As Grey Lynn sleeps on November 18 2004, Tim Selwyn sits at his desk tapping out his latest polemic, Frank Sinatra keeping him company on an antique gramophone. It’s 3.00am and he’s dead tired. His beard, normally impeccably shaped and trimmed, is ragged and his shirt, for once, hasn’t been pressed. He’s had too much to do.

Parliament has been in urgency trying to push through the Foreshore and Seabed Bill, the government’s somewhat hasty response to the Court of Appeal’s June 2003 ruling in favour of Marlborough tribe Ngati Apa. In the year since, talkback has fizzed with the fears of Middle New Zealand, peddled an alarmist vision of our beaches being fenced off, Mongrel Mob members at the gate levying picnicking Pakeha families.

This law would protect what Helen Clark described as every Kiwi’s “birthright” — full and free access to the nation’s beaches. But Selwyn, who is of Welsh, Irish and Whakatohea descent, is desperately opposed to the legislation. As far as he’s concerned, it’s nothing short of state expropriation of Maori land. Confiscation in the 21st century.

Yesterday morning Selwyn bought a Telecom phone card from a Shell service station in Grey Lynn, a central Auckland suburb. Security camera footage taken at 3.30am would later show him wearing a backpack with a wooden handle poking out the top; police would allege it was an axe. The police would also claim Selwyn called a taxi using the name “Jeremy” and asked to be driven to West Auckland. An inquisitive cab driver might have caused him to lose his nerve, perhaps sparing the Te Atatu office of Maori MP Dover Samuels an axing.

The reinforced glass doesn’t break easily; he has to give it several whacks before the axe is embedded to his satisfaction. He stops for a moment to admire the job — “a spontaneous work of installation art at the electorate office of the Minister of Art and Culture”, he’d later reflect — and scatters a handful of pamphlets explaining his actions.

But tonight, with most news reports saying the bill is expected to pass in a few hours, Selwyn feels he has no choice but to go through with it. He feels cornered. Someone has to do something, to show Maori they are not fighting alone. Several times he has told friends that he could not bear to live with himself if he does nothing. The fact the Prime Minister, after championing the legislation, has jetted off to an APEC meeting in Santiago has especially angered him. Typical avoidance mode, he thinks.

As forensic experts from the police Electronic Crime Laboratory will demonstrate in court, Selwyn starts his notorious call to arms on his ageing Apple at 3.03am and prints it out, without saving, nine minutes later. He then sets off for the Prime Minister’s electorate office on foot, heading down Williamson Ave, crossing over the North-Western Motorway via the Bond St bridge, then walking into Sandringham Rd. It takes about 15 minutes.

The reinforced glass doesn’t break easily; he has to give it several whacks before the axe is embedded to his satisfaction. He stops for a moment to admire the job — “a spontaneous work of installation art at the electorate office of the Minister of Art and Culture”, he’d later reflect — and scatters a handful of the pamphlets explaining his actions.

He retraces his steps, carrying on up to Ponsonby Rd, where he places a neatly folded batch of “press releases” atop a green power box outside the trendy boutique Hailwood. Using the phone card bought the night before, he makes several calls to TV3, Radio NZ, NewstalkZB and other media outlets, telling them where to find the pamphlets. The NewstalkZB reporter is the first to arrive, just before 7.00am.

The pamphlet reads:

By attacking the electorate office of the chief instigator, the Prime Minister — who is due to abandon the mess she created by fleeing the country today — we signal that a threshold has been crossed. The broken glass symbolises the broken faith, broken trust and shattered justice, our axe symbolises the steadfastness of our determination. If this is destined to be Confiscation Day, then we have marked it. Ake! Ake! Ake!

In all, Selwyn scatters six pamphlets in Ponsonby and 19 outside the Prime Minister’s office. They are slightly different, however. In the more detailed press release, he calls upon “all like-minded New Zealanders to take similar action of their own”. In the other set, the wording is altered a little. “We call upon other like-minded New Zealanders to commit their own acts of civil disobedience,” it reads. That tiny semantic difference will prove crucial in Selwyn becoming the first New Zealander in decades to be convicted of the crime of sedition.

Marty ‘Boomfa’ Bradbury, a great ambling, pierced, tattooed bear of a man, steps inside the prison gates and waits in no man’s land with the other visitors — a worn Maori Mum with three kids, a spotty skinhead with a clutch of gangsta rap CDs, and an older Pakeha lady who coyly confesses she’s “jazzed-up for the old man”.

“How do I look?” she asks. “Need some lippie, don’t I?”

There’s a tug at Bradbury’s voluminous shorts. “Hey! You’re that TV fulla,” a small boy chirps. “You making a show about jail?”

“Nah… I’m just here to see a mate,” smiles the host of Stakeout, TV3’s gotcha reality show. After a few more minutes of small talk, the visitors’ van pulls up.

“So you’re here to see the Axeman?” the driver asks us. Just five weeks into his sentence of 15 months for fraud and dishonesty and a further two for sedition, Tim Selwyn is already Hawke’s Bay Regional Prison’s biggest celebrity.

