A vintage law criminalising doing business with pirates has resurfaced this week, after a Fitzroy bakery owner unknowingly sold a pie to a volunteer for the Pirate Party of Australia, an act legal commentators say may, on a strict and almost certainly never-enforced reading, fall foul of a nineteenth-century-era offence still sitting in Victoria's Crimes Act.
Section 70C of the Crimes Act 1958 makes it an offence to trade or deal with "pirates," a provision inherited from old English maritime law and never formally removed, drafted with actual seaborne piracy in mind rather than a registered political party whose name happens to share the word.
"I sold him a pie," the bakery owner said. "He paid, I gave him the pie, he said thanks. I've since been told this might technically be an offence under a law from the 1800s. I don't really know what to do with that information."
The Pirate Party of Australia, for its part, found the whole episode "extremely on brand," according to a party spokesperson, who noted the group's platform is built around freedom of information and culture, civil and digital liberties, privacy and anonymity, government transparency, and participatory democracy — values the spokesperson said sit awkwardly against "apparently still being a prosecutable trading partner under a law nobody's looked at since Federation."
"We'd actually argue this law is a pretty good example of exactly what we campaign against," the spokesperson said. "Outdated, unreviewed regulation nobody in government has bothered to repeal, quietly sitting there criminalising completely normal behaviour. In this case, admittedly, our own lunch."
Legal academics contacted for comment confirmed the provision remains technically in force, though none could recall it ever being tested, let alone against a political volunteer buying a pie. "It was written for actual maritime piracy," one said. "Ships, cargo, the high seas. Whether it was ever meant to cover a bloke in a Pirate Party t-shirt at a sausage sizzle is, I think, an open question nobody especially wants answered."
The bakery owner has not been charged, questioned, or otherwise contacted by police, and has confirmed he will "probably still serve him again if he comes back."
The Pirate Party volunteer, reached for comment, said only that the pie was "very good, and worth the apparent legal risk."