Geoff Tuxworth, Simon Petterffy and and Glen Pendlebury are determined Australian pirates. They may only be passive-aggressive, but they are aggressive nonetheless. On Saturday night, under the cover of darkness, they approached a commercial vessel with a determination to board the craft and impose their will on the crew.
To do so, they acted in the full knowledge that they were operating outside the law, would be committing an act of trespass and were beyond Australian territory. They had to travel 40 kilometres to sea from Bunbury in Western Australia, well past the limit of Australian territorial waters, which is 22 kilometres. They had to get past spikes. They had to avoid razor wire. They worked in darkness. They risked tipping into an ocean swell.
Once on board they sought to dictate terms. They demanded that the vessel they had just illegally boarded, the Shonan Maru No.2, return them to Australia and abort its mission. If their demands were not met, they would go on a hunger strike.
The Japanese ship has continued to sail south. The three men are now captive and, having entered a Japanese ship in international waters, are subject to Japanese law.
I keep encountering news reports describing this as a diplomatic ''crisis'' between Australian and Japan. What crisis? There is no crisis.
The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has offered no sympathy for the protesters: ''The conduct of these three Australians in my view is unacceptable.'' This would please the Japanese government. She has also complained that the cost of extracting the three men would run to hundreds of thousands of dollars in the expense of sending a ship to get them.
Her views will resonate widely with Australians even though the overwhelming majority are, like me, opposed to Japan's continued whale hunting, especially in southern waters far from Japan. The federal government has taken Japan to the International Court of Justice in an effort to curb its whaling operations.
We've also had dubious commentary from another pirate operating far from his home waters, Paul Watson, a Canadian who runs the anti-whaling operation called Sea Shepherd. It was Sea Shepherd vessels which took the three illicit boarders to the Japanese ship.
Having aided the trespass, Watson told the media: ''I think the Australian government would be very embarrassed if an armed Japanese vessel can just pick up Australian citizens in Australia and then take them away to Japan. Japanese vessels have no right to take prisoners in Australian waters.''
Pull the other one. The incident did not take place in Australian territory, and the ''prisoners'' went to great effort to get into their prison. Australia has a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, which the Shonan Maru No. 2 had entered, but it was entitled to do so as this zone is not the same as territorial water.
The great flaw in the environmental movement is the sanctimonious belligerence of so many of its protagonists, the lies and exaggerations, and the assumption that they are above the law and can disrupt and destroy the businesses of other people who are operating lawfully.
The three men who boarded the Japanese vessel are a classic example. They belong to a small group in Western Australia called Forest Rescue, which specialises in blockades and hyperbole. As its website states: ''Forest Rescue have a no compromise approach against anything that threatens Western Australia's biodiversity … our state is on the brink of ecological collapse by native forest logging, land clearing and mining companies.''
If justice were to be served, Tuxworth, 47, Petterffy, 44, and Pendlebury, 27, would be on the first leg of a long journey down to the Southern Ocean, then back to Japan, then into the care of the Japanese justice system. We might see them back in Australia in six months, at no cost to the Australian taxpayer.
If they regarded this as too great an indignity, and engaged in a hunger strike, they should be allowed to be the masters of their own fate. Let them accept the consequences of their own brinkmanship. Nobody forced them into this predicament. Nobody did them any harm.
I say this even though I believe Japan's whaling operation is pointless and cruel and the three men acted with physical courage, are not seeking personal gain and are not engaging in violent acts.
As I write, the Australian Customs ship Ocean Protector is on its way to an ocean rendezvous with the Shonan Maru No. 2 to collect these three men. So the Gillard government is doing what it does best: wasting taxpayers' dollars while managing to achieve the worst of both worlds - not sending a strong message to Japan and not sending a strong message to law-breaking, grandstanding, moral blackmailers.
Email a friend