The whaling war: Conflicting cultural perspectives (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The political ritual generated by Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean annually captures the Australian imagination and at least the attention of international audiences. This article examines how Australia has become the self‐appointed guardian of Antarctic whales whilst Japan remains resolutely pro‐whaling.     

Scientific whaling and how philosophy of science can help break the international deadlock

Despite widespread public interest on the topic of whaling, there is at present relatively little work on how philosophy might contribute to analysis of the status of whaling in international law. When philosophers have looked at the topic of whaling, they have confined their attention to a fairly narrow set of ethical questions, such as whether international law should permit certain forms of traditional indigenous whaling or extend legal rights to whales themselves. However, there is another important issue which has so far been largely neglected by philosophy, even though it is at the forefront of current international legal disputes over the status of whaling: the issue of so-called ‘scientific whaling’. This article considers the international legal dispute between Australia, New Zealand and Japan over the latter’s lethal harvesting of whales in the Southern Ocean, and the recent attempt at resolution by the International Court of Justice. On its face, this required that the Court demarcate ‘scientific’ from ‘unscientific’ activity; however, it effectively baulked at this task. The authors argue that this approach of the Court was unfortunate, and that demarcating science from commerce is not only achievable in philosophy, but might also inform international legal practice. Resolving this issue is important for genuine progress to be made in the current international stand-off over Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean.     

The history of Australian legal opposition to Japanese Antarctic whaling

ABSTRACT

Whaling has been a consistent theme in Australia’s relations with Japan since the 1930s, Australia having endeavoured to regulate, restrict, or bring to a complete halt Japan’s Antarctic whaling virtually since it began. Australia’s motivations have been mixed, involving at various points, some combination of protection of Australia’s coastal whaling industry, concern for Australia’s security, for safeguarding Australia’s Antarctic territorial claim, and more recently, concern for Australia’s whale-watching industry and/or for the whales. Since environmental consciousness became a primary factor in the 1970s, Australian policy has been aligned with that of anti-whaling non-governmental organizations (NGOs), albeit that certain actions of NGOs have caused difficulties for the Australian Government. Law – inclusive of legal argument in the course of diplomacy, domestic laws, and international litigation – has been a mechanism of influence used by the Australian Government and NGOs. This paper traces Australia’s legal opposition from its beginnings until Japan’s announcement in December 2018 that it would end Antarctic whaling.     

Australia's decision to initiate Whaling in the Antarctic: winning the case versus resolving the dispute

On May 31, 2010, Australia instituted proceedings before the International Court of Justice in the case of Whaling in the Antarctic (Australia v. Japan). Although Australian politicians had for some time threatened such a course of action, the decision to proceed with international litigation took many observers by surprise, most basically because Japan appeared to be in a strong legal position and the risks associated with the case appeared greater than Australia's prospects for success. This article examines the background to the whaling dispute and suggests two ways in which litigation in the World Court may contribute to resolution of the dispute no matter the legal outcome of the case.     

Australia's Antarctic agenda

Australia has had a long connection with, and significant national interests in, the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. The Australian Antarctic Territory comprises 42 per cent of Antarctica's landmass. Australia is not only a claimant state and original signatory to the Antarctic Treaty but has played a significant role in the development of what is termed the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). This article aims to provide an overview of Australia's key policy interests and government policy goals towards Antarctica, including its commitment to the ATS. In examining key policy objectives we note that despite continuity and development of these objectives, significant changes and challenges have arisen in the period 1984–2006. It is these challenges that will help frame Australia's Antarctic agenda over the next 20 years and beyond.     

Feminist protest in the desert: researching the 1983 Pine Gap women's peace camp

This article examines the rich symbolism offered by the central Australian desert, and what happens when it becomes a site of feminist protest, as happened in 1983 when Australian women mounted a women-only peace camp at the Pine Gap military facility. The desert holds iconic status as both the ‘centre’ of Australia and ‘the middle of nowhere’, evoked as the ‘heart’ of the country and yet represented as dangerous and deadly. Its ambivalent meaning for white Australia unsettles Pine Gap as a site of protest, and also differentiates it from more traditional protest sites like urban streets, as well as from the most famous women's peace camp at Greenham Common in England. This account is made more complex by my own formative relation to central Australia, where I lived as a child and left in 1983 around the same time as the protest. The impact and limits of situated knowledge and feminist writing practice thus form part of this research as it also intimately addresses the formation of my feminist self through the remembering and remaking of meanings for this landscape of my childhood.     

