You know many in the media have jumped the shark when journalists seriously argue it’s OK for Emmanuel Macron to call Scott Morrison a liar publicly, but it’s a diplomatic outrage for the Australian leader to leak a text message that proves his French counterpart was the one bending the truth.
Left-wing journalists just can’t resist stories claiming Australia’s international reputation is being harmed. From the ABC’s decades-long campaigns against the Pacific Solution and turning back the boats to climate change action, such reporting is always a turn-off for mainstream Australians.
Already convinced the leaking of Macron’s text was a travesty, ABC RN Breakfast host Fran Kelly was indignant on Wednesday about the leaking to this newspaper of a US document proving Joe Biden was wrong last week in his criticism of Australia’s handling of the scrapping of its contract with France’s Naval Group to build 12 diesel electric submarines.
Andrew Hastie, Assistant Minister for Defence, got the issue right last Thursday: “National security must take priority over the emotions of friends and allies. Macron’s reaction is a small price to pay for world-class nuclear submarines.”
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to use the submarine contract to lift France’s engagement in the South Pacific was reasonable. But the subs he contracted to pay $90bn for were a bad idea. Nor is there any reason to believe France would come to the aid of Anglophone Australia in a conflict with China – the point of the AUKUS agreement that enraged Macron.
The way ABC journalists have reported Turnbull’s dewy-eyed professions of loyalty to France you could be forgiven for thinking the French bilateral relationship is one of Australia’s most important. Not so. France is our number 17 trading partner.
The most recent figures on the DFAT website show Australian imports from France in 2017-18 were worth $5.1bn. Our exports totalled $1.6bn. France’s total investment in Australia was $24.8bn and Australia’s in France was $51bn.
The US is our second biggest trading partner. Australia’s exports to the US totalled $27.4bn in 2019-20 and our imports $53.4bn. The US is Australia’s largest foreign investment destination: US investment here totalled $163.47bn in 2020. The other AUKUS stakeholder, the UK, is our eighth biggest trading partner with two-way trade of $26.9bn.
Trade with China, our biggest trading partner, is worth $251bn a year. But combined trade with New Zealand and our partners in the new Quadrilateral – India, Japan and the US – totals $214.8bn. All are Pacific powers while France, despite holdings in New Caledonia and French Polynesia, is overwhelmingly a North Atlantic power.
And while tens of thousands of Australians have died in two world wars on French soil, there has been little military engagement with France in the Pacific since colonial times. The UK and US have fought beside Australians in the Pacific, as well as in Europe.
What to make of the media’s treatment of Macron’s dummy spit? ABC News political editor Andrew Probyn did a good job buttonholing Macron at the G20 meeting in Rome to ask about the submarine contract. It was Bevan Shields from the Nine newspapers who chimed in to ask if he thought Morrison had lied to him. “I don’t think. I know,” said Macron.
While this column has criticised the AUKUS coverage of the ABC’s main TV and radio current affairs programs, the news team has handled the story well. Along with defence correspondent Andrew Greene and foreign affairs (Asia Pacific) specialist Stephen Dziedzic, Probyn had virtually the entire AUKUS scoop up online by 11.43pm on September 15, ahead of the following morning’s announcement by Morrison, Biden and Boris Johnson.
But since then many high-profile ABC journalists have sided with Macron and maintained the fiction that Australia could have kept France apprised of its negotiations for an alternative submarine.
In The Australian on September 22, Paul Kelly was among the first to explain how misguided that idea is. “Can you imagine what sort of fool Morrison would have been to brief the French?” Macron would have rung Biden immediately. Kelly imagined the call: “Mr President, I think you need to remember France is a more important country than Australia with a longer history of association with America.”
Kelly last Wednesday was scathing of media treatment of the Macron-Morrison disagreement. “Was Macron misled? Of course he was. Was Morrison justified in maintaining such secrecy? Of course he was. The naivety of commentary on this point is almost beyond belief.”
Foreign editor Greg Sheridan, something of an AUKUS sceptic and a critic of delays the nuclear submarine plan will impose on the Royal Australian Navy, nevertheless rejects the idea the government has betrayed the French. He wrote last Tuesday: “Australia has not breached any contract. It has decided not to proceed with a new stage of a new contract.”
Sheridan is highly critical of Biden’s handling of the affair. “The fact that at the AUKUS press conference Biden couldn’t remember Morrison’s name, and almost from day one after was apologising to the French … tells you something very unpleasant about the Biden Administration.”
This brings us back to the most substantive story of the week by this newspaper’s former Washington correspondent, Cameron Stewart.
Stewart, who has made reporting about submarines something of a career specialty, on Tuesday revealed a previously secret 15-page AUKUS timeline negotiated by Biden’s National Security Council that “describes to the hour how the world would be told of … AUKUS”.
“The document, which Mr Biden’s closest advisers signed off on, made it clear Australia would tell France on that day, September 16, that its $90bn submarine contract was being scrapped,” Stewart wrote.
Fran Kelly on Thursday gave opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong a soft interview, during which the ABC host criticised the leaking of the US timeline. And always ready to give Turnbull a free kick, both Kelly and Laura Tingle on ABC’s 7.30 allowed the former PM considerable airtime to attack Morrison.
Phil Coorey, in The Australian Financial Review on Friday, brought some much needed perspective to the week-long orgy by Turnbull and fellow former PM Kevin Rudd, whom he labelled a “social media pest”.
“Rudd offered the odd bon mot, making it two former prime ministers sympathising with a foreign leader over a matter on national security. The pair could co-author a book: If Being Prime Minister is So Easy, Why Were We So Bad At It?”
On the national security question, Sky News’s Peta Credlin is correct. This is dangerous for Labor, which risks looking like it cares more about Macron’s issues than Australia’s.
Credlin editorialised on Wednesday night about Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese: “Scoring cheap political points against your political opponent should never mean stooping to take another country’s side against our own.”
That might gain politicians and journalists “likes” on Twitter and at the ABC. It won’t win a general election.
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