Ocean Sentry
(from theage.com.au) NOTHING has changed, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd repeatedly said, calming doubters over his Government”s whaling policy.
But that”s the point. Rudd reassured Australians demanding international legal action against Japan that he had always wanted to try the diplomatic route first, and reserved the right to go to courts later. Now, six months after promising to take up the fight against whaling in the Southern Ocean with a vigour unseen in decades, Rudd left Tokyo yesterday with no visible diplomatic gain.
Isnstead, using the failed language of the Howard government, he said the two countries “agreed to disagree”.
Nothing had changed.
This increases fears that the Rudd Government has shied away from offending the business attached to Australia’s largest export customer, and will tone down its campaign.
It’s strange, because polls repeatedly show that action against whaling is a no-brainer to Australians. In the most recent Essential Research poll this week, 91% of respondents said we should take international legal action, even if it meant compromising our relationship with Japan.
Australia drew attention to the whaling with the audacious decision to send the patrol ship Oceanic Viking to monitor the fleet.
The $1 million cost seemed a relatively small price compared with the global reverberations achieved by the release of the images of whaling.
But the evidence Oceanic Viking gathered remains to be tested.
Advice commissioned from Oxford international law professor James Crawford has gone to the Government, its contents unknown. Legal action remains in the back pocket.
Meanwhile the Japanese whaling lobby is approaching a critical point in its ambition for a return to a commercial kill at the International Whaling Commission in Santiago in 12 days’ time.
In recent years Australia, more than any other country, has lobbed verbal grenades at Japan for its relentless attempts to take control of the IWC. Now Rudd is emphasising the importance of the IWC reform process as well.
He can be sure that if countries such as Australia fail to exert all their powers to stop Southern Ocean whaling, environmentalists such as the hardline activists of Sea Shepherd will.
