Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I table a ministerial statement relating to the future of the International Whaling Commission.

Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Link to 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.

Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is interesting to read the minister’s statement that I understand he tabled yesterday in the House of Representatives. He is essentially trying to reassure Australia that the government and the minister are not asleep at the wheel on whaling and, ‘It’s okay; we’ve now made up our minds about what we are going to be doing.’ They have set a course, after making very clear promises in the run-up to the last election that they were going to take decisive action to end whaling. The only whales that have been saved from being killed in the Southern Ocean on the government’s watch have been saved by the Sea Shepherd and the work of the volunteers in trying to protect those whales. The government have not yet saved one whale.

The government have left it to the last minute to take legal action. They are part of the IWC. They have been at the negotiations and at the small group meetings. They knew what direction the IWC was taking. They knew that diplomatic action was not succeeding. They have left it to the last minute to initiate legal action against whaling, knowing full well that if the proposals before the IWC succeed their legal action will probably be invalid and unsuccessful. They have one hand tied behind their back already going into this legal action because they knew the proposals coming up at the IWC had the potential to make their legal action invalid.

At the same time the government were toing and froing about whether to take legal action, two people in Japan, the Tokyo Two, took action to try and expose the embezzlement of whale meat. I had the good fortune of meeting one of them, Toru Suzuki. He is a delightful, brave young man who made a decision to try and expose the embezzlement of whale meat and expose what is going on in the whaling industry. The Tokyo Two are currently on trial in Tokyo. Foreign Correspondent had an excellent show on this last week. That program highlighted just how brave these two young men were and the risks they took that could see them sent to jail. They face 10 years jail for trying to expose this embezzlement. It is something that I think every Australian would be proud that they tried to do.

Rather than an investigation into the embezzlement of whale meat, those two young men who were seeking to protect whales have been charged and are currently facing trial. What have our government done? As far as I am aware, they did not even send an observer to the trial—something that was requested by many people. Those two young men are currently facing a 10-year jail sentence for doing what I think most Australians would have done to expose this trade. Yet this government have taken so long to take legal action, and now they are trying to defend their position a minute before midnight before they go into the IWC.

A similar situation where the government has not been active enough can be applied to the sinking of the Ady Gil. We are very concerned that that ship was sunk by the deliberate action of Japanese whalers. A report was released by the Maritime Safety Authority which is inconclusive. Our Federal Police facilitate Japanese investigation of the Sea Shepherd and yet do not take any action when a boat is sunk, we believe, in our territorial waters. The Ady Gil was sunk, putting at risk six lives—those people trying to take action to save whales—but again our government has refused to act. In the ministerial statement the minister talks about the crucial role of science and says:

It is Australia’s view that the role of science is paramount to the IWC.

I think what is paramount to the IWC is protecting and conserving whales. Australians are very clear: they want our government to ensure that the killing of whales is stopped. We Australians totally oppose the commercialisation of whaling and we want our government to take action to ensure that does not occur.

I am concerned that the focus on the paramount role of science takes attention away from the fact that we expect the IWC to be conserving whales. That is the role that Australians want from the IWC, and we want our government to be taking clear action not only to ensure that the killing of whales ends but also to work very constructively and proactively to ensure that happens—and not make meaningless promises and commitments and not take action after the horse has bolted, which I am deeply afraid is what is happening with the legal action that the government has now said it will take.

If it had initiated that action straight after the Oceanic Viking had been to the Southern Ocean and had the video footage and the documentation of that process at the end of the 2007-08 season, we might have now been in a position where that court case had been argued and where we might have had a judgment. Now we may never have a judgment because the government has prevaricated on this issue for so long. The previous government tried diplomatic action and it failed. So this government continued it, but it does not use other levers—for example, saying we do not want to negotiate a free trade agreement. It is an example of a mechanism that the government could have used to remind the Japanese just how important we find the whaling issue.

I agree with the minister’s comments in his ministerial statement that commercial whaling is dying out and that the countries that are whaling are subsidising it. In Japan it is clear that it is being subsidised. That is true and I agree with the minister that it is being propped up. Japan is continuing to prop it up. Whale meat, as I understand it, is not popular in Japan, and whaling is not a traditional industry, broadly, in Japan. I am aware that there has been coastal whaling in some communities, but the commercialisation of whaling at the scale that it is not a tradition in Japan. It started in the fifties as a way to feed the country after World War II—the 1940s and 1950s, after the war—but there is no justification whatsoever for continuing this barbaric trade and this barbaric view of whaling.

I think the nations of this world made a very sensible decision to put in a moratorium. We need to ensure that whaling never ever recommences. I am very concerned that the proposals that are being put to the IWC will in fact wind back the good work that has been done in the past. I urge the government and the minister to take an extremely strong stand—but, unfortunately, I think the action has been taken too late. We will be watching IWC negotiations very closely—very closely indeed—and I just hope that the outcome at the IWC does not invalidate the legal action that the government is commencing.

Question agreed to.