AUKUS: Ex-diplomats pan Scott Morrison’s handling of French subs fallout

Former diplomats say Scott Morrison’s failed to prioritise the need for careful diplomacy in the AUKUS submarine fallout.

Former Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese.

Some of the nation’s most experienced former diplomats have criticised Scott Morrison’s handling of the AUKUS submarine fallout, saying he failed to prioritise the need for careful diplomacy.

Career diplomat John McCarthy said French President Emmanuel Macron crossed a diplomatic line in branding the Prime Minister a “liar”, but Mr Morrison should have exercised restraint in reacting to the inappropriate personal sledge.

The former ambassador to the US, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, Mexico and Vietnam, and former high commissioner to India, said diplomacy was “not something that is merely left to officials”.

“In this country, diplomacy is underestimated at the highest ­levels,” Mr McCarthy said. “It is something that has to be at the forefront of the thinking of the most senior people of the country, and … this is evidence it wasn’t.

“Obviously foreign policy, even towards big powerful countries like the US and France, is secondary in the Prime Minister’s thinking.”

Mr McCarthy disputed Mr Morrison’s claim in Glasgow that Mr Macron had committed a “slur” against Australia, saying the French President had been “very, very careful to talk about the relationship between the Australian and the French people through two wars and all the rest”.

“He was extremely careful. He was not sledging Australians. I did not get that sense at all. Quite the opposite. He was sledging Scott Morrison, and that is inappropriate at that level.”

Mr Morrison also rejected Joe Biden’s suggestion that the handling of the submarine deal had been “clumsy”, and that he believed the French had been informed “long before” the Attack-class subs were cancelled.

Former Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese said having the US President describe Australian diplomacy as “clumsy” and the French President label the Prime Minister a “liar” was “hardly a triumph of diplomacy”, but foreign policy positions around the world, including in Australia, the US, France and China, were “more than usually being framed through the prism of domestic politics”.

“When you have a very domestic political prism applied to everything, you are not inclined too much to think about the diplomatic handling of an issue.”

Mr Varghese said the situation was made worse by the under-investment in DFAT and professional diplomacy by successive governments.

Former senior diplomat Allan Gyngell said he couldn’t remember a time when Australia was “simultaneously and so directly at odds with two close friends”.

Professor Gyngell, who headed the Office of National Assessments from 2009 to 2013, said if he were advising Mr Morrison, “I would advise him not to conduct foreign policy with close friends in the public domain”.

“The more you turn it into a competitive ‘who said what’, the harder it gets to recover the situation,” he said.

He said the spat could have lasting consequences for Australia by “complicating Australia’s capacity to do the things we need to do with the countries that are most important to us”.

“Politicians are no different from anyone else in that they bear grudges and those grudges over time can shape real outcomes in the world. So it’s best to avoid them,” Mr Gyngell said.

In Glasgow on Monday, Mr Morrison said the Attack-class submarine program had faced “significant challenges” and he conveyed this to Mr Macron months before the September 16 AUKUS announcement.

He said he told Mr Macron at their June 12 dinner at the Elysee Palace that he believed the Attack boats “would be further delayed”, with the first potentially not completed until 2038.

Mr Morrison said he told Mr Macron such a delay would mean the submarine “would be obsolete almost the minute it got (in the water)”.

However, Mr Morrison talked publicly after the dinner about the “much-improved position” of French submarine contractor Naval Group.

Less than a month before the AUKUS partnership was announced, Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Defence Minister Peter Dutton also “underlined the importance of the Future Submarine program” in a “2+2” meeting with their French counterparts.

Defence officials have consistently argued the French-designed submarine would be “regionally superior”, and would be delivered on time and on budget.

As recently as last week, Defence’s general manager of submarines, Greg Sammut, confirmed France’s Naval Group was informed just prior to the AUKUS announcement that its offer for the next stage of the Attack-class contract was “affordable and acceptable”.

A leak to The Daily Telegraph appeared to back Mr Morrison’s claim to have forewarned Mr Macron at their dinner in Paris of what was to come. It said Mr Macron told Mr Morrison that night: “I don’t like losing”.

However, The Australian on Tuesday revealed the existence of a confidential document confirming Mr Macron was kept in the dark ahead of the AUKUS announcement that Australia would instead buy US or UK nuclear subs.

The 15-page document, negotiated in secret between Biden’s National Security Council and Australian and British officials, described, to the hour, how the world would be told of the new Australia-UK-US AUKUS pact.

It made it clear Australia would tell France on the day of the AUKUS announcement that its $90bn submarines were being scrapped.

Labor foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong said Mr Morrison’s instinctive reaction to criticism was “to furiously attack rather than to accept responsibility”.

She suggested “the Prime Minister, his office or someone in the government” had sought to use the classified document “to try to make a political point”.

“This is not the way an Australian leader should behave,” Senator Wong told ABC radio.

“He should remember this is not about his personal feelings, it is about the country‘s interests.

“And our interests are in trying to manage those two relationships. We need more partners, not fewer.”

Mr Dutton said Australia had “factored in all along that the French were going to be upset about losing a contract of this size”.

“So you understand that the emotion within France and by the French President, but to accuse the Prime Minister of lying is just a bridge too far and completely absurd on all of the facts that I’ve seen and I think the sooner we move on from this the better,” he told 2GB.