[Stoat]

This says to me that the Sea Shepherders' activities are endorsed by the Australian government.

I have no doubt at all that this is precisely what it means to you, however it appears that the Australian Government is not quite so depraved as what you take them to be.  From a far more reputable and balanced Australian news source:

Canberra casts off whaling activists NEWS.com.au

THE Australian Government has condemned the actions of the rogue activists who boarded a Japanese whaling ship in the Southern Ocean, as federal police examined whether they could be prosecuted.

(edit)

The tactics of the Sea Shepherd activists were also rejected by Greenpeace, which has its own ship shadowing the Japanese whaling fleet in the Antarctic, as maritime law expert Don Rothwell warned they could be charged with offences ranging from trespass to terrorism.

Mr Smith said the incident was being "evaluated" by the Australian Federal Police.

(end edit)

I think that many here will find it quite telling that in your giddiness and jubilation at the notion of these scummy violent hippie terrorists being released, your default source for information on it is America's Pravda, the endlessly-discredited New York Slimes which is losing readership as a sieve loses water precisely because of it's increasingly shoddy 'reporting' and blatant leftwing bias. As is the NYT's ongoing pattern of bias, they omit crucial details in their version of this story in order to spin the story to appeal to it's leftwing readership.  This story is being carried on over a thousand major sites, and this is the one that you choose.

Also quite telling is the fact that the Sea Shepherd people are so violent, imbalanced and hysterical that even the normally hard-Left Greenpeace hippies reject them.  From the article:

Greenpeace whales campaigner Rob Nicholl said his group's ship, Esperanza, which is also tracking the Japanese whaling fleet, had rebuffed efforts by Mr Watson to co-ordinate with it.

Mr Watson was a co-founder of Greenpeace before he split with the organisation in 1977 to pursue more radical action against whaling.

"We are there to defend the whales, not to attack whalers," Mr Nicholl said.

 

This matter is far from being over.

[GovernmentShrinker]

You’re ignoring the bottom line. From the article you linked to: “Mr Smith said the Oceanic Viking would be used as a neutral platform to return the two activists to their own ship, the Steve Irwin.” This hardly sounds like the Australian government is interested in stopping them. They can “evaluate” all they like, but actions are what counts. If they didn’t want the Sea Shepherders to carry on, they’d take them onto the customs ship and bring them to Australian soil, to await the conclusions of the legal authorities’ “evaluations”.