Dr Kate Barclay, The Great Hall, 9 September 2010

Malcolm Cook:
Please, and I'll do this myself, completely turn off your phones, not to mute or, as they say in Japan, manner mode. Please turn them completely off to ensure no electronic interference occurs. Also, if you need to leave for another drink or to go to the bathroom, please close the door as quietly, if leaving or returning, this is particularly important for the video taping that will hopefully go on ABC2's Big Ideas.

Quite a while ago, which shows that UTS is very well organised, I got an invitation to be the MC tonight. I was very excited to accept and I think I accepted within ten minutes, which was unusual for a few reasons. One, the Lowy Institute in UTS, I think we have quite a few things in common, even though this is a very large university and the Lowy Institute's a very small think tank with no students at all, actually. I think we both want to contribute to Australia's discussion about global affairs and this series is a good example.

I also follow Australia/Japan relationships very closely but not from an environmental point of view or from the fisheries but from a strategic point of view, particularly in the security domain. So it's really interesting, I'm going to learn a lot. I probably go to Tokyo about four or five times a year.

I also know almost nothing about tuna fisheries and Australia/Japan relations over tuna, so I'm going to learn a lot. The only think I know about tuna is I like to eat it a lot even though there's not a lot of it.

I also have very strong opinions on how Australia, particularly the present Rudd and now Gillard government's approaching the whaling issue with Japan. It's one that is in stark contrast to the tripartite support for taking Japan to the ICJ over it's whaling activities. I think this is strategic nonsense but I'm sure many in the audience may disagree but I'm not up here talking about that.

I'm very happy to introduce Kate Barclay, who I've had the pleasure of getting to know since the invitation. We have a personal connection because both of us have studied and worked in Japan, which led us then to focus on Australia/Japan relations. I think if you live and worked in the two countries you talk about, that gives you a much better sense and a much better analytical clarity than if you haven't.

Kate is one of the very few social scientists in Australia researching tuna fisheries in the Asia Pacific region despite its economic importance to Australia and its environmental sustainability challenges. She's been very successful in her pursuit so far. She has received money from AusAid, the National Library and the king of them all when it comes to academic funding in Australia: the Australian Research Council.

She's conducted research on Taiwan and China tuna fisheries and, as we're going to hear tonight in great detail, Japanese fishery governance. She's also worked with the Solomon Islands and the United Nations Development Agency on the Solomon Islands tuna fishery are very important for them.

She's published in many of the top international journals in her two fields of study we're going to hear about today: fisheries management and Asian studies. She's also working with a colleague of ours and mine at the University of Sydney on the whaling relationship between Japan and Australia.

So Kate, I'd like to ask you to come up and talk about Right Versus Righteous. Thank you.

Kate Barclay:
I've been, as Malcolm said, working on tuna fisheries for a long time now, about 13 years. Having lived and worked in Japan and I speak Japanese - I've lived in Japan for about four years, although I hadn't worked on whaling, it was always something - as an Australian living in Japan - that I was interested in. I'd followed curiously the events as they unfold in the media and listened to Japanese friends' and colleagues' opinions about whaling and about consuming whale meat. I hadn't brought the two together: tuna and whaling until events in 2005/2006.

There was a bit of a buzz around late 2005 to do with a report that had been commissioned looking at the amount of southern bluefin tuna in the Japanese market for sale, uncovering that the Japanese fleet had been over catching the amount that they were supposed to catch. There's an international agreement and the major fishing countries have quotas. They're supposed to keep their fleets within those - a tonnage per year of southern bluefin tuna that's caught - in an attempt to manage this fishery.

So that was quite a scandal at the time, that the Japanese government had let their fleet over catch their quota by a significant amount. Japan is a major fishing country and a major tuna importing country. It takes a leadership role in a lot of the international negotiations about tuna management. So for this to have happened was quite a shock but I was busy with other things. I noticed there wasn't any media coverage at the time but I just sort of moved on.

In mid 2006, I had my first child and I was on maternity leave and was sitting, one day, feeling very sleep deprived on the ferry. I think my son was about six weeks old at the time. I had a phone call from an ABC researcher who was trying to find someone to interview about the report.

