Face of the threat: young, well-educated and middle class, with a cocktail of fears
When ASIO chief Mike Burgess warned last year of the threat posed by people motivated by a ‘cocktail …. of conspiracies’, he could have been referring directly to Gareth, Nathaniel and Stacey Train.
When ASIO chief Mike Burgess warned in March last year of the threat posed by people motivated by a “cocktail …. of conspiracies’’, he could have been referring directly to Gareth, Nathaniel and Stacey Train.
As the nation mourns the death of two young police officers and a neighbour gunned down on a remote bush block at Wieambilla in Queensland, attention has turned to the bizarre conspiracy theories that fuelled the Train trio’s murderous rampage.
Ringleader Gareth Train, 47, was the most vehement in his support of a grab-bag of popular and nonsensical conspiracy theories about government mind-control and surveillance, the supposed health dangers posed by the 5G phone networks, and the hoary old chestnut that the Port Arthur massacre of 35 people carried out by a lone gunman in Tasmania in 1996 was actually a secret government plot to de-arm the nation.
High on his list of grievances – views shared by his younger brother Nathaniel, 46, and his wife Stacey, 45 – was the supposed dangers of the Covid-19 vaccine, a viewpoint that turned to burning anger against the government and its agents, including the police.
“They came to kill us and we killed them,” Gareth said in a shadowy video with Stacey by his side, posted online at 7.39pm on Monday, three hours after the trio killed constables Matthew Arnold and Rachel McCrow, and three hours before they themselves would be shot dead by specialist police who stormed their fortified block.
For the past two years, Burgess, the director-general of ASIO, had been warning of the threat posed to Australia by people like the Trains, who had become further radicalised during the Covid lockdowns.
And however nutty the conspiracies seemed – Gareth Train wrote online that Princess Diana’s 1997 death in a Paris car accident was a “blood sacrifice’’, and warned of “Luciferian agendas’’ – Burgess’s warnings could not have been more clearly driven home than by the tragic events at Wieambilla, on the Western Downs, last Monday afternoon.
“We are seeing a growing number of individuals and groups that don’t fit on the left-right spectrum at all; instead, they’re motivated by a fear of societal collapse or a specific social or economic grievance or conspiracy,’’ Burgess said in his threat assessment in March 2021, a year into the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
“The behaviours we are seeing in response to Covid lockdowns and vaccinations are not specifically left- or right-wing. They are a cocktail of views, fears, frustrations and conspiracies.
“Individuals who hold these views, and are willing to support violence to further them, are best and most accurately described as ideologically motivated violent extremists.
“Today’s ideological extremist is more likely to be motivated by a social or economic grievance than national socialism. More often than not, they are young, well-educated, articulate, and middle class – and not easily identified.’’
Articulate, well-educated, middle class and not easy to identify; like two former school principals and a groundsman, sons of a Baptist preacher.
Whether the Trains explicitly fit the definition of domestic terrorists is not clear. Terrorists are those who commit acts in furtherance of a specific political aim, usually to undermine an elected government or terrorise the community. It’s possible the Trains were “sovereign citizens’’ – a group of ideologues better known in the US than Australia, who reject democratically-elected governments and state institutions, and are prepared to use violence to repel them.
On September 10, 2020, Gareth Train took to the alt-right website Citizens Initiated Referendum Now to rail against federal and state “operatives/influencers and surveillance’’ in the mid-90s, deride former PM John Howard’s gun buyback scheme that followed the Port Arthur massacre, and claim governments had attacked Australians’ individual rights and freedoms.
In a foreboding thought-bubble, he wrote: “If provoked respond using all necessary force to go about your business in peace. Everyone has the God given right to defend themselves against all aggressors no matter badge, flag or patch.’’
The website is run by Sunshine Coast-based Vietnam War veteran Mike Holt, who stood unsuccessfully for Pauline Hanson’s political party One Nation in the seat of Fairfax in 2013.
Holt refused to answer The Australian’s questions and threatened to sue “for libel’’ if any of his own comments were published.
Train posted several niche conspiracy-theory websites, and Stacey posted their video after the police officers’ death on mainstream site YouTube, owned by Google.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil had earlier told parliament conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation was being “turbocharged’’ online and new government responses, including legislation, may be needed.
A teary Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll told of the moment she received the call on her phone late on Monday afternoon advising her that two officers following up a missing person’s report on Nathaniel Train had been shot as they jumped the fence onto the fortified block owned by Gareth and Stacey Train.
“That feeling of, my God I hope, my God I hope they’re all OK,’’ she recalled, standing outside the Chinchilla police station, where tributes of flowers and blue and white teddy bears were placed in honour of the constables Arnold, 26, and McCrow, 29, two popular country coppers stationed at Tara, 70km away.
She was in her car in Brisbane when the call came through advising the two officers were down, a third, Russell Kirk, was injured, and a fourth, Keely Brough, had escaped into the bush, but was being threatened by a bushfire the trio had lit to flush her out.
“I was being briefed throughout the entire evening. Then to sadly find out that two were deceased, that Keely had finally made it out and that Randall was back calling for help,’’ she recalled.
“There were dozens and dozens of phone calls going into the night.
“You get that call and the information’s very scant originally. And you know that two of your police officers have been shot at and you’re sitting there yourself praying that they’re alive. And then when you get that terrible, terrible news that they’re not, your heart sinks.
