PRESSURE is growing for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to take up the issue of whaling with Japan and to use the same diplomatic vigour that he employed to raise Tibetan human rights with China, The Age reported early last month.

Worried that the Government may be softening its anti-whaling stance against Australia’s best trade customer, opposition parties and environment groups said they wanted Mr Rudd instead to push the issue when he visits Tokyo next month, it was reported.

The issue of whaling, as Anne Cullen points out, is one of the prime examples of globalisation, which has seen governments and non-state actors coming together to address the rapidly declining stocks of whales in the worlds’ oceans. 

Globalisation is about the increasing interconnectedness we see in every sphere of social, political and economic life and across political and national frontiers. With globalisation, we see a blurring of the territorial boundaries between nations and states, of national economic and political spaces.

As organisations and lobby groups such as the International Whaling Commission, Greenpeace and the Japan Whaling Association show, social, economic and political activities can be organised not just on a local or national scale, but increasingly on a global scale.