http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/when-protest-becomes-hoonery-20100107-lwuu.htmlEven those strongly opposed to Japan's revival of its whaling industry, as this newspaper is, must feel uneasy at the latest antics of the Sea Shepherd protesters in the Southern Ocean. Thankfully no one was killed in the collision between a Japanese security vessel attached to the whaling fleet and Sea Shepherd's boat, the Ady Gil, but that could easily have occurred with only a slight variation of the bigger and slower ship's course.
The Ady Gil is or was a black, futuristic trimaran reminiscent of the sort of gleaming, lowered and turbocharged utes favoured by hoons, and employed a sort of version of their highway tactics. It cut across the bows of the Japanese ship, then apparently cut speed to force a sudden turn, shone a kind of green laser at the Japanese crew, and dangled ropes in the hope these would entangle the ship's propellers. This was a high-risk game of chicken on the high seas, verging on the illegal.
The Japanese protective moves in their latest hunting season show a defiance of the world in shielding an obnoxious and hypocritical activity, but have been quite legal. They are entitled to use fire hoses, to hire aircraft for observation, and to employ publicists. Calls for Australia or New Zealand to send naval or other ships to somehow keep order are disingenuous.
Without suggesting that Sea Shepherd, Greenpeace or either government alter their opposition to whaling by Japan, or stop recording and exposing the brutality of the massacre, it is probably a time to cool down the physical interference, maybe too for the activists to show their own lack of hypocrisy by taking on the Norwegian and Icelandic whalers as well.
The current Japanese whaling expedition is the last that will be mounted under a budget allocated by the former Liberal Democratic Party, whose neo-cons were susceptible to the ''Showa nostalgia'' in the symbolism of whale meat to the shared hardships of war and defeat last century. The new Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has stated he doesn't like whale meat, a signal that this revival is over. His Democratic Party of Japan has been going over the government books to eliminate the kind of subsidies and perks for retired bureaucrats that sustain the whaling activity.