Macron still bitter about Australia looking after its own interests

The French sub deal was baggage Australia didn’t need to sign in 2016 and it certainly wasn’t necessary for Macron to bring it up six years later, writes Piers Akerman.

Pardonnez moi, Monsieur Macron, tu me fais chier avec tes conneries. (Translation: Pardon me, Mr Macron, you’re pissing me off with your bullshit).

The French President is clearly still riled by Scott Morrison’s government’s decision to place Australia’s national defence interests ahead of diplomatic niceties and dump Malcolm Turnbull’s idiotic plan to spend $90 billion converting French nuclear-powered submarines into Australian diesel-powered subs.

According to French leader, Morrison’s decision to tear up the dumb contract and sign up to the AUKUS agreement with our natural allies, the UK and the US, was provocative and risked “nuclear confrontation” with China. Forgetting that the contract was loaded in France’s favour from the get-go, Macron told a press conference before last week’s APEC summit in Thailand that France had been helping Australia achieve “freedom and sovereignty” because the French submarines could be built and maintained domestically.

“So it was both industrial co-operation and giving sovereignty to Australia, because they will maintain the submarines themselves, and it is not confrontational to China because they are not nuclear-powered submarines.

“But the choice made by (former) prime minister Morrison was the opposite, re-entering into nuclear confrontation, making himself completely dependent by deciding to equip themselves (with a) submarine fleet that the Australians are incapable of producing and maintaining in-house.”

French President Emmanuel Macron (second from left) and then Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull (centre) on a Collins-class submarine operated by the Royal Australian Navy at Garden Island in Sydney in 2018. Picture: AFP

Macron, whose country has a nuclear submarine fleet which apparently isn’t a threat to anyone, even had the temerity to suggest that the French were still interested in flogging submarines to Australia – but that must have been for his domestic audience.

He certainly needs to distract the folk at home because a series of lurid sex scandals associated with former colleagues who also graduated from his alma mater, the elite Sciences Po (SciPo) which produces most of France’s top-ranking bureaucrats, is dominating the headlines.

Among those involved are his close friend and associate Laurent Bigorgne, who is currently on trial for spiking his sister-in-law’s champagne with ecstasy, and Olivier Duhamel, the former president of the Sciences Po National Foundation, who earlier this year confessed to sexually abusing his step-son.

The strategic decision by Morrison to cancel the irrational $90 billion contract and become a formative member of AUKUS was correct and was even endorsed by Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese when he took office.

The decision on whether the deal to deliver our future nuclear-powered submarine fleet is with the British or the Americans will be made next year after the current defence review is completed.

Taking advice from the French, as much as we may enjoy their contributions to the world of wine and cuisine, would be unwise as historians well know.

France's President Emmanuel Macron at APEC in Bangkok this week. Picture: AFP

Immediately before WWII, France had the largest standing army with the greatest number of tanks in the world but they surrendered to the Germans in barely six weeks.

Within five days of launching their attack on May 10, 1940, the Germans had crossed the Netherlands and Belgium, and then, following General Erich von Manstein’s masterly strategy, ducked around France’s so-called impregnable Maginot Line, with the French surrendering on June 22.

As a former US defence representative Jeb Babbin famously said in 2003 during a discussion on the differences between European and US strategy in the Iraq war: “… you know frankly, going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless noisy baggage behind.”

The French sub deal was baggage Australia didn’t need to sign in 2016 and it certainly wasn’t necessary for Macron to bring it up six years later.

China has long shown it needs no provocation to give Australia the cold shoulder and those (like former Labor Foreign Minister Bob Carr) who claimed Australia unnecessarily baited the Celestial Kingdom and was in some way responsible for China’s sanctions on beef, coal, wine and barley, need to take off their Sinophilic blinkers.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the APEC in Bangkok this week. Picture: Getty Images

Albanese spent 32 minutes with China’s leader-for-life Xi Jinping in Bali during which time he managed to rattle off a number of points through an interpreter and to which, again through an interpreter, Xi responded with a diplomatic noncommittal. Subtract the time taken for the two-way translations and those 32 minutes shrink significantly.

Hardly a breakthrough but Albanese later muddied things by claiming Taiwan, our friend and ally, was ineligible to join the world’s largest trading bloc.

Was this a pay-off for getting to see Xi? Our allies, particularly Japan, South Korea and Taiwan need to know.

Otherwise, Albanese’s diplomatic dance is as productive as Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen’s grandstanding giveaway trip to Egypt’s Sharm El-Sheikh resort for COP27.

Which goes to show that neither Albanese or Bowen should be allowed out without supervision.