First there was the furore surrounding his June 2006 trial and the unusual charge of sedition. It wasn’t the axe through the PM’s window that aroused such zeal from the police and interest from the national press, but rather the sharp edge of his words — the apparent incitement to others to follow his example. Most people hadn’t heard of such an offence; certainly it hadn’t been used in many years: 30, 50 or 70, depending on who you talk to. Moreover, it carried a ring of political martyrdom. Thomas Paine, father of the American Revolution, and Gandhi were seditionists, but Tim Selwyn?

Then in late July, Selwyn hit national headlines over his weblog, Tumeke!, which he writes by hand, mails to Bradbury, who then posts it on the internet. The first blogger to describe life from inside a New Zealand prison — a novelty in itself — Selwyn has written scathingly of his trial judge, Josephine Bouchier (“the wife of a cop… with the Lynn of Tawa accent from hell”), and the head of his prison unit (“a manner somewhere between an ungracious maths teacher and a disappointed car-yard owner chastising his salesmen”). But it was his graphic description of the beating of a fellow inmate, Roger Tira Kahui (on remand on sexual violation charges), that caused the most fuss. “There was a solid slap no doubt corrective in nature,” Selwyn wrote, “quickly followed by a slamming thud that reverberated around the compound as his head hit the concrete wall.”

A niggly exchange followed in Parliament between Mita Ririnui, the Associate Corrections minister, and National MP Simon Power, who demanded Selwyn be silenced. “This sort of carry-on is hardly sending a message to people that prison is a place where you are deprived of many of your liberties,” Power said. Huffed Prime Minister Helen Clark on radio: “It used to be that when you were put away, you were put away from society.” But Selwyn was not committing any offence, so the blogs continued.

Boomfa Bradbury: Tim was the single funniest person I’d met. Smart. Really smart. But principled. He looked at the Takapuna 90210 social elite with contempt — that was another thing which pleased me. Christ they were shallow.”

It’s not the first time Selwyn has caused public outrage — nor even the first time he’s had a brush with the law. In 1995, he was sentenced to six months’ periodic detention for fraud after feigning a marriage to obtain student allowances.

The following year, he was sentenced to six months’ jail, reduced to three on appeal, for forging signatures to nominate himself for eight community boards, mostly on the North Shore. (Selwyn says he was genuinely interested in solving the city’s transport problems but “cut corners” because he was disorganised.)

Having assumed an alphabetically advantageous surname — Abaford — the young politics student found himself on the Glenfield Community Board. It was only when bemused journalists went digging that his ruse was rumbled. A desultory police investigation was launched; it gathered force after a mysterious break-in at the Browns Bay police station where only Selwyn’s diary was taken.

From his prison hut, Selwyn, 32, is only dimly aware of the latest ruckus. The prison, 10 minutes south of Hastings, is one of the country’s newest: a sprawling forbidden city of perforated steel fences, razor wire, few trees and little grass. It’s home to 568 men, eight per cent of the national prison population. “Pretty flash for a shithole,” is one visitor’s description of the place.

As the prison van chugs from block to block, Bradbury gives a potted history of his best friendship. It started at Takapuna Grammar in 1990 when he arrived from Orewa College for sixth form and first met Selwyn. Both sons of solo mothers from state houses in Bayswater, the two quickly bonded and worked hard at being rebels, to the amusement of their peers.

“He was the single funniest person I’d met,” Bradbury says. “Smart. Really smart. But principled. He had very firm views about the world at a time when it was much cooler not to.” That he was an outsider didn’t bother Selwyn. “He looked at the Takapuna 90210 social elite with contempt — that was another thing which pleased me. The things that seemed important to them just seemed so vacuous to us. You know — what kind of car you had, what shoes you wore. Christ they were shallow.”

They flatted together in their first year at Auckland University in 1992 and studied the same politics and philosophy papers. When Bradbury went on to forge a career in alternative media, editing the Auckland University student magazine Craccum and the music rag Rip It Up and hosting radio shows on Channel Z, Selwyn was often at his side. “He’s been a fantastically loyal friend,” Bradbury says. “He’s always been there for me.”

“And there he is!” he grins, spotting prisoner PRN60477981 dressed in Guantanamo Bay orange overalls sitting in a spartan courtyard.

Inside Unit 8 — the medium-security block — the two men embrace awkwardly. “Good to see ya,” Bradbury says. We sit in weak spring sun as they talk about the blog — Selwyn suggesting his mate broaden the content away from his “sub-Marxist conspiracy theories” — and then about the privations of prison life. “I’m missing Radio New Zealand Nine To Noon, parliamentary question time, rugby, eggs and women,” Selwyn says.

For almost the entire hour-long visit he’s charming, wryly humorous and seemingly devoid of bitterness. It’s only when Bradbury raises the subject of tenure review, the process of freeholding high-country farms, that his genial mask slips. “The White Witch [Helen Clark] is selling off 20 per cent of the South Island through the freeholding of Crown leases — to Pakeha — while simultaneously confiscating Maori property and turning it into Crown title so it can be leased to Pakeha.

