Brian Rudman: Speak up and scrap the old sedition law

The jailing of Tim Selwyn for sedition should send a shiver up the spine of anyone whose business is words and ideas. And in a free and open democracy, that's every one of us.

That the police, off their own bat, can prosecute a pamphleteer for sedition, persuading a jury that the Government was in danger of being overthrown unlawfully as a result of his scribblings, drags us into the same class as "guided" democracies such as Singapore.

It's as though we've caught the 9/11 fever which permits British police to gun down an unarmed Brazilian electrician on the Underground and the United States to lock up terrorist suspects and throw away the key.

Many years ago, as a university student journalist, I was threatened with a charge of criminal libel by the then Speaker of the House, Roy Emile Jack, and his lawyers. The alleged libel was for writing that the Speaker was either asleep, made deaf by the flaps on the full wig he was wearing or a racist for claiming he had not heard - and therefore could not rule on the appropriateness of - a National MP telling Northern Maori MP Matt Rata, to "get back to your pipis".

A charge of libel was a civil issue, and obviously considered not very threatening to a penniless student. So they came up with the archaic charge of criminal libel. Under this statute they could, by proving malice, have me locked up.

Sir Roy eventually cooled down, and, as my legal adviser, Frank Haigh, predicted, no charges were ever laid.

All I had to do was perform a theatrical grovel to Parliament for breaching privilege and it all went away. But it was, and remains, an eye-opening alert to the reserve bullying powers our political masters and mistresses have at their disposal.

Those were illiberal times, when the communist smear was an effective and debate-freezing tool. But I don't recall anyone digging out the old sedition laws. Or the witch-burning and blasphemy ones either.

Mr Selwyn put an axe through Prime Minister Helen Clark's electorate office window in a protest against the controversial foreshore and seabed legislation and, in a pamphlet left behind, called upon "like-minded New Zealanders to take similar action of their own".

The jurors, bless them, found the comments seditious. But, confusingly, they said he was not seditious elsewhere in the pamphlet when he called upon "like-minded New Zealanders to commit their own acts of civil disobedience".

When I think of the decades of hot-headed battles I have lived through, dealing with everything from Maori sovereignty to gay rights and rugby tours with South Africa, the Vietnam War, anti-nuclear-ship visits and women's rights, such "seditious" statements were a daily occurrence. Everyone was demanding revolution and change. But while governments came and went during these turbulent times, none were brought down by acts of revolution that the charge of sedition implies.

Mr Selwyn is no hero. Yesterday he was also jailed for a further 15 months on dishonesty charges. Ten years ago he served time for forgery, standing in a local election under a false name. And there was more. So why not lock him up for another two months for sedition? Who cares? Well I do, for one.

The New Zealand I was born into may have been a paradise to bring children up in but it was a blinkered, narrow-minded, rugby-racing-and-beer monoculture where freedom of speech was protected by abusing and threatening the jobs of the commie-poofter troublemakers who tried to exercise it.

Compared with the sixties, we now live in a golden age of free speech and free expression. Who of us would want to go back? The conviction and jailing of someone for exercising this new openness are chilling reminders of those bad old days. The quicker the sedition law is repealed the better.

* Meanwhile, back to Rotoroa Island, and apologies to both the art-loving John Gows. On Monday I said that art dealer John Gow was heading the Rotoroa Island Trust, representing the anonymous donor family who had enabled the Salvation Army property to become a public domain. It's not him, it's John Gow, co-owner of the Strada group of companies, who in recent years has created the acclaimed Connells Bay Sculpture Park on his Waiheke Island property.