It transpired that it had come to media attention because an official from the Australian Fisheries Management Authority had talked about the report at a seminar at the Australian National University, which had been transcribed and that was put on the web. So he hadn't intended to make the report public but knowledge about the report leaked out. That was why it then became a media issue.

I was feeling sleep deprived and I was a little bit out of the loop and really the only thing I had to go on - I had never seen the report myself - was a couple of gossipy phone calls from six months earlier. So I didn't feel I had anything useful to contribute and said I couldn't do an interview.

The researcher was quite disappointed and I said, well you should contact the people in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry in Canberra and the Australian Tuna Boat Owners Association. They should be able to tell you what's going on. She said she couldn't get anyone from either of these organisations to talk to her.

When I finished speaking to her I was very puzzled. I was thinking, is this the same Australian government that jumps up and down about whaling - usually more than once a year in the media - now refusing to talk to the media about another marine environmental issue, that arguably was quite serious? So that was the point at which I started to think about these two issues together: tuna and whaling.

Before I talk about the politics, I'll just give a very quick overview of the stock issues for the two areas. The International Whaling Commission has a scientific committee and if you want to look at what the environmental or the sustainability - perhaps the wrong word - what the issues are for the different whaling species, that's a good place to start.

Basically, there are some species still in danger of extinction, even though there's not a lot of whaling going on anymore. The Minke whales, which are the species that the Japanese program mainly targets, are described as being abundant and not in danger of extinction. The Antarctic population of Minke whales, there is a comment on the website that there possibly has been a stock decline, but that's the only environmental issue that IWC talk about for: Minke whales.

Tuna is more complicated. I'm focussing on southern bluefin tuna here because that's the one that there's a significant Australian industry for and that Australia has a big role in international negotiations over. So we have the International Whaling Commission, there are a range of international bodies that deal, so the governments work together to try and do the management of tuna stocks.

I've just got the acronyms up on the slide. There are several species of tuna, some of which are more or less resilient to fishing, skipjack being a kind of tuna that is very resilient to fishing, although there are bio catch issues with catching skipjack. [Impersane] that's using fish aggregation devices. Then there are some other species that have greater or lesser problems. Then when you get to bluefin, both northern bluefin and southern bluefin, they have been heavily overfished and the stocks are less than ten percent of probably what the stocks were before fishing started.

Now this section of the paper I've been working on with a colleague - Charlotte Epstein from Sydney University. We're looking at the comparison of Australian government responses to Japan on tuna and whaling through international relations lens and we're talking about whether - that Australian responses to Japan, especially on whaling, can be described as a kind of attempt to shame, a shaming behaviour. So it's an attempt to try and affect the way Japan behaves in this arena by shaming them, by standing up loudly and saying, you are doing the wrong thing in the International Whaling Commission or in the media or whatever.

You could say then that in the 2005/2006 scandal about Japan over catching southern bluefin tuna, the Australian government took a very different strategy of choosing not to shame. We think this is more than just not doing something. This is an active diplomatic strategy in itself.

Where the opportunity existed - and there is a pattern of behaviour of shaming - the Australian government chose not to. It could be seen as perhaps a diplomatic strategy to encourage more co-operation with Japan. If Australia had stood up in the media and said, look what Japan's done, this is really bad, the possibility that the Japanese government then would not co-operate on fixing the problems in southern bluefin tuna, I guess, would be reasonably high.

So that is one answer for the inconsistency between the Australian government positions on whaling and tuna over this dispute. So you could say it's just hypocritical of the Australian government - we don't have a whaling industry so they'll go hard on whaling. We do have a substantial southern bluefin tuna industry based in Port Lincoln in South Australia and it more or less underpins that economy, so then we go softly softly on this issue.

Charlotte and I, after looking at it in depth, think there's more to it than just that material difference. There are two different scripts for the way the Australian government has historically and continues to construct itself as an environmentally responsible state to do with these two issues: whaling and tuna.

Australia's anti-whaling script started around 1979/1980 because prior to that Australia was a whaling country and quite a staunch whaling country, a member of the International Whaling Commission but a pro-whaling member. Around then a range of factors caused Australia to go 180 degrees the other direction.

