Abe will be the first Japanese leader to visit Darwin since it was bombed in the second world warThe visit comes just days after the Japanese whaling fleet departed for a ‘scientific’ hunt
Prime minister Scott Morrison is being urged to personally raise Australia’s opposition to Japan’s unjustified “scientific” whaling programme during talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Abe will today become the first Japanese leader to visit Darwin since Japan’s deadly 1942 bombing of the city. The visit comes just days after the Japanese whaling fleet departed for the Southern Ocean for a “scientific” hunt that could see as many as 333 minke whales killed.
There is growing international opposition to Japan’s whaling after its attempts to lift the global hunting ban failed and the International Whaling Commission agreed a formal position that the country had failed to make a scientific case for killing whales.
Australian Marine Conservation Society director Darren Kindleysides said: “The prime minister needs to be raising our continued opposition to whaling directly with the Japanese prime minster and should be asking that he turn around the Japanese whaling fleet. Australians expect our leaders to be speaking out.”
Nicole Beynon, a whale conservation campaigner at the Humane Society International, said: “As far as we know, the whaling issue has consistently been raised at the prime ministerial level between Australia and Japan and we fully expect it to be raised again.”
A spokesperson for Scott Morrison said: “The prime minister is unable to comment on private conversations with the Japanese prime minister.”
Former Greens leader and environmentalist Bob Brown said it would be “humiliating for Australia if our PM does not confront Abe on his illegal whaling” during the visit.
In a statement, Environment Minister Melissa Price said the Australian government remained “strongly opposed to all forms of commercial and so-called ‘scientific’ whaling, including Japan’s whaling in the southern and North Pacific oceans.
