Australia accuses Japan of 'dummy-spit' over whales

Australia's environment minister on Sunday accused Japan of a "dummy-spit" — a childish tantrum — over its failure to lift the ban on commercial whaling at an international conference last week. "It was a very bad conference for Japan," Malcolm Turnbull said of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Alaska.

After losing its bid to overturn the two-decades-old moratorium on commercial whaling, Japan threatened to pull out of the 77-nation IWC and start a breakaway group.

"I think their huge dummy-spit at the end will not reflect well on Tokyo," Turnbull told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "I think the Japanese government really has to sit back and ask itself, looking at the debacle that was Japan's outcome at the whaling conference... 'Can we continue to fly in the face of world opinion on this issue?'"

Australia is a leading opponent of the resumption of commercial whaling and a strong critic of Japan's "scientific" whaling program, under which it kills hundreds of whales each year.

This year, it wants to include on the hit list 50 humpback whales from stocks that migrate annually from Antarctic waters along the Australian coast to their breeding grounds in the tropical Pacific.

The plan has caused outrage in Australia, where whale-watching is a multimillion dollar industry with boats taking tourists to see the giant mammals making their way up the country's east coast.

Turnbull said engaging Japan over whaling had to be done constructively.

"Whaling is essentially a nationalistic issue in Japan; that's its support base, so the engagement with Japan has to be as a friend, it has to be candid, it has to be constructive. If you threaten Japan, they dig their heels in."

But he rejected the suggestion that accusing Tokyo of a "dummy-spit" was far from constructive. "Their own mothers would recognize they did a dummy-spit," he said. "To stand up at the end of the conference and say: 'That's it, we're threatening to pull out' — that is a dummy-spit on any view."