One is that there was changing public mood and opinion about whaling during the 1970s - in large part due to the activities of organisations like Greenpeace and Project Jonah that started as North American organisations around that time and then moved overseas. Whaling was a big issue and there were people putting their lives on the line going out in little zodiacs doing the direct action against whaling that we're all familiar with.

They did manage to change public opinion quite a lot. One of the people's opinions who they managed to change was Malcolm Fraser, who was the Prime Minister at the time. He more or less drove legislation in 1979 and 1980 that banned whaling in Australia. Australia didn't just become a non-whaling country; Australia became an anti-whaling country in legislation at this time.

That's not actually what stopped whaling at the time. The last company that was whaling in Australia at the time decided to stop for commercial reasons because the price for whale oil wasn't good. That's sort of by the by for this argument. The important thing to note is that from 1980, Australia became a very staunch anti-whaling state. Both internationally and in a domestic political arena, the government has constructed itself as being environmentally responsible because it's anti-whaling. That's a big part of a political identity.

Then we have quite a different script that the Australian government has followed in tuna. So since the 1960s there was heavy fishing of southern bluefin tuna, which in the 1980s caused stocks to collapse. So from the late 1980s there was international - tuna are highly migratory species, these kinds of tuna, so any one country is not going to be able to manage the stocks, there has to be international co-operation. Whaling is the same and that's why international negotiations are so important in the management of these species.

So Australia, New Zealand and Japan were the main fishing countries in the 1980s and they started the talks, they established the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna, which is the international organisation under international law that handles the management of this species. It's expanded - the organisation - as other countries have entered as fishing countries. There have been several dispute areas over time.

One was in 1998 to 2000 where during the 1990s Japan had been proposing a scientific program but that required killing more fish. You have, as I mentioned before, there are quotas. The CCSBT, this international commission sets a global quota and then carves it up and gives it to the different fishing countries and says you can catch this much and no more. If you're going to have a scientific program, you've either got to remove some of that commercial catch from each country or you expand the global catch.

Australia and New Zealand weren't willing to do either of those things so they were stalling on Japanese requests for a scientific program. In 1998 Japan then just unilaterally declared a scientific quota - a significant one, which was perhaps a bit inflammatory. The Australian government responded, and the New Zealand government with them, in a similarly robust manner and took the issue to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. So they basically took international legal action over Japan's tuna scientific program.

The Australian government went quite hard on this and you could almost say that they borrowed from the anti-whaling script on this. I didn't bring the piece of paper but I have a quote - I think it was Warwick Parer who was the responsible minister at the time - and he likened this tuna scientific quota to - said it was 'as spurious as Japan's scientific whaling program'. So he directly drew connections between the two and he was criticising Japan in the media.

Australian ports were closed to Japanese fishing fleets for a while there. It was really quite a confrontational episode. It was eventually cleared up by being sent back to this commission and the commission had to set up the scientific program itself. So really no side really won out of the international legal dispute and there was a lingering problem within the CCSBT with Australia and Japan unable to agree because there was such a lot of bad feeling on substantive issues for some years. I think it wasn't until 2003 that they were able to agree on quotas again, so they just continued with the existing quotas.

I would argue that from that experience, Australia decided that confronting Japan publicly was a bad idea and not going to result in good outcomes and that this directly influenced the way they handled the 2005/2006 scandal over Japan's over catching. As I mentioned, the Australian government was not talking to the media when it became publicly known about this report.

I did find a statement by the then responsible minister, who was Eric Abetz, but the language he used was very different if you compare it to Warwick Parer in 1998. In 2006 Eric Abetz was talking about these species that migrate across national boundaries have to be managed co-operatively and he actually used the word 'co-operate' and that that's the important thing. He didn't make any explicit criticism of Japan in his statement that was in the media at that time. So it's very different handling of the situation.

Then in 2009 the scientific committee for the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna came back with some quite negative assessments of the stocks and basically said, you're going to have to do more about restricting fishing if these stocks are to recover or even for current levels of fishing to be sustainable. So all of the members took cuts to their quotas and Australia and New Zealand went further and actually took extra voluntary cuts on top of the standard cuts that everyone agreed to.

