Sea Shepherd Canberra Fundraiser to benefit Operation No Compromise

I’m thinking Capt Watson and George Lucas share the same hair stylist.

Prettymuch.

Sure, the Japanese just call Sea Shepherd pirates.
Sure, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service considers Sea Shepherd the very definition of a single-issue terrorist group (under the Environmentalists heading).
Sure, the FBI says they’re eco-terrorists when providing testimony to Congress (Paragraph 6).
But so long as he isn’t officially convicted of a felony, we keep granting him access so long as he meets the conditions of business entry visas.
If that changes, Australia will probably officially disavow him and refuse access, but he’ll keep on doing some unofficial EEZ\Whaling Treaty enforcement if New Zealannd start granting him visas.

Out of curiosity, will Shane Rattenbury be going, or does he hold the Greenpeace grudge?

So what you’re saying Skid is that:
we’ve made a claim on land which only a few countries agree with;
that we can’t enforce an EEZ in this area because it possibly breaches treaties we are a party to and;
it would cause us trouble if we tried.

Go Aussies.

You know, when I was a kid I made a fort on some bushland which I called Chewzbekistan. Even though nobody would agree that I owned the land it was on, it didn’t matter because I “knew” it was mine.

chewy14 said :

…since when is the Antarctic our back yard?

Since we claimed the Australian Antarctic Territory from the British though the Australian Antarctic Territory Acceptance Act back in 1933?
For an idea of the scope of our claim: http://www.ga.gov.au/image_cache/GA17424.gif
Legally, AAT shares the laws of the ACT and Jervis Bay, and we proclaimed EEZ around it as a foundation for future resource sovereignty claims should the Antarctic Treaty System ever be repealed.

chewy14 said :

What’s Politics got to do with it?

Everything.
Most ‘international law’ is derived from whatever was customary before the laws were written.
(IE: They simply reinforce the status quo until someone can get away with being ‘progressive’, and then the laws are reformed)

In any case, even though some countries recognise our sovereignty of AAT, claiming a later EEZ it is still a a potential violation of Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty System, so for the most part the EEZ around the AAT isn’t actually enforced as it would draw a lot of scrutiny.
Contrast that with how being noticed caught fishing in the Heard\MacDonald Island EEZ means that we’ll dodge icebergs to hunt you, and spend $5mil chasing you half way around the world, just for half a fridge full of fairly tasteless fish, all so we maintain the soverignty claim.
(Either you use your sovereignty claim when its threatened, or you risk losing it)

So for the most part, we ignore Japan’s violations of international agreements as long as they ignore Australia’s and the commerce keeps flowing.

#13 said: “1. Australia is pretty hypocritical here, seeing that until the 1970s we had a huge whaling industry that was, at least partly, responsible for putting whales in the position of being endangered in the first place”

Some papers turned up a couple of years ago that showed the crash in stocks in the South Ocean was almost entirely attributable to illegal fishing (by the Japanese and Russia, I think). Until then, Australians thought legal fishing (Australia + legal Japanese etc) was to blame – being illegal, the effort was unmonitored, unrecorded and unknown. It was a major discovery in fisheries management. While not letting Australia off the hook, it did explain the previously inexplicable. You’ll just have to take my word for it because there’s no way I could provide the papers now (and I can’t even remember the exact species).

With that in mind, it would not surprise me in the least to see that some of the decline in whale populations could have been driven by hunting efforts we didn’t even know about.

ConanOfCooma said :

You could ask my Grandmother about the Japanese stance on doing things humanely, she spent a fair bit of time with them in Indonesia during WWII.

Way to refute the suggestion of racism. Thank goodness the Germans aren’t into whaling, their behaviour in WWII was even worse!

Check out the Sea Shepherd South Park episode. Season 13, Episode 11. “Whale Whores”.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/episodes/s13e11-whale-whores

Very funny!

dtc said :

Why are whales special? Why is harpooning whales worse that killing 1000s of chickens or cows or pigs or all those other animals?

Unless you are vegetarian, then your only complaint about killing an animal can be because its either a rare animal (so should not be killed) or is not being killed humanely (can be killed but in a different way).

You might complain about people killing ‘our’ animals (ie in our territory), but thats a different issue to whether the animal itself should be killed.

Otherwise you end up deciding one animal is ‘better’ than another based on no particularly good reason (certainly not intelligence, since we eat intelligent animals as well as not so smart ones).

We don’t launch explosive harpoons in to the animals we kill for food. We have laws and regulations pertaining to killing animals humanely. You could ask my Grandmother about the Japanese stance on doing things humanely, she spent a fair bit of time with them in Indonesia during WWII.

If you want more of an insight into how the Japanese deal with the mammals of our oceans, watch the delightful documentary “The Cove”. A real eye opener.

On the other hand, I won’t take these organisations seriously until they start arming themselves and really take the fight down South. Until then they are just a bunch of incense-waving rainbow-rats that only do one thing: complain (and not very loudly).

While I think whaling is an abhorrent practice, I also think that:
1. Australia is pretty hypocritical here, seeing that until the 1970s we had a huge whaling industry that was, at least partly, responsible for putting whales in the position of being endangered in the first place
2. Illegal tactics are illegal tactics, no matter how good your cause. A Palestinian suicide bomber who deliberately targets and kills civilians is still a terrorist, whether or not you think that Israel is a murderous state. The Sea Shepherd falls foul of, at the least, the international laws of piracy
3. Constantly berating and lecturing Japan about what is right and wrong is probably only going to make them dig their heels in deeper (in a similar way to how so many of us resisted the message of the anti-wood fire heating brigade.
4. There is most probably an element of racism in play here. Norway kills a similar number of whales as Japan, but gets nowhere near the same amount of negative press. Granted, they are not whaling close to our waters; however, there is simply not the same level of international outcry as there is to Japan’s whaling.

Why does watson keep doing this ? MONEY !! publicity and money. The Australian government should stop the old man from having his boats in our ports ..he just does as he likes. Bob Brown .. please read up on this dodgy organisation and dont support it , all is not as you think or as it seems.