“If it was 100 per cent Maori who were entitled to freehold instead of pretty much 100 per cent Pakeha, do you think it’d be an issue? It’d be an almighty fucking drama all right.”

Tim’s writing was always the crème de la crème of student media,” recalls former Craccum editor Ben Thomas, now a journalist with the National Business Review. “All the things the medium prized, he was a master of. Cynicism. Forthrightness. Controversy. Snappy writing. There was nothing formulaic or clichéd about his work at all.”

Selwyn’s often considered the most gifted of Craccum’s mid-’90s alumni which include Bradbury, Qantas Journalism Award winners Alex Spence, Alistair Bone and Tim Watkin, essayist Tze Ming Mok and, most notably, Jessica Williams, producer of the BBC’s Hardtalk and author of the acclaimed 50 Facts That Should Change The World.

“With Tim, there was a sense of possibility,” Thomas continues. “Whatever he was writing about was within the realms of the possible. A lot of student journalists will write a diatribe where they say, ‘It’s all so terrible, it’s all so unfair’, whereas Tim would actually make a case why it should be different. And you’d actually believe things could change.”

Selwyn is best remembered for an inflammatory article he wrote for Thomas in 2000. Craccum published a guide, Suicide And How to Do It, accompanied by grisly pictures of a man who’d blown half his head off with a shotgun. “The point of the story was to puncture the myth suicide is a ‘painless, easy way out’,” remembers Thomas.

But that story was immediately followed by Selwyn’s Last Call, a typically acerbic opinion piece that slammed “the suicide industry” and derided those attempting suicide as “fakes” and “losers”, then argued for people’s right to take their own lives.

It swiftly got the reaction its author sought. Coroners Council chair Richard McElrea described it as “an appalling piece of writing”. Hard News’ Russell Brown bagged the author: “Selwyn is one of those people who try to be clever but just aren’t bright enough.” And then Kim Hill famously hung up on Selwyn on her Nine To Noon show, unable to stomach the vileness of his views and his polite refusal to resile from them.

Next the Press Council weighed in. While student media usually fell outside its jurisdiction the council decreed that, due to the public outcry, it’d consider complaints. Its detailed and measured report surprised many: the complaints from the likes of the Mental Health Foundation and Ministry of Health against the suicide guide were dismissed — the magazine’s editors were even praised for their efforts. But the council had no time for Selwyn’s Last Call: “Selwyn’s calculated shock attack on social taboos and his obnoxious conclusions leave a repellent taste.”

“I thought it the sort of thing the [British magazine] Spectator might run,” says Selwyn in a letter to North & South from his prison hut. “But New Zealand, I’m afraid, just isn’t mature enough to deal with that form of robust opinion. It was an argument to ‘respect’ suicide (I suppose in a Japanese sense) rather than embark on it for trivial reasons. If an adult individual of sound mind truly believes they don’t have any reason to live, then who are we to stop them?”

However, Selwyn would soon find that being the enfant terrible of student media didn’t pay the bills. After leaving university he worked in an eclectic muddle of jobs — stints as a call-centre sales rep for accidental death insurance, Sunday Star-Times’ TV columnist in 1997–98, second-hand bookshop proprietor in the late ’90s and a few months as an Act Party electorate agent in 2002.

Tim Selwyn on Helen Clark: “A product of 25 years in Parliament, straight from the halls of academe with no private-sector experience [and] a born-to-rule attitude any true Tory would admire”.

There were several creative projects with Bradbury: Selwyn wrote columns for Rip It Up under Bradbury’s editorship; the two made a pilot show, Dissident TV, for C4 in 2004 and did a weekly Radio Live talkback show together until earlier this year.

But his first love remained writing, even if he struggled to make a living from it. “My freelance writing hasn’t been that successful,” he admits. “I’ve also been knocked back from plenty of journo jobs.”

Since no one would hire him, Selwyn would simply publish himself. His weblog Tumeke! (“to startle” in Maori) was launched in April 2005, five months after his sedition arrest. Its purpose was elegantly stated in the first post: “To convey ideas, provoke debate, provide a forum for discussion and irritate people and institutions that deserve to be so disturbed, always with a view to reform and advancement of ourselves, our society, our state, and our world.”

In a year, Selwyn wrote well over 100,000 words. Read through the archives and a picture forms of a restlessly intelligent mind. Selwyn can be idealistic (setting up a constitutional convention blog, “a bold new experiment in on-line participatory democracy”), constructive (posting his submission to the Auckland City Council Long-Term Plan) and sentimental (proposing sirens sound for one minute at 1pm on Anzac Day to honour the fallen).

He can be mischievous: when Trade Me shut down the auction of Tame Iti’s shotgun-blasted flag, Selwyn upbraided it for pawning [Springbok-era Red Squad leader] Ross Meurant’s “Minto Stick” and auctioned Iti’s “UK-designed, Chinese-made flag” on Tumeke! It fetched $350.