Japan didn't take an extra voluntary cut but Australian government pronouncements about it did not include any criticism about Japan not taking an extra voluntary cut. So people may remember that issue being in the media last year because the Australian industry and people concerned about the economy around Port Lincoln were quite angry at the Australian government for having allowed such large cuts to the Australian quota and they worried about jobs in Port Lincoln.

In sum, the Australian on southern bluefin tuna has been about - it's not about ceasing to fish southern bluefin tuna, although perhaps in my argument, it could be mounted that perhaps they should. It's been about trying to have a sustainable use of the resource, which is a very different script to anti-whaling, which is about ceasing to whale. It's a different kind of environmentalism.

With southern bluefin tuna, the script has been about sustainable use of a resource and, although in early times they did take a confrontational line with Japan on disputes about this, in recent years the program has been to work with Japan on these issues. So whereas in whaling it's you don't whale and you oppose Japan, in tuna it's you fish and you try and do it sustainably and you work with Japan, not in opposition to Japan. Charlotte and I would argue that this goes a large way to explaining the inconsistencies in the Australian government approach towards Japan on these issues.

To look now at the Japanese side of things a little bit more - I've concentrated on the Australian side - an interesting question to ask is why does Japan whale. Often we might assume that it's for economic reasons but there is not substantial Japanese whaling industry left. It has declined over the years. There's one company left - the only work it does is contracted to the Japanese scientific whaling program. There were annual sales in 2007 and 2008 of US$48 million and this was very heavily subsidised - about US$12 million subsidy included in those sales. Prices for whale meat have been falling in Japan and supply exceeds demand. So it's really an economic non-issue in Japan, whaling.

So does Japan whale then for cultural reasons? There are a few coastal communities in Japan that have a long history of whaling but not very many. Widespread eating of whale meat and industrial whaling was important in the 1940s and 1950s when Japan was reconstructing after the war and there was a shortage of animal protein. As the Japanese economy recovered and there were more sources of protein, the consumption of whale meat dropped dramatically.

So by the mid 1970s people were having less than - so there was less than two percent protein per capita coming from whale meat and in the 1980s this dropped to almost zero and it stayed at that low level. Most Japanese people wouldn't eat whale from one year to the next. So in the sense of it being a large part of Japanese food culture or it being an important historical tradition for Japan as a whole, those are not reasons to do whaling either.

So it looks like, to me, the reason Japan whales is more political than anything else. I don't mean electoral politics; I mean internal bureaucratic politics within the Japanese government. So there are a couple of points that I just want to make briefly about the nature of Japanese politics to help make this point.

One is that the bureaucracy in Japan is much more powerful than we would understand from an Australian perspective. There's a sense that bureaucrats should be well trained and highly educated and every competent and that this is a sort of balancing act against the politicians in a sense. So legislation is actually drafted by bureaucrats in Japan and then ministers decide to pass it or not. Whereas we might expect that it is the elected politicians who are in the driving seat for building legislation. That's just an example of how different the bureaucracy is in Japan and how powerful it is.

So if the bureaucracy or the ministries are a really powerful political force in themselves, the politics within the ministries and towards the politicians becomes quite important in the Japanese political scene and government agencies - a lot of this argument I've drawn from a paper by a Japanese political scientist called [Ishiatsu] - forgotten his first name - anyway, he's listed with some other papers that I've used as background for this paper in the bibliography at the end of the PowerPoint presentation.

So [Ishi]'s take on thing is that a government agency - in the kind of politics they engage vis-à-vis each other is they want to enlarge their budgets, increase their staff and increase their jurisdictional power. Then he adapts this to the whaling situation and says the government agency responsible is the Fisheries Agency that's under the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

The whaling issue, because it's materially a non-issue - it's not really an electoral issue, it's not an economic issue, it's not a large scale cultural issue. They can't enlarge the amount of money they get for treasury for the scientific whaling program and they can't increase the number of staff and they already have total jurisdiction over it. No other government agency has any jurisdiction over the scientific whaling program.

