Australia is getting tougher

Australia, as I've mentioned before, is a very anti-whaling nation. To the extent that leaders perceived to be soft on whaling come under considerable political pressure, which is likely why Kevin Rudd's government recently declared that if Southern Ocean whaling doesn't cease by November 2010, he'll follow through on promises to challenge Japan at the International Court of Justice. Japan for its part plans to reintroduce its plan to "scale back" SO whaling in exchange for the International Whaling Commission's sanctioning of commercial whaling in Japanese waters. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out - the IWC meeting is in June, so there probably won't be much official action on this until then. But behind the scenes there certainly will be some back and forth between Japanese and Australian diplomats.