Australia’s conservative Liberal-National government is facing fresh calls to monitor whaling in the Southern Ocean after activists released vision that shows Japanese whalers have made a successful start to this season’s hunt.
Anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd said its three boats found all five ships from the Japanese whaling fleet, one with four dead minke whales onboard.
Sea Shepherd said the Japanese fleet was in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary and that the activist group was working to drive the fleet from the area.
ABC News reports it is the first time the environmentalists and the whaling fleet have crossed paths this season.
Environment Minister Greg Hunt last month said the Government would send an aircraft to monitor the fleet, despite promises before last year’s election to send a ship.
ABC News reports Sea Shepherd Australia chairman Bob Brown said there was no sign of surveillance from the Australian government.
“Sea Shepherd is committed to doing all it peaceably can to prevent this grotesque and cruel destruction,” Mr Brown said.
“There’s three carcasses on the ship; a fourth carcass has been cut up. There’s blood all over the place, meat being carted around on this factory ship deck, offal and innards being dumped in the ocean.
“That’s just a gruesome, bloody, medieval scene which has no place in this modern world.”
Mr Brown told ABC News he had written to the Environment Minister, asking him to take urgent action to stop the whaling.
However, Mr Brown said he expected “finger-waving” from the Coalition directed at Sea Shepherd rather than Japan.
“A Customs vessel was promised with surveillance. That hasn’t happened,” he said.
Acting Australian Greens Party leader Senator Richard Di Natale said the government’s response was disappointing.
“This is a government that has set a world record on breaking promises early on in its first term,” he said.
“This was a Government that said very clearly ‘We are going to send a vessel to monitor the activities of the Japanese whalers’.”
Sea Shepherd said the Japanese fleet’s work in the sanctuary contravened a 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling.
Peter Hammarstedt, captain of the Sea Shepherd vessel Bob Barker, said the Japanese government has shown “flagrant disregard for international law by continuing their illegal whale hunt while the world patiently awaits a decision from the International Court of Justice (ICJ)”.
In June last year, Australia’s then-Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus called on the ICJ to outlaw Japanese whaling before the start of the current whale-hunting season.
The court is yet to rule on the matter and Mr Brown said he did not believe there would be a decision before the end of the season.