Foreign Affairs has jurisdiction, certainly over international negotiations about whaling, but the scientific program this agency has total control over. They can't grow it that way but they can enlarge the budget through the sales of whale meat.

We've heard in the media the Tokyo Two were sentenced this week. That was about illegal sales of whale meat where fishing crew were taking the whale meat and selling it personally. The whale meat in the scientific program is perfectly openly sold on the market as a cost recovery exercise and Ishi includes in his paper how the sales of meat from the whaling program have increased over the last decade or so and they make up a substantial portion of the budget for the scientific whaling program.

So he argues that when the Japanese government goes into the International Whaling Commission each year and argues to lift the moratorium on commercial whaling and allow commercial whaling to resume, his argument is that that's a [phant]. That they don't really want that. What they really want is to maintain the scientific whaling program in it's current form. It's a nice little piece of turf to guard and a little money earner. So it's quite a convoluted argument but, in my understanding of Japanese politics, I find it quite a convincing argument.

Then another political point about the politics of whaling from a Japanese perspective is that it's a safe arena to say no to the US. So Japanese nationalists sometimes chafe a bit about having to accept what the US wants. For example, regarding large US military bases on Japanese and the problems they cause. They can't say no about that but they can say no loudly in the international arena about whaling.

So when the US says you shouldn't whale, they can say no, we're going to whale. That is an arena that can be a bit of a safety valve to show to the nationalists that there is an area where you can say no to the USA. A fairly safe area because it's not threatening anything because it's a bit of a non-issue.

Another point, and this is - [Ishi] and some other people have made this point about the politics of whaling in Japan is about. I've mentioned that in some ways you could see it not as a cultural issue but it has, to an extent, been culturalised as a political issue.

[Ishi] did a content analysis of national parliamentary debates and also of the stories about whaling in the large Japanese daily newspapers over time. He found that until the early 1970s, when whaling was mentioned in those arenas, it was not mentioned to do with culture, it was a nutritional issue. It was talking about the food supply for Japan. As less and less were eating whale meat, it became a less important issue. The Fisheries Agency was concerned that it was losing it's public profile and it's importance. They employed a PR company to increase the public profile of whaling.

The way that was done, because it wasn't an important nutritional issue anymore, was to talk about it as a cultural nationalism issue. Food culture in Japan is an important part of national and sub-national regional identities and fish food culture is a very important part of that as well. There is a discourse in Japan about the world being divided into fish food cultures versus meat and food cultures. Places like the USA and Australia are characterised as meat food cultures. When we are anti-whaling, that that's an attempt to be culturally imperialist against the fish food culture people and that we don't understand the importance of whaling.

This shift has been quite successful. There's a shift in understanding of whaling to become understood as a cultural nationalism issue has been quite successful in terms of public perceptions. So public opinion polls in Japan will often show that most Japanese people don't eat whale and, from that perspective, don't see it as very important. They do see Japan's right to whale in the context of cultural imperialism and not kowtowing to other white western countries telling them not to whale, is important. They think Japan should have the right to whale.

Attacks in this context, of course, attacks on Japan by anti-whaling groups or anti-whaling governments confirm this view clearly. So that's a bit of an overview of the politics of whaling in Japan. Then it's interesting to then consider about well how effective then are anti-whaling strategies, are shaming strategies - standing up loudly in public arena and saying to Japan you're doing the wrong thing about whaling.

Effective at what is an important part of that question. Certainly not very effective at all in getting Japan to stop whaling. Effective at making a strong environmental statement to the domestic audience in Australia or other countries; that's been very effective. We get media coverage on it every January when the Japanese ships go to the Southern Ocean for the whaling program in the summer there. Then we get it again in June each year when the International Whaling Commission meets. So it is very effective from a domestic political perspective.

There are some unintended effects I think of this. One I have mentioned is that it buys into and strengthens the sense that anti-whaling is anti-Japanese and when you look at some of the anti-whaling - not necessarily the stuff Australian government says but when you look at some of the wider community responses, anti-whaling stuff, they are quite anti-Japanese. Sometimes in extreme examples they're using environmentalism as an excuse for anti-Japanese racism.

