Hon. Chris Carter, wailing to the Japs

So the Minister for Conservation thinks that telling Japanese how much money we can fleece off their tourists for watching whales will convince them to stop whaling!

I heard him on TV say it and then read the Herald article:
"We can now demonstrate conclusively that living whales are much more valuable than dead ones. I think that will be a strong argument in Japan." Newsflash, Carter, they think they taste nice and are worth a fortune. If he can't understand the Japanese he isn't going to persuade them is he? It is the weakest possible argument in Japan - if the Japanese pull out of the IWC it will be due to this sort of NZ idiocy.

NZ's position is this: Japan should have whale-watching like we do and they will be economically better off. Laughable, niave, factually incorrect, a total misunderstanding of the purpose of Japanese whaling and a credulous argument lacking any merit and more crucially, credibility, whatsoever. How can Japan's taking 440 whales from our backyard and selling it at huge profits to it's customers be replaced by having whale-watching ventures off Japan's coast? The fact is they can both have domestic whale-watching and still take the whales in our area. The argument our government has held up for several years now (and like a mantra unthinkingly brayed by Carter) is nonsensical. We use the argument of our own self-interest to demand that Japan makes a sacrifice of it's free supply of an expensive resource. Our argument fails because the Japanese are not idiots. We need a new strategy.