“And then when you find out two have made it out alive, you’re grateful for that.’’
There are many unanswered questions about what turned Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacey Train into the police killers they became on Monday.
The first time their names became widely known in public was on December 8 at 9.13am, when NSW Police issued an appeal to find Nathaniel Train, advising he was last seen in Dubbo on December 16 last year, but had been in contact with some family members as late at October 9 this year.
“When he could not be contacted by family or friends, he was reported missing to officers from Central North Police District on Sunday (December 4, 2022), who immediately commenced inquiries into his whereabouts,’’ police advised.
They described Nathaniel as being of Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander appearance, but his Indigenous heritage has not been publicly confirmed.
What is now known is that Nathaniel and Gareth, the sons of a conservative Baptist preacher from Toowoomba, were both married to Stacey, who first married Nathaniel when they were teenagers, giving birth to two children.
She later left him for Gareth, who she married, and who is thought to have raised her now-adult, and estranged children.
The trio worked in the Queensland Education Department for years – Gareth as a groundsman, while Nathaniel and Stacey became respected school principals. Nathaniel and Stacey both left their employment and threw away their careers after refusing to get a Covid-19 vaccine.
They lived and worked around Queensland for almost 30 years, including in small Aboriginal communities, sometimes owning properties and apparently living together in their bizarre love triangle. Gareth was the dominant personality and the brothers’ father, Ronald Train, described him as “gun-obsessed’’, controlling and demanding and “difficult to control.’’.
In 2009, Stacey worked as principal at Proston State School, while Gareth was employed as groundsman and general handyman. Stacey moved to Quinalow school the next year and Nathaniel taught at Innisfail.
The last school Gareth was involved with was at Pormpuraaw State School on Cape York, before he left the department. Nathaniel worked on the other side of the cape at Yorkeys Knob. Stacey’s last job was at Tate Shire State College, 33km from the bush block on Wains Rd. Nathaniel’s final job was at Walgett State School in NSW, which he left after suffering a heart attack in 2020.
“Gareth Train resigned from the Department in May 2016, Nathaniel Train resigned from the Department in March 2020, and Stacey Train resigned from the Department in December 2021,” a departmental spokesperson said. It was later revealed Stacey quit one day before mandatory vaccinations came into force.
Gareth and Stacey had bought the remote 43ha bush block off Wains Rd for a steal in 2015, becoming increasingly reclusive in an off-the-grid bush hideaway not connected to town water or electricity. It did however have a satellite dish and access to the internet. It wasn’t prime agricultural land; but dry and scrubby, with a dam, and a shed.
But unlike the neighbouring “blockies’’ who enjoyed the peaceful solitude on their bush blocks halfway between Chinchilla and Tara, they had rigged it with trip wires, surveillance cameras and booby traps as they were joined by Nathaniel and the trio hunkered down, falling deeper down the rabbit hole of perceived persecution.
The police, when they came, didn’t want to hurt them. They were just checking if Nathaniel Train was all right. They didn’t have ballistic vests, and when they couldn’t get through the locked gates, they blithely jumped the fence.
There, the Trains, dressed in camouflage gear and armed with high-powered rifles, gunned them down. When good Samaritan neighbour Alan Dale, 58, came to investigate the smoke from the fire they had lit, they gunned him down too, with such a high-calibre bullet he didn’t even know he’d been shot until he suddenly felt unwell and collapsed.
ASIO did not comment on the tragic events of this week, although O’Neil said intelligence agencies were investigating.
But the agencies – mentioned by Gareth Train in his deranged videos – could have been describing the Trains when Burgess gave his threat assessment speech early last year.
“In addition to the enduring threat from religiously motivated violent extremists is a growing assortment of individuals with ideological grievances,’’ he said. “Ideological extremism investigations have grown from around one-third of our priority counter-terrorism caseload, to around 40 per cent. This reflects a growing international trend, as well as our decision to dedicate more resources to the emerging domestic threat.
“The face of the threat is also evolving, and this poses challenges as we seek to identify and monitor it.
“People often think we’re talking about skinheads with swastika tattoos and jackboots roaming the backstreets like extras from Romper Stomper, but it’s no longer that obvious.
“Today’s ideological extremist is more likely to be motivated by a social or economic grievance than national socialism.’’
In response to the shootings, the Australian Federal Police Association urged all police forces around the country to lobby their state and territory governments to refocus on establishing a national firearms registry, a stalled project legislated 10 days after the Port Arthur massacre but which has been bogged down in bureaucratic incompetence for the past 26½ years.
“If the recent events trigger anything, I’d encourage each local police force to encourage their government to have a real crack at developing a true national firearms registry, a proper database and nationally-uniform gun laws,’’ said police association president Alex Caruana.
President of the Queensland Police Union, Ian Leavers, also urged action on a national firearms register.
“Do I think it would have made a difference as a result of what’s happened here? No I don’t. But as a result of looking at this holistically, it’s an opportunity and we should have one system across the country,’’ he told The Australian.
“It is at this point in time that each jurisdiction has its own databases and they’re not talking to each other. They are chunky, they’re clumsy and what I want is one national system so the police officer in Chinchilla can access the same information as the police officer in Penrith or in Dandenong, simple as that.
“I understand Port Arthur was a long time ago, the technology may not have been up to speed but it’s now 2022 and I think we should have a national database.
“It is time.’’