Australian local government in the 1970s

Australian local government was the subject of a great deal of debate in the 1970s as attention focused on geographical boundaries, legal and constitutional jurisdiction, and financial imbalance. Little came of moves to reform boundaries or to alter the scope of activities. More success was achieved in applying the principle of fiscal equalisation to local government's parlous financial situation. Stability and resistance to change are however the overwhelming characteristics of Australian local government. The paper surveys the scope and function of local government in the 1970s. The recently developed radical critique of the local state is found to have little relevance to Australian local government because of the small and fragmented scale of local government social policy.     

Sovereignty and inconvenience: The significance of Bentham's exasperation

This article explores the meaning of ‘inconvenience’ and ‘convenience’ in legal and philosophical reasoning. The argument is that such considerations were crucial in the practice of Australian courts in marking out the boundaries of judicial propriety in relation to parliamentary proceedings. This argument is made with recourse to usages of the terms in constitutional debates of the seventeenth century. The older meanings of these terns have now been lost to Australian constitutional law. Hence, I argue, the problem of the boundaries of judicial propriety must be the subject of broader or more theoretical considerations such that the political preferences of judges will be less capable of insulation from their judgments.     

Legal Manoeuvres and Violence: Law Making,Protest and Semi‐Authoritarianism in Uganda

This article explores the interplay between violent protest and the making of laws in Uganda. It advances two main arguments. First, since multipartyism was restored in 2005, the Ugandan government has repeatedly drafted intentionally contentious new laws in part to provoke, divide and politically manipulate opposition. Implementing these laws has often not appeared to be a priority; rather, drafting, debating and (sometimes) passing them represent tactical ‘legal manoeuvres’ geared towards political gain. Second, I argue that these manoeuvres can be linked to another trend since 2005: the rise in urban‐based protests and riots, which have often become violent and resulted in aggressive crackdowns by the state. In bringing these trends together, this article argues that the use of legislative processes as part of a strategic repertoire to destabilize political opposition has exacerbated unrest, especially among urban dwellers. Moreover, in response to rising protest the government has engaged in further legal manoeuvring. The analysis suggests that the semi‐authoritarian nature of the regime in power, where the symbolic importance of the legislature and relatively free media contend with fundamentally authoritarian tendencies at the centre, is propagating this cycle of legal manoeuvres and violence.     

(Post)Colonial [1] Encounters: gendered racialisations in Australian courtrooms [2]

This article identifies how the Australian legal system has generated knowledge about ‘traditional’ gender relations in Aboriginal Australia. Using a sample of artefact cases from the Australian judicial system, constructions of Aboriginal gender relations are mapped. By tracing knowledge production in these cases, it demonstrates how the non-Aboriginal Australian legal system has fabricated its own versions of ‘Aboriginal Customary Laws’, or Aboriginal ‘traditions’ about violence committed by Aboriginal men, against Aboriginal women. (Post)colonial understandings about the Aboriginal ‘other’ have occupied spaces in legal understandings and then been enforced in law. The Australian judicial system itself is therefore guilty of perpetuating and privileging the ‘colonial’ in these encounters.     

The ‘arc of instability’ and Australia's strategic policy

The proposition that Australia faces an ‘arc of instability’ to its north has been an important feature of the Australian strategic debate in the early twenty-first century. Prompted by worries in the late 1990s over Indonesia's future and East Timor's uncertain path to independence, the ‘arc’ metaphor also encapsulated growing Australian concerns about the political cohesiveness of Melanesian polities, including Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. While tending to overlook the divergent experiences of countries within its expanding boundaries, the ‘arc’ fed from Australia's historical requirement for a secure archipelagic screen. As such it has became an important weapon in the debate over whether the locus of Australia's strategic priorities should be increasingly global in the ‘war on terror’ period or remain closer to home in the immediate region. The ‘arc of instability’ metaphor was consequently adopted by leading Australian Labor Party politicians to argue that the Howard Coalition government was neglecting South Pacific security challenges. It became less prominent following the Howard government's greater activism in the South Pacific, signalled by Australia's leadership of the East Timor intervention in 2003. But its prominence returned in 2006 with the unrest in both Honiara and Dili. In overall terms, the ‘arc of instability’ discussion has helped direct Australian strategic and political attention to the immediate neighbourhood. But it has not provided specific policy guidance on what should be done to address the instabilities it includes.     

Timor-Leste’s foreign policy approach to the Timor Sea disputes: pipeline or pipe dream?

