Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I will keep my remarks brief. This ministerial statement is simply a statement of the failure of the Rudd government on the issues of whaling. It is a government that has been all talk, all spin and yet there has been so little effective action on so many issues, perhaps none so emphatically as the whaling issue. The government, when in opposition, promised it would deliver an end to whaling, promised it would bring to a stop the whaling culture, and yet every year, as the Japanese fleet has sailed out and the whaling hunt has started, what we have seen is yet again the government expressing its shock and horror, desperately scrambling for strategies or tactics and not actually delivering on any of its promises in any effective way. They promised to undertake some surveillance. They did a little bit of that in the first year but have done none in any of the subsequent years. They set up a whaling envoy position—somebody who has travelled the world at great expense, who has met with international leaders and talked about issues of whaling endlessly but who has delivered no significant change to whaling practices around the world.

They promised legal action, and finally what we saw towards the end of the last whaling season—just a short while ago—was the government saying there would be legal action. Just a short while ago they finally acknowledged they would take some legal action. I note they made that acknowledgement only after the last lot of Senate estimates. They were still ducking, dodging and weaving during the last Senate estimates questions about whether the legal action would be undertaken. They did not want to face scrutiny from this parliament and from the Senate on the issues of their legal action. Indeed, it strikes me, looking at this ministerial statement, that the legal action they announced was nothing more than a distraction on the day of the announcement, because in Minister Garrett’s ministerial statement, which goes on for five pages, the legal action gets just two lines. It gets the most fleeting of mentions. That is how significant the government see their promised legal action to be. They took three years even to announce that they would do it, let alone proceed in any meaningful way with it. That is how significant they see their response to the issue of commercial whaling to be.

What they have done in announcing the legal action, in taking the stand that they have taken—which looks, from the way they have done it, to be little more than a media stunt designed for the Australian market—is put themselves in the worst of all positions leading into this meeting of the International Whaling Commission. In many ways they have now checked themselves out of the debate. We have this statement from the minister, trying to position the government and say what they might do come the International Whaling Commission meeting, but the reality is that they have now said, ‘No, we’re giving up on the International Whaling Commission; we’re going to take Japan to court instead.’ They could have done that two or three years ago, and we might know whether that was a meaningful strategy. Instead, right on the cusp of the most significant meeting of the International Whaling Commission in years—when reform and compromise proposals are on the table, when Australia should be at the forefront and trying to ensure that it has as much clout as possible on this issue that Australians hold dear and important—the Rudd Labor government decided that getting a day or two’s worth of cheap headlines at home was more important.

Having failed to honour their promise of court action for the first, second and much of the third years of office, for some strange reason, less than a couple of months ahead of the International Whaling Commission meeting, they decided that was the critical time to announce that they would undertake legal action on whaling. Why did they choose this time? It certainly was not strategically beneficial to their position at the IWC meeting—far from it. It certainly was not because they will be able to get an outcome on this before the next election. They will not get an outcome on this issue before the next whaling season let alone the next election. It was not because they had methodically been building up a case of evidence that they had gathered through surveillance of whaling operations. Over the last couple of seasons there has been no gathering of evidence. It was because there is an election coming up and they wanted to put out an announcement, to tick the box and say, ‘Yes, we are taking legal action.’ But we have no details of that. They have subjected themselves to no scrutiny. They dodged the estimates process by announcing this legal action just a week after estimates.

This is just another cynical gesture by the Rudd Labor government. This ministerial statement made by Mr Garrett today only ads to the cynicism and demonstrates the failings. It is five pages of excuses—five pages of why the Rudd government have failed to deliver on the promises and the overblown rhetoric that they took to the last election that they could end commercial whaling. It is also a signal of defeat in advance. If you read the language of it, it seems to be conceding that they do not hold out a whole lot of hope for the outcomes of the IWC meeting. They fear the compromise proposal developed by the chair and deputy chair of the International Whaling Commission—a proposal that will allow the slaughter of whales to continue over the next 10 years. They fear it will be sanctioned by the International Whaling Commission.

They do not hold out much hope of defeating that proposal at the IWC. Little wonder they do not hold out much hope, because Australia has checked itself out of the debate. It is stranded in no-man’s-land. It is taking legal action that none of the other strong antiwhaling nations like New Zealand have agreed to back. Australia has been left out on a limb. It will now be up to other countries to wage the fight in the IWC while Mr Garrett is there looking as impotent as he has been in every other aspect of his portfolio. This meeting will show him making another failure.

The risk is that we will get the worst of all outcomes, that we will see a sanctioning of commercial whaling. But we will then proceed on our way with our court challenge, possibly having that court challenge undermined by the IWC decision that we failed to help shape for ourselves. It is a fail, fail, fail from this government on the issue. Yet again, it is a demonstration that all their talk, all their promises and all the millions of dollars they have spent on envoys, diplomacy and research—and potentially in years to come on legal action—have been a waste. It will be wasted money that will not deliver a result. It has all been about public spin rather than actually delivering anything on the issue of whaling.