There has been much in the local news about the three protesters who illegally boarded a Japanese Government ship and the cost to the Australian taxpayers of their so called 'rescue'.

Did their return to Australia warrant the cost and would it be the ethical thing to do for them and their organization to chip in for the cost?

It would have to be some sort of forced payment, as those types of activists typically do not have an ethical issue with costing other people money. I wouldn't be surprised if the organisations in question spent more money in courts trying not to pay than actually paying the rescue cost due to the precedent it would set.

One of the protesters already has a lengthy criminal history with many unpaid fines. He didn't have the money to pay the fines up front, so it was agreed he would pay them off over time (with no interest). Now he has been arrested because even with that cushy deal, he still failed to make payments. His fellow activists regard him not as a deadbeat, but as a hero.

Protesting is something of a slippery slope. Whilst protesting in a civil manner is entirely appropriate in a modern, democratic society, there are always those extremists that take things way too far.

They wouldn’t be alone, though. There’s a long tradition of helping people in difficulty on the high seas, and not asking them how they came to be in difficulty, or demanding payment depending on some judgment about how they got into trouble.

It’s not that long since the Australian government spent literally millions of dollars mounting an air-sea rescue exercise involving a naval destroyer and a number of aircraft to assist a British yachtsman who had sailed single-handed into the Southern Ocean, despite the fact that saling single-handed in the Southern Ocean will foreseeably get you into trouble. No charge was made.

Obviously this isn’t quite the same situation, but nevertheless people who go to sea have a common interest. If you’re in any kind of trouble at sea, other mariners help you, and they don’t charge for it. That’s a principle they won’t want to see weakened.

If this ever comes to court, expect maritime sporting and even maritime commercial organizations to be lining up with the protesters.

Indeed, good point.

This circumstance is a bit different, though. The three protesters weren't actually in any danger, they were quite safe and being treated within the bounds of maritime law whilst being detained on the Japanese vessel. There was no 'rescue' to be done, and I would suggest that the actual 'rescue' (and I use that term loosely) was more for the political motivation of preventing endless whinging by land-bound eco-activists about the plight of their idiot friends.

I'm pretty sure there are false alert fines for activating an EPIRB without a reason, so there might be a slight precedent for calling out authorities at great expense to the taxpayer for non-rescue and/or water-taxi purposes.

Then why didn't their own organization go and pick them up?

There is no comparison with the yachtsman, he was in difficulties because his boat was sinking and he was in peril of his life, these three were in difficulties because they chose to commit an illegal act against a friendly Government and they were in no peril.
They were on an eminently seaworthy ship, were being treated humanely, had access to warmth, dryness and food.
The only constraint upon them was that they were not allowed to commit any more crimes.

So why was taxpayer's money wasted to go and bring them home?

Perceived votes?

Greens' influence?

Well if, as harry suggests, the government picked them up in order to avoid political embarrassment, why should the protesters pay for that? The government picked them up for its own advantage; the protesters would probably have preferred the situation, and the public attention, to continue.

I'd vote for a perception that it might have cost the Govt. votes.

Still a massive waste of money.

Peregrinus, the anti-whaling lobby demanded that the government 'rescue' the three protesters. That the current government is ethically deficient and not particularly strong-willed is not an excuse for wasting taxpayer money to the tune of over a million dollars. Quite frankly, there are a lot more people who need government assistance than those three protesters, and it was clearly money wasted.

Unfortunately, there is now also a strong precedent for eco-activists to charge the taxpayer for the cost of rescuing them from situations of their own doing. If eco-activists want to go around protesting, they can, but they shouldn't be charging exorbinant costs to the taxpayer when they come unstuck.

Perhaps this was a win-win situation for the anti-whaling lobby. If the government didn’t pick up the protestors, then there would likely be a trial in Japan, with embarrassing publicity, followed perhaps by jail sentences, continued embarrassment, a campaign to “bring them home”, etc, etc. The demands that the government pick up the protesters would have been beneficial even if the government didn’t pick them up; they laid the ground for the further campaign when the protestors were tried and sentenced.

On the other hand, if the government did pick them up, a useful precedent was established.

The government did pick them up, presumably because it thought that this was the less politically costly option. (Which means that, if this was a waste of money, this was money the government chose to waste for its own political convenience.)

But note that none of this undermines the protestors’ moral position. The whole point of protest activism is to put pressure on governments in non-violent ways. This tactic was clearly effective for that purpose. If we object to it, are we effectively saying that protest activism is inherently unethical? That would be a very hard position to defend.

These three protesters had no moral position, except perhaps in their own minds and in the misguided minds of their confreres .

What they did was an act of piracy and had they been shot whilst carrying it out then the Japanese would have had no case to answer.

Protesting and activism isn't inherently ethical or unethical. It varies upon what the cause is and what the activism actually consists of. Most activists stumble by associating any sort of self-described 'protest' or 'activism' with ethical behaviour.