He can be spiteful — consider the thrashing he gives Russell Brown for the narrow range of contributors he selected for his book Great New Zealand Argument: Ideas About Ourselves.

“There are no working-class voices here. No James K. Baxter, no John A. Lee, no Bruce Jesson or Tim Shadbolt or Warwick Roger let alone Bob Jones or Roger Douglas — and certainly no Maori ‘militants’ who Brown evidently thinks unworthy or perhaps incapable of ideas or ‘great writing’.”

He’s even more scornful of his nemesis Helen Clark — “a product of 25 years in Parliament, straight from the halls of academe with no private-sector experience [and] a born-to-rule attitude any true Tory would admire”.

But he comes up with stuff you probably didn’t know. Like the fact New Zealand’s one-month chairmanship of the UN Security Council in April 1994 coincided with the UN’s disgraceful dithering over Rwanda’s genocide (“We had our chance on the world stage and we did nothing and almost one million died.”). Or the real reason Australia’s wealthier than us (“It’s pretty basic: they dig shit out of the ground… In 2000, Australia’s mineral exports were $A43.8 billion — almost twice that of agriculture”).

Interesting stuff. But he’s under no illusions his ideas are going to find readers. “What’s the point of a blog? he muses at one point: “The least popular people using the widest possible medium to convey the most unfounded ideas to the smallest possible audience for the minutist of effects.”

Tumeke! makes it plain Selwyn possesses a broad repertoire but his consuming passion is distributive justice. The self-described “reformed libertarian” had always taken a keen interest in property rights, and the Foreshore and Seabed Bill would obsess him.

When North & South talked to him about the legislation, the anger hadn’t dimmed.

“The Ngati Apa [Appeal Court] decision was decided under the laws of the empire about customary rights,” he says. “This wasn’t PC Treaty of Waitangi bullshit. It was a white court and it found that a group of New Zealanders may have a right — it didn’t even establish a right — if they could prove customary usage. The government panicked. The scene was set for a terrible law.

“It was presented as ‘Save our Beaches’. Never mind the fact a fairly sizeable chunk of our coast is already in private ownership. But you won’t see the government passing legislation to take those people’s property off them.”

Selwyn brands the customary rights provisions in the new law the “white man’s touch”. He says the Crown’s position appears to be that if Maori wanted the opportunity to claim the “lesser rights” offered under the act, they’d have to prove they’d kept Pakeha off their beaches since 1840.

“In other words the act says Maori should have rolled out the barbed wire and had armed patrol vessels to protect their foreshore and seabed and only let Pakeha on if they signed an agreement which acknowledged Maori rights. This is what the current act says should have happened. This is simply untrue and untenable — Maori would not have wanted that to happen any more than Pakeha. Once again this is a Pakeha projection on to Maori — their distorted view of what Maori property should mean. Our history has not been one of Maori seeking to stop Pakeha having access to beaches.”

He wrote about the situation extensively on Tumeke! but says now he always knew stronger action was required. “George Orwell said, and I’m probably misquoting him here, that during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”

Selwyn’s always been a rebel. The eldest son of a wetsuit cutter and seamstress — “working-class hippies with hearts of gold” — he had a happy enough childhood in Bayswater: backyard barbies; making maps of his primary school; building huts on North Head with his mates (there were hardships too: Selwyn’s youngest sister suffered from Prader-Willi Syndrome, a congenital condition characterised by short stature, mental disability and compulsive eating. And his parents separated when he was 10).

But politics was in his blood. He used to listen to Parliament on the radio with his mother Suzanne. One of his grandfathers, a locomotive engineer, passed on to Selwyn his cherished loyalty card from the 1951 waterfront dispute — “Stood loyal right through 151 days”. He insists that in 1979, aged five, he went to Cheltenham beach with a Vauxhall Primary School group to watch the American nuclear submarine USS Haddo cruise in and made a seaweed peace symbol on the shore.

Converted to atheism by a “smart Vauxhall kid”, he sneaked into the school library after hours and reclassified a story about Jesus, using a typewriter and cards, from non-fiction to fiction. In 1983 the school went to Eden Park to perform “dumb, lame English folkdances” for Prince Charles and Princess Diana and he had his first Republican stirrings. And when the French class sang the Marseillaise at assembly just two years after the Rainbow Warrior sinking, Selwyn stormed out.

But his schoolboy politicking reached its zenith in seventh form at Takapuna Grammar. “At the start of the year some of my peers wanted to nominate me as a prefect — I set them straight with a lecture about the Jews who worked for the Nazis to oppress fellow Jews in concentration camps etc.” Instead Selwyn ran for student rep on the board of trustees — “I gave what I thought was a decent speech to the school assembly that laid into senior management.” He didn’t win. Later that year he was suspended. (Selwyn left Takapuna Grammar with a B bursary.)

