KEY POINTS:
It is a shame that the Law Commission's latest report, recommending the abolition of the offences of sedition, was made public on the eve of the Easter break. Delivered to a press which does not publish on Good Friday and to a public with its mind on other things, the report did not get the attention it deserves. Sedition is not at all common and is largely irrelevant to people's daily lives. Yet it is a charge which is misused on occasion and represents an overly broad, worrying threat to one of our most basic rights, the freedom of expression.
Last year, a man who attacked the Prime Minister's electorate office window with an axe and helped disseminate pamphlets calling for action against the foreshore law was jailed for numerous charges including sedition. The levelling of the sedition charge was an over-reaction by the police and an embarrassment, really, for an open society. What the pamphleteer, Tim Selwyn, was urging was political action, not the overthrow of the state.
The Law Commission's final report sticks closely to its draft recommendations late last year that New Zealand has no need for charges of sedition in the Crimes Act, 1961. Like its chairman, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, the report gets straight to the point, saying the provisions are overly broad. "They infringe on the principle of freedom of expression and have the potential for abuse, a potential that has been realised in some periods of our history, when these offences have been used to stifle or punish political speech." It goes on to observe that in a democracy it is hard to see how or why speech uttered against the government should be a crime. And it says that other parts of the Crimes Act deal adequately with inciting violence, rioting and willing insurrection.
In a 100-page analysis, the commission makes a persuasive case that those, like this paper last year, who believe the sedition provisions have been misused but probably serve as a protection against unpredictable upheavals, need to turn that argument on its head. The greater concern should be the potential for unpredictable abuse of the sedition charges as a form of political muzzling. "By abolishing sedition, we will better protect the values of democracy and free speech," the report says, noting that had the 1961 provisions been subjected to the Bill of Rights Act 1990, they would have been red-carded.
Criminal defamation was abolished in 1992 and it was right that a bid to reinstate it was stared down by the news media and others in this Government's first term. Any law which allows authorities to jail a citizen solely for political opinions, however extreme, is anathema. The Law Commission's simple summaries of this country's prosecutions for sedition make a compelling case for abolition: the list includes Te Whiti and his rousing resistance to the state at Parihaka, conscientious objectors, union leaders, an Irish bishop failing to show due deference to the English monarch and the axe-wielding Mr Selwyn.
We have a largely open society, but it is one in which threats to freedom of expression and the freedom of the press regularly arise. The Law Commission's clear and forceful report is a welcome support for free speech. It usefully quotes English writer and thinker John Milton from a speech in 1644: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties ... Let [truth] and falsehood grapple; whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter." A progressive government would take confidence in that view, endorse the Law Commission's recommendations and implement them as soon as possible.