Over recent years, Australia and Timor-Leste’s bilateral relationship has been consumed by contested maritime boundary claims in the resource-rich Timor Sea. Intractable disagreements over the right to build a petroleum export pipeline have led Timor-Leste to reinvigorate its pursuit of permanent maritime boundaries as ‘a national priority’. This article examines Timor-Leste’s interests in the Timor Sea and assesses its strategies for achieving its foreign policy goals. It argues that Timor-Leste’s attainment of its stated goals relies on Australia shifting its Timor Sea policy, which has been largely consistent since the 1970s. Timor-Leste’s key strategy is a public diplomacy campaign that positions permanent maritime boundaries as the final stage of its independence struggle, and presents Timor-Leste as owning the disputed Greater Sunrise gas field under international law. While the public diplomacy campaign aims to win enough Australian ‘hearts and minds’ to put pressure on the Australian government, it ultimately fails to negotiate the strategic and historical realities of the interests that define Australia’s realpolitik approach to the Timor Sea.     

Improving Efficiency in Australian Local Government: Structural Reform as a Catalyst for Effective Reform

Municipal amalgamation has been the main policy instrument of local government structural reform programmes in Australia for well over a century. However, council consolidation programs have not achieved the intended cost savings or improved service provision promised by advocates of this means of structural reorganisation. This paper considers whether the failure of municipal amalgamation processes to produce significant economic benefits necessarily implies that structural reform programs that invoke consolidation have no place in Australian local government policy. It is argued that ‘top-down’ state government structural reform policy initiatives carrying the threat of amalgamation constitute an efficient mechanism for evoking optimal ‘bottom-up’ structural change models.     

Britain and the British Antarctic Territory in the wider geopolitics of the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean

Britain's contemporary and future relationship with the British Antarctic Territory and the wider region is the subject matter of this article. In the aftermath of the ill‐fated plans for a merger of British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the National Oceanography Centre, it is timely to ask how the UK projects influence and secures its scientific, resource and strategic interests. The contemporary Antarctic is increasingly characterized by tension over resource management and conservation politics as Antarctic Treaty parties disagree, both in private and public, over the purpose of legal instruments and the regulation of activities such as fishing and marine conservation. While we do not predict the collapse of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), our analysis suggests that the effectiveness and legitimacy of the ATS is increasingly under challenge. The United Kingdom's position as a claimant state and original signatory to the Antarctic Treaty is complicated by the presence of counter‐claimants (Argentina and Chile) and a wider preoccupation with other overseas territories, such as South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands and the Falkland Islands. Polar science, carried out by BAS and other British agents, remains critical not only for maintaining the UK's ‘soft power’ but also increasingly for cementing a ‘strategic presence’ in the Antarctic. The article ends with a cautionary note: scientific excellence is no longer sufficient to guarantee geopolitical/strategic interests and there is growing evidence that claimant and non‐claimant states alike are no longer regarding Antarctica as an area that will remain free of intensifying and diversifying resource exploitation.     

Idealists,Pragmatists and ‘Simple-Minded’ Scamps: The Tasmanian Mental Deficiency Board and State ‘Care’ in the 1920s

This article uses case files to trace the negotiations that took place in the early 1920s between officials at the Tasmanian Children of the State Department and the Mental Deficiency Board about the training and employment as farm labourers of sixteen boys in state care who were diagnosed as ‘feeble-minded’. It explores the ways in which the boys attempted to improve their work conditions through negotiation and protest, finding that the Department supported them against the Board over the need for fair treatment and wages. Australian studies of children’s protest while in state care have concentrated on girls and do not address intellectual disability or the agency of officials. This investigation addresses that historiographical gap.     

‘I Could Eat My Baby to Bits’; passion and desire in lesbian mother–children love

Mother–children love and adult–sexual love tend to be differentiated by the absence/presence of passion and desire. In the course of my research on lesbian parent families, the artificiality of this distinction has become transparent. In attempting to describe ‘mother love’ mothers said repeatedly they loved their children ‘to bits’, wanting to ‘eat them up’, feeling ‘utterly passionate’ towards them. This challenges the traditional sexual–sexless boundaries between parents and children. The intensity of ‘maternal love’ often means that mother–child intimacy becomes a site of delicate negotiations between desire and love. The legal–moral boundaries that are invoked prohibit intergenerational desire, upholding the incest taboos that dominate Western culture. However the construction of these boundaries neither stop adult–child ‘border skirmishes’ nor quash children's ‘natural’ exploration of their sexuality. I explore how bodies and bodily boundaries are used to manage sexuality and desire in families. I consider how mothers negotiate their way through the contradictions of mother–children love, incorporating the passion and desire of this love. I suggest mothers' acknowledgment of their passion does not mean that ‘maternal love’ is potentially sexual/incestuous, but instead questions its conceptual framing. I suggest that future research on mother–children love might usefully look outside the traditional discourses used to describe and delineate love, towards ones that incorporate non‐sexual desire.     

