to people’s exposure online to acts of violence, and people becoming a little bit numb to what that means.’