But these little skirmishes and his later Craccum capers were merely setting the stage for the battle that defines him — against the Foreshore and Seabed Bill. Selwyn would go to extraordinary lengths to try to stop it.

“Nine thousand submissions were made. These submissions were a sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission without the reconciliation part — and the truth coming from the victim’s side only.”

First he made a submission to the ministerial inquiry in December 2003, arguing the public should have access on foot to all unenclosed parts of the foreshore and seabed. He called this the “right of traverse”, something the ministerial report would later quote.

Then the government took the legislation on the road. Selwyn prepared a submission for the parliamentary select committee set to convene at Auckland’s Alexandra Racecourse. But when he arrived to speak at the appointed time, he was told the committee had already heard enough submissions and wasn’t interested in his. “The ‘consultation’ process was a farce,” he says. “Nine thousand submissions were made — and they are often moving histories of Crown oppression from various Maori pleading to be treated like full citizens for once rather than a subject race. Whereas I was angry, they spoke with a quiet dignity — a stance that sadly is ineffective against the Crown. These submissions were a sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission without the reconciliation part — and the truth coming from the victim’s side only.”

As the final vote on the legislation loomed, Selwyn joined the anti-bill hikoi across the Auckland Harbour Bridge, attended a rally at Okahu Bay and marched down Queen St. A few days before the bill passed, he called Green MP Metiria Turei at Parliament and urged her to delay its passage by filibuster.

But all to no avail. “On November 16, 67 pages of last-minute amendments in a Supplementary Order Paper were put up,” he says. “Parliament was going to pass the most controversial law in the tenure of the Clark administration and it was still being hacked together at the 11th hour. It all seemed unbelievable.

“It was just so wrong on so many levels it just couldn’t go through — it was a constitutional abomination, a raupatu [confiscation] in our own time and something I’d sworn publicly never to allow. At this point I realised drastic action was necessary. Right up until the night before it passed I thought the inherent evilness of what they were contemplating would become apparent and they’d back off. But when predictions were made that it would all be over the following day, I knew something had to occur. I had committed myself to something — anything. And if protest could not stop the bill then at least it would taint it.”

A month after the axe attack Tim Selwyn was in bed when police from Operation Barbarian knocked on his Grey Lynn flat’s front door. They searched his room, his desk and extensive archives. They seized his computer and the phone card he’d used in his media ring-around. He was arrested at 8.12am and, an hour later, taken to the Avondale police station for questioning.

While he half-expected to be caught — “you don’t attack the state and expect the Empire not to strike back” — he never dreamed he’d be charged under Section 83 of the Crimes Act with sedition.

A marvellous-sounding charge with a medieval whiff, it’s defined in New Zealand law as an intention to “bring into hatred or contempt, or to excite disaffection against” the Queen or the government; to “incite… or encourage violence, lawlessness or disorder”; to incite “hostility or ill will” between different classes or groups of people; to incite the public to bring about constitutional change by unlawful means; or any offence “prejudicial to the public safety”.

On the face of it, Selwyn looked guilty on several counts — but so too are hordes of talkback callers, editorial letter writers and other suburban agitators most weeks. Yet no one in New Zealand has been charged with this offence for many years.

Just how long is a source of considerable confusion. “Oh, it’d be 50 years ago,” constitutional law guru and former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer suggests. “I don’t think there’s been one [prosecution] in living legal memory. There were some rather obnoxious regulations made at the time of the 1951 waterfront dispute which I think involved sedition. There may have been a prosecution then, but I don’t think there’ve been many others in recent years — it’s a sort of museum piece really.”

When North & South visited Associate Professor Bill Hodge of the University of Auckland Law School, he was poring over an old tome held together with Sellotape. “This is Adams on Criminal Law, the old text — the 1908 act. It’s certainly not something we teach in law school today. Still it’d be an interesting teaching exercise under the heading ‘Public Law for Theoretical Purposes’. It’s just obsolete in criminal law practice. Or so we thought.”

Chris Trotter: “I think if you put an axe through the PM’s electoral office window you can expect to attract more than the usual amount of police attention. She’s going to be asking the police, at a fairly senior level, for some answers.”

Selwyn’s lawyers reckoned the last case was about 1910. Several newspapers reported there hadn’t been one since 1914. It was left to a redoubtable blogger, Idiot/Savant from the No Right Turn site, to dig up the names.

Historically, sedition charges were brought against Maori leaders, pro-Irish demagogues, anti-conscription activists, suspected communist sympathisers and stroppy union leaders. The last case appears to have been in the 1940s.

So you might well be wondering why the police dredged up this old law?

“I have no idea,” says Palmer. “I don’t think there was any need. It’s very odd actually. I don’t think many police would be all that familiar with the law of sedition. It doesn’t come up.”

Detective Sergeant Millar Rewi, who ran the Selwyn investigation, didn’t return North & South’s calls. But it seems implausible that a couple of beat cops turning up to a scene where there’s a broken window with an axe in it and a few random leaflets lying on the ground would immediately think: “We’ve got a seditionist on the loose.”