I Quindici Giorni di Scanzano: identity and social protest in the New South

Abstract

This paper examines the dramatic events of ‘I Quindici Giorni di Scanzano’, the vast popular uprising in Basilicata in November 2003 that thwarted a government decree to create a consolidated national nuclear waste dump at Scanzano Jonico. The struggle cut across lines of locality, age, social class and political affiliation, mobilizing the populace with various symbols, including references to brigandage, postwar struggles for land, and the Madonna of Loreto. Solidarity for the protest came from all quarters of the South, especially the neighboring regions of Apulia and Calabria. Although government representatives and some of the media portrayed the Lucanians in recognizably anti-Southern tropes of ‘uncivicness’, this paper argues that this remarkable moment in Basilicata's history created a new sense of public identity and action that in many ways reflected recent intellectual discourses on the South.     

Can direct democracy deliver an alternative to extractivism? An essay on popular consultations

Between 2013 and 2018, ten different municipalities in Colombia held popular consultations in which people were asked to decide whether they wanted or not extractive industries in their territory. Promoted and articulated by environmental movements for the defence of water resources and local livelihoods, popular consultations led to surprising alliances of traditionally opposed actors, that found their interests temporarily aligned in opposition to resource extraction. In all of the ten popular consultations people voted massively against allowing the industry to enter. Through the defunding of the popular consultations and through a series of legal challenges, the government rushed to stop an additional 54 votes from happening that threatened to derail its finances and model of development. In this essay, I identify three main boundaries in the literature concerning popular consultations: between what counts as legal and legitimate, between the centre and the periphery as loci of political power, and between people and nature as bearers of rights. By providing an analysis of the absent elements of the political and academic discourse, I argue that popular consultations as spaces of experimental autonomous activity have the potential to engender alternatives to extractivist development. Hence, building on the notion of ‘resource sovereignty’ and contemporary discussions on autonomy as a prefigurative force, I reconfigure the three boundaries into a theoretical framework to guide research and political action for alternative post-extractivist futures.     

(Re)assessing Parliamentary Policy Impact: The Case of the Australian Senate

A recent article in this Journal suggested that assumptions about the legislative influence of the Australian Senate may overstate its de facto power. Stanley Bach indicated that compromise with the Senate was relatively rare, and pointed out that most successful Senate amendments were government amendments. This paper provides an alternative view. We suggest that legislative influence is more subtle than Bach acknowledged, and that it is necessary to dig deeper in the data to fully understand the Senate's role. We therefore supplement his analysis in two ways: (1) through tracking the ultimate outcome of government defeats in the Senate; and (2) through analysis of two case study bills. We find that in confrontations with government the Senate ‘wins’ the great majority of the time. This shapes government behaviour in the chamber, such that many government amendments actually respond to non-government concerns. The most important element of Senate influence is therefore ‘soft power’– exercised through negotiation – backed up only in extremis by the ‘hard power’ of government defeat. This holds important lessons for the study of legislative influence more broadly, as well as demonstrating the true power of the Australian Senate.     

‘Australia in this Matter is under Some Scrutiny’: Early Australian Initiatives to the Rhodesian Problem, 1961–64

Abstract

Australia’s attitude towards the problem of Rhodesian independence in the early 1960s has been largely ignored by the literature on the subject. Not unnaturally, the focus of recent research and scholarship has been Australia’s response to Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in November 1965 and the absence of any appetite for sanctions against the white minority regime. This lack of enthusiasm is often interpreted as symptomatic of an abiding sympathy not only for ‘kith and kin’ but also for Rhodesia’s white supremacist policies, which are invariably conflated with Australia’s own racially discriminatory practices. While senior Australian policymakers were uncomfortable with the notion of alienating people with whom they shared traditional political, economic and sentimental ties, they showed no support for the perpetual domination of the African population by Europeans, and indeed, accepted both the desirability and inevitability of black majority government. With this in mind, they worked hard to contribute to a genuine solution to the Rhodesian problem in the early 1960s and were deeply critical of Britain for refusing to adopt positive action. Although Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies continued to struggle with these competing forces, he too recognised the irresistible nature of black rule and acted accordingly.