These shaming strategies can strengthen the sense that anti-whaling is anti-Japanese cultural imperialism by the meat food countries, which can turn whaling from a non-issue into a cultural nationalism political issue in Japan, which in turn makes it harder for the Japanese government to remove their support for whaling. So in effect, it's counterproductive to changing Japan's policies on whaling. The unintended effects in Australia I think are related to some of that anti-Japanese sentiment I talked about. I think that the shaming strategies, anti-whaling shaming strategies directed at Japan can promote anti-Japanese sentiment.

Now to look at - to apply the same sort of analysis of the Japanese side to southern bluefin tuna. Why did Japan over catch southern bluefin tuna? I guess a simple answer would be that Japanese fishers wanted more share of a very lucrative market. Now whether the Japanese fishers involved thought this level of catching was sustainable or not, I'm not sure.

Were they just thinking, okay, this stock's going to collapse anyway, we need to get in there and catch as much as we can because if we don't someone else is going to do it and we might as well make the money? Or whether they did believe what they were doing was sustainable, I'm not sure.

The really interesting question is to ask why did the Japanese government let them. I mean you'd have to say here that there would be domestic political pressures from the Japanese tuna fishing lobby versus the script of being a responsible international player. On fisheries and quite a lot of other areas, the Japanese government very much constructs itself as a responsible international player. So this must've been a really large tension and I guess there would be questions then about at what level, where in the government did people know this was going on? It could be that very few government people knew specifically how much overfishing was going on and that knowledge was kept quite limited.

As I'll explain in the next couple of slides, government structures for managing it did let it happen, so people must've suspected that it was going on even if they didn't specifically know.

The domestic political context for tuna fishing in Japan is somewhat like the rice issue. People may know that rice is seen as - the rice lobby in Japan is very powerful. There has been strong protection of the Japanese rice industry because it's expensive to produce rice in Japan and if there wasn't protection that this industry probably would've collapsed because of cheaper imports.

Tuna fishing is somewhat similar. As a food producing industry, it buys into concerns about food security. It might be hard to understand from an Australian perspective where we have heaps of food but Japan has had a history of being concerned about it's food security. It imports much more than half of it's nutritional intake of food and they've had famines during the 20th century at various points and it is a political issue.

Then there is also the cultural nationalism about food culture that I talked about before. Tuna for sashimi and sushi is an iconic Japanese part of food culture. So these two together mean that there is political and consumer support for local industry in opposition to imports. So Japanese consumers will happily pay more for fish they see as - that's caught by the Japanese industry as opposed to imports and there's political support as well. This extends to subsidies.

So some of the subsidies that the Japanese fishing industry gets are to do with the fact that they're rurally based. Tuna industries are based at ports in rural areas around Japan. As people may be aware, the way the electoral system has worked in Japan - it's falling apart a bit now but certainly most of the time since World War II, rural votes counted more than urban votes. So it was always very important for the government to keep rural areas happy and tuna has been part of that.

Another important aspect of the domestic politics of tuna fishing in Japan are similar to the whaling. To understand a bit about the governance structure - how it's administered and how those parts of the Japanese administration relate to each other. So it's under the same agency as whaling, which is the Fisheries Agency. So the turf guarding for whaling was to do with a scientific whaling program. The turf that the Fisheries Agency has to do with tuna are more to do with industry associations.

I've written up there the Japanese word gaikakudantai because they are specific to Japan. The closest English word is QUANGO, which is a Quasi Non-Government Organisation. So their government funding is funnelled through the ministries in Japan to these Qangos that sit between ministries and the private sector. It's a politically very important layout, this layout of Qangos in Japan around the ministries. They funnel a lot of money that way and there's also exchange of personnel, either through temporary secondment of ministry staff into these organisations or, when ministry staff retire they get a golden parachute job often in these Qangos.

So whereas we might think an industry association would be headed up by tuna fishing companies, picked representatives from those, the way these industry organisations have worked in Japan has actually been much more run by government. The executive positions are all held by bureaucrats or former bureaucrats.