And so Selwyn’s defenders saw Helen Clark’s hand in this, remarking on the supreme irony of a Labour leader victimising him with a piece of legislation that’d victimised her Labour forebears. Yet it seems equally implausible that the Prime Minister would be foolish enough to meddle in a criminal investigation (a Clark spokesperson told me she had “no involvement” in the charge).

Political commentator Chris Trotter sees it this way: “I think if you put an axe through the PM’s electoral office window you can expect to attract more than the usual amount of police attention. She’s going to be asking the police, at a fairly senior level, for some answers. And that’s entirely reasonable.

“Consciously or unconsciously senior cops will have taken on the message this was more serious than just an intentional damage charge. It’d be absolutely impossible to find any sort of paper trail, but that’s not the way things happen. Senior public officials imbibe a mood or mindset from their superiors or from their political masters and act on their own initiative. And lo and behold we have a sedition charge.”

The wheels of justice turn slowly. Selwyn’s trial on charges of “seditious conspiracy” and “making a seditious statement” began in the Auckland District Court on June 6 this year, 19 months after the axing. At a depositions hearing a year earlier, he’d pleaded guilty to “conspiracy with a person or persons unknown to commit intentional damage”, taking the rap for the axe attack — his act of political vandalism. The sedition charges relate solely to his words, not his actions.

Crown prosecutor David Johnstone declined to be interviewed for this story, but leaf through court transcripts and his strategy was clear. The Crown would seek to prove Selwyn’s pamphlets were designed to stir others to follow his example and break the law. So the case centred on two single sentences: Selwyn’s exhortation for “like-minded New Zealanders to commit their own acts of civil disobedience” (in the pamphlet outside Helen Clark’s office), and the longer press release he left on Ponsonby Rd urging them to “take similar action of their own”.

Selwyn’s counsel, Mark Edgar and Louise Brown, centred their defence on three points. First the charge was unnecessary as he’d already ’fessed up to the axe attack. As Palmer says, “There are many other provisions in our criminal law that punish the things you need to punish without getting into the crime of sedition. If someone was inciting a riot, for instance, then you’d read the Riot Act.”

Second, this was an explicitly political crime. Selwyn was in the dock not because of something he did, but because of something he said. Sedition is a thought crime — it outlaws ideas which may be displeasing to the government of the day. Says Palmer: “You can’t have a situation where you value freedom of expression for the democratic protections it gives you, and then punish people who publish pamphlets if you don’t agree with them. This is a form of censorship. Political censorship.”

Third, the defence argued the Crown had to prove Selwyn’s incitement to violence was immediate — “a clear and present danger” in legal jargon — and not merely bolshie rhetoric. In his famous dissent in Gitlow v. People in 1925, US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said only speech which attempted to foment immediate action (such as yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre) should be prosecuted. Anything less than this, even the most fervent abstract advocacy, ought to be protected in a free society.

But though it was Selwyn’s pamphlets — and statements — on trial, the axe would hover above it all. While in theory it was irrelevant — Selwyn could have simply taped the note to the window and faced the same charge — Bill Hodge says it would have been “impossible” for the jury’s thoughts not to be “unconsciously coloured” by the axe. “You can’t divorce the two,” he says. “An axe through a window resonates with most of us. Yes — it’s a symbol. Yes — middle of the night. Yes — political office. But you can’t escape the fact it’s an axe through a window. On the face of it, it looks pretty scary.”

But weren’t the Ponsonby Rd pamphlets seditious? “That was a press release,” Selwyn snapped. “It was given to the media to incite the media to acts of journalism.”

And so the Crown would try to prove Selwyn was more than a symbolic Hone Heke; they’d argue he was trying to rouse an army of axemen to do his bidding. After all, hadn’t he incited New Zealanders to commit “similar acts” in the pamphlets on Ponsonby Rd?

“That was a press release,” Selwyn snapped. “It was given to the media to incite the media to acts of journalism.”

So why then, Johnstone asked, did Selwyn send out several emails to Black Power contacts — “the heavier and more militant the better” — in the days before and after his action?

“It was a desperate call for any possible assistance on any matters,” Selwyn replied. He was just “fishing… looking for political people with strong views.”

Despite a rousing closing address from his counsel invoking the ghost of Martin Luther King, Selwyn was found guilty. Bizarrely, the pamphlet he left at the scene of the crime was adjudged kosher. It was the six Ponsonby Rd pamphlets — the press releases — three kilometres from the scene that were deemed seditious. How these could be an immediate incitement is a question only the jury can answer.

“Two words on a flyer?” Selwyn’s lawyer Mark Edgar would tell me later. “Two words. And you morph from being on this side of the law to that side of the law. It’s a very thin sliver, isn’t it?”

