Franech envoy Jean-Pierre Thebault plays fast and loose with subs facts

France’s ambassador has painted a wildly impressionistic account of Australia’s historic decision to dump his country’s submarines in favour of nuclear-powered boats from the US or Britain.

The French ambassador to Australia Jean-Pierre Thebault delivers his address to the National Press Club. Picture: Gary Ramage

France’s ambassador to Australia Jean-Pierre Thebault, in his full Gallic fury, has painted a wildly impressionistic account of Australia’s historic decision to dump his country’s submarines in favour of nuclear-powered boats from the US or Britain.

Mr Thebault’s speech was an explosive grab-bag of lies, exaggerations, truths and insults as he did the bidding of his President, Emmanuel Macron, in seeking to exert yet more pain on the Morrison government.

He accuses Australia of “intentional deceit” when it allegedly stabbed France “in the back” to take a “leap into the unknown” by signing onto the AUKUS deal to acquire nuclear-powered subs.

However, the ambassador’s speech contained more intentional deceit than a Bond movie.

He peddled the demonstrably false claim that France’s Naval Group had “an impeccable commitment” to the $90bn plan to build 12 French-designed Attack-class submarines, and he accused the federal government and the media of running a “smear campaign” against the French before the contract was cancelled.

But it was the independent audit office, not the Morrison government, that wrote the scathing report last year revealing the growing problems with the French project, including the fact that France had already missed two key milestones in the development of the subs.

It was the independent shipbuilding advisory board, not the government, that last year urged Defence to consider jettisoning its deal with France and find a new submarine builder because negotiations had turned so toxic.

Despite Mr Thebault’s portrayal of the Naval Group as the jilted bride, France did much to trigger the bitter divorce that we are now witnessing.

Ever since it won the 2016 contract to build the submarines, Paris has been at almost constant loggerheads with Australia about the project. France played hardball with Canberra over the amount of Australian industry content in the project. The French government, when it won the contract, greatly exaggerated the number of jobs that the project would create in France, especially in Brittany where French subs are built. It then tried to meet this target by taking prospective submarine work away from Australian defence industry contractors in Adelaide. It was only after a protracted argument that Canberra won a concession from France that Australian industry would win 60 per cent of the project.

In the short six-year life of the program, France missed three key deadlines: the concept studies; the systems requirements review; and the preliminary design review.

Defence believed France was trying to gouge Australia by asking for an excessive price to produce a detailed design for the subs – an impasse that still had not been resolved at the time the contract was terminated.

During the project, the publicly stated price of the French submarines jumped from $50bn to $90bn, although that was more a case of Defence trying to hide the true cost to the taxpayer rather than the fault of the French.

Part of the reason why France played hardball with Australia over the subs was because there was no obvious Plan B for Australia on submarines. So as far as Paris was concerned, they were a monopoly player with little need to negotiate. The unexpected ­creation of the AUKUS pact changed all that and a furious Mr Thebault spared no punches in pointing out the uncertainties of what he called a “giant leap into the unknown”.

The ambassador described the AUKUS deal as being nothing more than “a project of a project” with no “solid transition”.

He said the nuclear submarines may never be built in Australia, that they will cost more and that there could be a long “capability gap” between their arrival and the retirement of the existing Collins-class boats. All this is possible, although it assumes the worst of all outcomes. AUKUS is a work in progress, and even by the government’s reckoning it will take an 18 month study to work out what is achievable.

But some of Mr Thebault’s claims on AUKUS were over the top. He implied Australia’s lack of knowledge of nuclear technology might place civilians and sub­mariners at “considerable risk” if they lived near the reactors.

He also claimed, without offering any evidence, that AUKUS would be in breach of global non-proliferation rules.

What he did not say was that nuclear-powered subs would be a quantum improvement in Australia’s submarine capability compared with the French conven­tionally-powered boats.

The ambassador is right that Australia effectively stabbed France in the back. But for him to pretend that France was “impeccable” in the way it handled its own submarine project with Australia is a rewriting of history.