The industry associations then do part of the government's work as well, that's another important distinction. Part of the Japanese monitoring of their fishing fleet was not done by government per se but was done by the industry associations. So they must've been very involved in letting the over catching happen.

So how were they able to over catch? One, they were giving false reports on what they were catching. They were calling southern bluefin tuna something else and not calling every fish that was southern bluefin tuna southern bluefin tuna. Another important way that this was able to happen was that - so you might have, say, government observers on a fishing vessel watching what's happening. That would be one way of regulating and monitoring a fishing industry.

Another way to do it is that at the point where fish comes to market, that it has to be certified as having been caught by the relevant regulations. So this is something that is done with tuna fisheries. These are often called catch documentation schemes. So every catch, before it's allowed into the market, has to have the right documentation.

Southern bluefin tuna - Japan would not allow - Japan's the major market - would not allow a catch documentation per se, they wanted a trade documentation scheme. They said that only catch from fleets other than the Japanese fleets, so catch that was internationally traded into Japan would be monitored in this way. The Japanese fleet would not be monitored in this way.

So southern bluefin tuna has a trade documentation scheme rather than a catch documentation scheme. That was another way the Japanese fleet was able to - the system was not transparent enough that there was independent checking of how much the Japanese fleet was catching.

So then we would ask how effective has not shaming been for southern bluefin tuna? I said before that I believe that the Australian government made a decision that shaming confrontation strategies on this issue would be unlikely to work, so they've chosen non-shaming in recent years. You could say that one measure of how effective their strategy has been is that the CCSBT, this international organisation, is still functioning and it has managed to achieve some important changes in recent years.

So the year that the report was tabled - the over catching report was tabled in 2005 - a resolution for changing the trade documentation scheme that excluded Japan's fleet was changed to allow a catch documentation scheme. So clearly, Japan must've said okay, yes, our fleet should also be monitored with this system. So the resolution was passed in 2005 and it was adopted in 2006 quite quickly. If Australia had gone to the media and protested about the over catching, possibly this wouldn't have happened. Possibly Japan would not have been willing to co-operate on this.

Another point that shows that the CCSBT is still functioning is that Japan did accept a cut in 2009. They'd taken a punitive cut because of the over catching, which effectively cut their quota in half from 2005 until I'm not sure when that finishes. Then they took a further cut last year when everyone else took a cut because the stocks were looking in even worse shape than people had thought. Would Japan have accepted a further cut or would Japan have co-operated with negotiations if Australia had been more confrontational over the over catching issue? That was another important question.

I guess the most important question you'd ask about how effective non-shaming has been as a strategy is have the southern bluefin tuna stocks recovered. Unfortunately, we're not able to say that yet. We'll have to see in the long term. I guess from a political point of view, if you don't have functioning political organisations for co-operation then that's not going to happen anyway.

So I'd just like to finish off my presentation talking about what then does this analysis mean for the way we might approach these two marine environmental issues. What should we do? What should our governments do? What should we as citizens do? What should non-government organisations concerned with this do?

One is of course, we should be environmentally responsible but I think it's also very important to foster good relations with Japan. Japan's a very important partner for Australia in a whole range of areas, both government to government but also cultural. There are a lot of Japanese people who come here, a lot of people from Australia go to Japan.

I've talked about how, to an extent, whaling, because it's sort of a non-issue, you could say that there's probably a bit of an agreement between the Australian and Japanese government. The Australian government can go really hard on anti-whaling and it won't affect the wider bilateral relationship. Ditto for Japan, that they can go really hard on whaling and Australia won't let that affect the wider bilateral relationship.

You'd have to ask whether it is possible to contain that confrontation or whether it might leak out. I think that the CCSBT example with the 1999 - the confrontation between Australia and Japan over the tuna program - show that it can poison relations and make co-operation on other issues really difficult for a period of years until you get over that.

Then I would also say that even though the Australian and Japanese government might have an agreement to quarantine whaling disputes within the whaling sector, Australian public images of Japan are undoubtedly damaged, I think, by the very strong anti-whaling and the connection of anti-whaling-ness to anti-Japanese-ness that occurs with public representations of this issue.

