A Japanese whaling ship has defied high-level Australian complaints to stay in the waters of World Heritage-listed Macquarie Island. Hours after the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said the ship was leaving the vessel was still in the area.

The Australian embassy told the Japanese government Tuesday past that whaling vessels were not welcome in the country's waters, but the Japanese ship was still within a few miles of the coast of Macquarie Island, which is part of the state of Tasmania. Professor of international law Don Rothwell said if Yushin Maru No.3 was staying close to Macquarie Island it was violating the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea which would normally allow a ship to proceed though these waters. The actions of Yushin Maru No.3 are not consistent with the right of innocent passage. The Greens leader, Bob Brown, said the ship's presence was illegal and called for a naval vessel to be sent there.

Commercial whaling not only continues, but grows and under the current, largely unregulated system, the number of whales harvested annually has doubled since the early 1990s, to about two thousand per year. Further, many populations of large whales have been severely depleted and continue to be threatened by commercial whaling. In the January 12 issue of the journal Nature Now, an economist and two marine scientists are suggesting a new strategy that they believe could save whales by putting a price on them. They propose an alternative path forward that could break the deadlock: quotas that can be bought and sold, creating a market that would be economically, ecologically, and socially viable for whalers and whales alike. The authors explain that the concept of auctioning off annual whale-catch quotas was suggested as early as 1982 but was never implemented. In the two most extreme scenarios, whalers could end up purchasing all the shares and harvesting whales at the established sustainable level, or conservationists might purchase all the shares, so that no whales would be harvested.

Many anti-whaling groups including the Marine Connection have had a fundamental problem with setting such quotas and oppose the strategy, feeling that quotas would appear to legialise commercial whaling.