He wasn’t the only one uneasy at the jury’s decision. “Ill-advised use of a tough law,” editorialised The New Zealand Herald. “Charge is past its use-by date” intoned the Waikato Times. However, the response from political parties was muted. While the Green MP Keith Locke went in to bat for Selwyn and the Libertarianz decried the case as “an assault on free speech”, there was not a peep from National or Selwyn’s former ACT comrades. For her part Helen Clark, through a spokesperson, told North & South she had no opinion.

But was it really such a bad verdict? Or is sedition simply a ridiculous law?

Look again at the definition of seditious intent and you’ll see it criminalises virtually all criticism of the government. So to say, as the blogger Idiot/Savant suggested, “The royal family are inbred imbeciles intellectually outmatched by their incontinent corgis,” is seditious. So too is advocating a republic.

Any number of books (and blogs) break the law. “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution,” rails the Communist Manifesto, available at any good bookshop near you. If the law is to be applied consistently, most of the nation’s booksellers should be put in the dock, which is plainly a nonsense.

As Geoffrey Palmer wrote in a 1989 paper on proposed Crimes Act reforms: “Sedition should not be a crime in a democratic society committed to free speech. Libelling the government must be permitted in a free society.”

And here the story might have ended heroically but for the news, rolled out the day after the sedition verdict, that Selwyn had also been convicted on several earlier fraud charges (that had been suppressed by the court until then).

Back in the early 1990s, before “Abaford” even, Selwyn had assumed several people’s identities, obtained passports in their names and, for several months, collected welfare benefits on their behalf. And he’d got away with it for a decade. Right up until two Mossad agents, Uri Kelman and Eli Cara, tried to fraudulently obtain New Zealand passports in 2004. The ensuing Internal Affairs investigation picked up 26 unrelated incidents of passport scamming. One of them was Selwyn who, by this time, was facing the sedition charges.

For someone styling himself as a political prisoner, this revelation came at the worst possible time. The distasteful details of the passport scam — Selwyn used dead babies’ identities to get those passports — marked this “martyr” as a heartless recidivist offender — and a hypocrite. Indeed Judge Josephine Bouchier remarked in sentencing: “He has committed offences which strike at the very heart of our way of government and yet he has also appeared to have been happy to take the government’s dollar in the form of monetary benefits.”

Bouchier described his offending as “a calculated attack on the institution of New Zealand government”. She continued: “Not everyone agrees with the way this country is run, but few commit the type of offences which Mr Selwyn faces sentencing for today.”

He was sentenced to 15 months’ prison on the dishonesty charges and a further two for sedition. Bouchier also ordered him to pay $2254.57 in reparations to the Prime Minister’s electorate office. Peculiarly, she never mentioned the intentional damage charge — the actual axe attack — that Selwyn pleaded guilty to.

Bouchier would make much of his historic offending at sentencing. But Selwyn committed his passport scams way back in 1993 — before his convictions for the fake student marriage business (1995) and his “stint” in local government (1996). His criminal career, sedition excepted, ended in 1996 when he was sent to jail.

Tim Selwyn on his fraud convictions: “I’m the first to acknowledge I’ve made serious errors and embarked on regrettable and selfish actions. I must set a better example... This means I have to make amends.”

“Look I was a 20-year-old dumb-arse,” Selwyn says from prison.

“My rationale at the time was that we have an oppressive and unjust state that exploits us, so we should exploit it. I was staunchly ideological then and had few qualms attacking the system. But I was wrong. I’m the first to acknowledge I’ve made serious errors and embarked on regrettable and selfish actions that, although undetected for many years, were nevertheless shameful and (intellectually at least) ghoulish.

“I can’t very well aim to reform the state from inside or by legal methods if I maintain a stance of attacking it by any means available — I must set a better example, especially if criticising current scams by the Labour Party and other politicians and institutions. This means I have to make amends.”

And while he seems genuinely remorseful about the scams, the belligerent Selwyn returns in a flash when he’s asked about the severity of his sentence. “The Israeli spies — those state operatives of a terrorist nation that actively uses the false documents of other nations to conduct a policy of assassination, murder, espionage and kidnapping — were allowed by the New Zealand government to escape with a ludicrously light jail sentence — they only served three months — and then were allowed to go. They should have been ‘repatriated’ — straight back to Gaza!”

Tim’s barbecues were just legendary,” says Martyn Bradbury. “You’d know summer was here when you were summoned, usually around Labour Weekend, to his flat.” Like several of Selwyn’s fiercely loyal group of friends, Bradbury will tell you the man is not the zealous lone wolf he seems — not even someone who’d mock the suicidal — but a caring, generous and gregarious mate. Perhaps so. But it’s fair to say Selwyn has a presentation problem.

For someone so smart and savvy, Selwyn doesn’t seem to get that politics is a game of persuasion. The art of the possible. His assumption that people care about ideas as much he does — that reason and argument will always trump shabby populism — is naïve.

So he’ll remain bewildered that not more people care about an issue that propelled 20,000 Maori to the forecourt of Parliament, spawned a new political party and prompted the United Nations to express concern at the “apparent haste” with which the foreshore and seabed legislation was enacted and, later, urge its repeal. And perplexed that his exhaustively researched petition to then Governor-General Dame Silvia Cartwright calling on her to exercise her Reserve Powers and decline assent to the Foreshore and Seabed Bill was brushed aside.

