The Commencement Of The 2006 Political Year

I had half expected there to have been some sort of an upsurge in local political activity during the past couple of days, in reverence of Parliament's reconvening after its Christmas break. However, as span avidly pointed out, this particular hope would not appear to have come to pass. Since Winston Peters arrived home from his first outings as foreign minister, there's been little of real, significant interest on the local political front, with the socially attentive citizenry having been left to -- if they so wished -- follow the seemingly endless David Benson-Pope tennis-ball-in-mouth excuse-for-a-debacle.

Not even Rodney Hide had anything to say about this mildly momentous time of take-off, instead offering up some interesting, albeit brief, commentary on an issue that he felt keen to highlight. I fail to perceive the injustice that Rodney has chosen to see in this situation apparently for the purpose of gaining possession of decidedly weak ammunition to use against the Waitangi Tribunal. For a start his entry is successful in making it sound as if the Waitangi Tribunal is promoting these medal reallocations on a mass scale. Anyone who makes the effort to read the article will discover that the entry is misleading; that the reallocation request only in fact applies to one case. I believe that it is a very one-sided case at that, and do not understand why it has taken so many years to have any progress achieved towards Manahi rightfully receiving the award that he deserves.

At sea, however, the political climate is distinctly more turbulent, as a long battle continues to be fought in the Southern Ocean between Japanese commercial whalers -- who claim to be taking the creatures' lives for scientific purposes -- and various protest groups, including Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The event of the whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru colliding with Arctic Sunrise, a Greenpeace vessel that is involved in the protest action, has resulted in a rapid increase in the heat of the situation, virtually simultaneous to the reconvening of Parliament in New Zealand.

The Sea Shepherds appear to have responded by sideswiping the Oriental Bluebird, a Japanese-operated tanker allegedly being used to refuel whaling ships, using their leader Paul Watson's ship Farley Mowat as a weapon. Farley Mowat is equipped with a hull-mounted "heavy steel blade" that the Shepherds dub "the can opener." The Herald reports that the implement inflicted a long scratch along the side of the commercial vessel, and note is also made of the fact that since beginning their anti-whaling protest actions in 1979, the Shepherds have "sunk nine illegal whaling ships without causing injury." They are evidently a formidable organisation.
I read this piece by Greg Barns in the Herald last week with great interest. The overall idea that he is pushing, however, I find thoroughly disagreeable even though he provides a significant number of valid points. I am still staunchly of the opinion that, in the end, it is wrong to slaughter whales, as the Japanese are presently doing in breach of the Southern Ocean sanctuary, whether for scientific purposes, "sustainably," or especially commercially. It is wrong to argue that Japan has some kind of culturally-given right to commit these crimes against nature. There is no such thing as sustainable whaling. It is another situation in which humans need to put wildlife's rights ahead of those that they themselves perceive to be entitled to, particularly considering that although global whale numbers are slowly recovering, they still represent only a fraction of the original population.