So the question then is about how to be responsible regarding marine environments at the same time as also fostering good relations with Japan. Working with Japan on whaling, I mean you could go two ways. I've talked about how there are two different kinds of environmentalism in a sense. You have an anti-whaling environmentalism or you can have an ecologically sustainable environmentalism.

So if you wanted to be co-operative, you decided to maintain the anti-whaling posture, so if you as a person of the Australian government decided that they needed to remain anti-whaling, they were not going to argue for ecologically sustainable whaling, could you be co-operative in your anti-whaling, rather than confrontational? Some ways that that might occur would be through working to build anti-whaling consciousness within Japan. So building a domestic within Japan movement against whaling, rather than it being outsiders telling Japan off for whaling, which might be working with Japanese home grown NGOs.

One of the other papers that's an important background for this is by someone called [Keiko Hirata] who talks about how - she expands a bit on that idea of the culturalisation of the issue, where outsiders' representations of whaling are easily twisted to - anti-whaling can be easily twisted to being anti-Japanese-ness. For an anti-whaling movement to be effective within Japan, it needs to be home grown rather than coming from Greenpeace or WWF. Even when the actual activists are Japanese themselves, those organisations are definitely seen as western organisations within Japan.

Another strategy could be a media campaign to counter the pro-whaling cultural nationalist message that's coming through the media in Japan. When it's raised as an issue, it's not actually raised in the Japanese media nearly as much as it is raised in the Australian media. So it's not a big issue but it still simmers there a little bit in the background.

Another strategy would be to identify the non pro-whaling parts of the Japanese government and lobby them. There are parts of the Japanese government that are pro-whaling, the Fisheries Agency, maybe not even everyone in the Fisheries Agency, people who are controlling the agenda, perhaps, in the Fisheries Agency. If you can find the parts in the Japanese government that are not pro-whaling and work on them, that might be another strategy.

Then on the other side, if you were to look at a different kind of strategy, which would be to talk about sustainable whaling rather than anti-whaling. That might be working with Japan to reform the scientific program and improve it or it might be doing what [Ishi] recommends, which is to consider lifting the moratorium on commercial whaling. So saying okay, well you can have commercial whaling but we're going to have really strict sustainability criteria here that's going to be based on excellent science. That might be another option to consider.

I think it's very unlikely that in the current public opinion climate that an Australian government would take this option because it would be political suicide, with current public opinion about whaling being so strongly anti-whaling.

Another reason that I don't think an Australian government is possibly going to take this stance any time soon is the fact that it's sort of a non-issue where the Australian government can get up - and successive Australian governments have used this to get up and go really hard in a public arena and say we're such strong environmental warriors. We're going really strong on the anti-whaling message while not tackling - to cover up for the other environmental issues like climate change, which are much harder to deal with. People who have perhaps failed to deliver on promises, if they can go hard on the whaling, it helps counter balance that.

So that's another reason. It's kind of a political gift, in a way, whaling, to Australian governments and I'm not sure that they're going to try and dismantle that gift by considering this option. So given that Australian governments might not open this option but that anti-whaling arguably does damage to the Australian/Japan relations, perhaps someone else needs to open up more room for debate on these issues.

Working with Japan on southern bluefin tuna - arguably the Australian government is working co-operatively with Japan on this. So my comments on this area would be more about strengthening what's already happening. So supporting - for the Australian government to adequately resource and take very seriously the international tuna negotiations.

Other things you might do is to encourage Japan as a key market country because the stocks that are really in trouble, in terms of tuna, are mostly destined for Japanese sashimi markets. So there's a real opportunity there. If one country has the main market, what can it do even more than it's already doing to make sure that what is sold on it's markets is sustainably caught?

Another move might be to support Japanese NGOs to work on bluefin tuna issues because to date they haven't very much. A related issue is that there's not much consumer awareness in Japan about the plight of tuna stocks. So that would be another strategy - to improve consumer awareness in Japan. Then also apply corporate social responsibility pressure to tuna traders in Japan - the companies that bring in the tuna. So you could ask the Japanese government to do what they can do and then you can also ask the companies that are importing tuna to do what they can do to improve the situation.

So thank you very much, those are my thoughts.