“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people,” NBR’s Ben Thomas told me, quoting Eleanor Roosevelt. “Tim would be a bad person to discuss the contents of the latest New Weekly with. But he gets quite exercised about ideas.”

The complexity of Selwyn’s thought and his inability, or unwillingness, to make it palatable to the mainstream ensures he’ll remain on the margins. His intellectual resistance to swallowing the party line — any party line — will mean he’s isolated even there. After all, how many ACT supporters are going to stick up for Maori land rights? And how many people as committed to the Treaty of Waitangi as he will deride its “PC” application in wider society?

Probably just Selwyn: “The treaty is about the constitutional order of the state, not an analogous partnership to be duplicated at every level through the private sector.”

Nevertheless, Selwyn doesn’t see himself as a rebel for lost causes. “In the short term the Crown seemingly has won,” he told me from prison. “It has a racist law that it’s got away with and has successfully resurrected sedition as a tool against those who write ill of the regime. But in the long term they’ve begun to lose. Eventually the true nature, history and methods of the Crown will fatally undermine its legitimacy in the minds of those who currently acquiesce in sustaining it.

“In that respect I may just be another streak of road-kill in the long, dark and winding highway to our nation’s maturity.”

But that day seems a long way off. In the meantime, Selwyn’s working in a forestry gang and, at night, reading over the often “shonkily circumstantial” case notes of fellow inmates. He has also become the prison librarian and his Shawshank Redemption-like public appeal (publicised in the Sunday Star-Times, New Zealand Herald and on Radio New Zealand) to broaden the titles from “Wilbur Smith’s epic chronicles of super-macho Victorian elephant slaughterers” has seen the library triple in size to 300 books.

He’s pumping out the prison blogs — 33 so far — and one of these, Surviving On The Inside, a 1500-word guide to “cracking it” in prison, was published by the Sunday Star-Times in October.

And he’s preparing for his appeal, now set down for late February — just five weeks before his scheduled release date.

Meanwhile, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, in his guise as president of the Law Commission, is reviewing Section 83 of the Crimes Act. His report, due out before Christmas, is widely expected to recommend the offence of sedition be scrapped.

So Tim Selwyn may have the distinction of being the last New Zealander so charged.

It’d be fitting for a writer with his activist inclinations and keen sense of history. From his hut, he recounts a tale about his Whakatohea people from back in 1865.

“The story goes that after the invasion force landed on the beach, skirmished and then camped on the foreshore, a lone man came out and harangued them at high volume for the entire night. I would like to think he’s an ancestor of mine.”

The Sedition File

Dust off New Zealand’s sedition cases and you’d almost think it was a law against the Labour Party. Bob Semple, Paddy Webb and Tim Armstrong — future cabinet ministers in the first Labour government (1935–49) — and future Labour MP James Thorn were all charged for speaking out against conscription during World War I and jailed.

Harry Holland, who’d later lead the Labour Party from 1919 to 1933, was jailed for a series of majestic speeches during the Great Strike of 1913. Holland, who’d earlier served time for sedition in New South Wales, told naval ratings from HMS Psyche: “You have a Gatling gun… When Massey’s Cossacks come down upon us, I urge the navals present, when they are ordered to shoot, to remember where their class interests lie, and point their guns accordingly.”

Maori were also natural seditionists: After the sacking of Parihaka in 1881, Te Whiti and Tohu were charged and detained for 18 months, Te Whiti for saying “Naku te whenua” (“Mine is the land”). Maori mystic Rua Kenana was prosecuted in 1916 for crowing, “When the German win, I’m going to be the King here.”

Irish orators couldn’t help themselves either. In 1922, James Liston, the Catholic coadjutor bishop of Auckland and son of Irish émigrés, made the mistake of mentioning the Easter Rising “martyrs” killed by the British. Charged with inciting disaffection against His Majesty and promoting hostility between different classes of subjects, he was acquitted by an all-Protestant jury.

And Commies were trouble. Nineteen-year-old female student Hedwig Weitzel, from a suspect family of peaceniks, was convicted with sedition for selling The Communist in 1921. That same year, a future Labour Prime Minister, Walter Nash, was convicted and fined £5 for possessing a pamphlet titled The Communist Programme of the World Revolution. “As dangerous to the body politic as typhoid germs deliberately placed in a city reservoir,” said a magistrate.

Our most famous seditionist was another future Labour Prime Minister, Peter Fraser. In a 1916 anti-conscription speech in Wellington Fraser, the predecessor Helen Clark most admires, said: “For the past two years and a half we have been looking at the ruling classes of Europe spreading woe, want and murder over the Continent, and it is time that the working classes of the different nations were rising up in protest against them.”

Fraser was jailed for 12 months. Ironically, he introduced conscription during World War II and then, after the war, brought in compulsory military training.