Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

and we have carefully analysed the information obtained through our monitoring of the Antarctic whaling fleet last summer. This was the first time that monitoring had been undertaken of the whaling fleet. No previous government has had the kind of information available to inform its consideration of legal options that we now have.

Our immediate efforts are on finding a diplomatic resolution to this issue and that is why we have increased our diplomatic engagement on whaling, particularly with Japan over its scientific whaling program. We have appointed Mr Sandy Hollway AO as Australia’s special envoy for whale conservation to advance the government’s objectives of ending Japanese scientific whaling and improving the conservation of whales. We have repeatedly called on Japan—through the Prime Minister, the foreign minister, through me and through the envoy—to suspend its whaling program in the Southern Ocean, particularly as we engage in reform of the International Whaling Commission. We make no pretence that this is an easy task. In fact, this is a complex issue, an issue between friends but one we know the Australian community feels very strongly about, and that is why we have been working so hard and why we will keep working to bring commercial whaling to an end. I note a report overnight from the Asahi newspaper in Japan that the Japanese government’s whaling program—

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