In this case, the three protesters and their fellow travellers have no problem charging the taxpayer a million bucks to rescue them from a situation they deliberately got themselves into. To me, this is unethical because government isn't some unlimited tap of money to be opened by anyone - the government has finite resources and that million plus dollars could have been spent far more ethically (domestic violence shelters? law and order? better equipment for troops in Afghanistan? more doctors/nurses/teachers? the list goes on).

I have no problem with protesting, but unfortunately the modern protest movement, especially of the left-leaning variety, has essentially degenerated into a bunch of overgrown toddlers having a big cry and expecting mum and dad (aka. the government) to fix their boo-boos. The almost complete lack of regard for their own safety nor the well-being of the (largely) taxpaying public indicates that such individuals, whilst they should have the right to protest, should be forced to take personal responsbility for their actions.

Boarding a ship without an invitation is not an act of piracy. If you're going to advocate the right of citizens to bear arms for lawful purposes, you probably shouldn't spread misinformation about when they are entitled to use them.

Couple of points here:

First, this million-dollar figure is being bandied around quite a bit, but I’d like to see a bit more detail. Given that the ship exists and must be maintained, and the crew must be paid, how can it cost a million dollars, or anything like that, for the ship to go to this place, rather than that? I struggle to believe that the extra fuel cost amounts to a million dollars.

I have a sneaking suspicion that somebody has simply taken the daily cost of providing and crewing the vessel, and multiplied it by the number of days this operation took. But this is only the cost of mounting the operation if, but for the operation, the vessel would not have been provided or crewed for those days. That is obvious nonsense.

Until I see details, I can’t be sure. But I suspect that this figure is being deliberately inflated by someone for polemical purposes.

Secondly, the protestors haven’t charged the taxpayers anything; the government has. The raising of tax, and the spending of tax dollars, is a matter subject to parliamentary control and scrutiny. While activists may have asked the government to intervene, the decision to intervene, and to spend taxpayers’ money, was the government’s, and that is where responsiblility lies. You suggested yourself that the “rescue” was politically motivated, and I agree.

The demand for the rescue was equally politically motivated, of course, as was the whole business of getting onto the whaling vessel in the first place. But neither of those cost the taxpayer any money at all; it was the “rescue” which cost money, and that was the government’s decision, and the government’s responsibility. a

Illegally and covertly boarding a ship at sea is an act of piracy and the crew of the boarded ship have every justification for taking drastic action, even if this results in the death of one or all of the boarding group.
The crew have no way of knowing the intentions of persons boarding their ship clandestinely from an unlighted vessel.
To assume that they are friendly may have fatal consequences for the ship and its crew.
Anyone in fear of their life from an unidentified attacker is allowed to defend themselves.

No, it isn’t. If it were, stowaways would be pirates. But they aren’t.

Piracy requires robbery with violence, or an attempt to seize control of the vessel with violence. Simply boarding a vessel is not piracy. Even boarding with violence is not piracy (though of course there was no violence in this instance).

The charge which the Japanese government considered bringing against the boarding party was trespass, not piracy.


Tell you what; run that defence at your trial, and we’ll see how it goes, shall we?

Back in the real world, the law of the sea is clear on this. The master of a vessel is justified in using reasonable force to exercise his authority over everyone on the ship, including uninvited boarders. In the event, the boarders offered no resistance of any kind to the master’s exercise of authority, and they were subjugated within seconds of boarding.

The Japanese master knew who the boarders were and where they came from; he had been shadowing their vessel, the Steve Irwin, for several days, and this was not the first occasion on which the vessel had been boarded by Sea Shepherd activists. The purpose of the exercise was in fact to oblige the Japanese vessel to call off the pursuit (by creating a need for the vessel to take the boarders to Fremantle for offloading).

In these circumstances, if he shot the boarding party and then claimed that he thought they were pirates, nobody would take him seriously for an instant. Even if it wasn't immediately obvious that they came from the Steve Irwin, the master of an ocean-going vessel is expected to be aware that there are no pirates operating off Bunbury.

Except his own Government and all that he would need to claim was that he thought that the pirates were attempting to take his vessel over under cover of the activists on the aptly named 'Steve Irwin'.

He would of course apologize profusely for the mistake as would a spokesman for the Japanese Government.

I think he’d have to give some plausible reason for thinking that pirates were operating under cover of the Steve Irwin, a vessel which - as he knew, because he was shadowing it - had departed two days before from the port of Fremantle. The “notorious pirates of the Bunbury coast” line is not going to work.

You seem to be changing your ground here, Samuel, from “he is legally entitled to shoot the boarders” to “he could lie and bluff his way through this, with the connivance of his government”. The latter could be true (though I’m not convinced) but it hardly amounts to an ethical defence of shooting the boarders.

Ethics has not got much to do with it, apart from questioning the ethics of putting something in quotation marks when it was not what I said.