A Virginia-class nuclear submarine (Image: AP/US Navy)

After embarrassing himself in his first response to Emmanuel Macron yesterday, Scott Morrison tried again last night, his staff having put their heads together to devise a better response to the French president’s statements of fact about being lied to.

“I want to address a number of the issues that came up when we gathered together yesterday for the press conference,” he told journalists. It’s not often a prime minister holds a media conference to respond to himself. Or, in this case, to clean up the mess he himself created when he spoke to journalists 24 hours before.

But, as happens with Morrison, his efforts at recovery have made matters worse. First, his office leaked confidential messages between Macron and Morrison to News Corp stenographers, demonstrating that not merely can the prime minister of Australia not be trusted to honour a deal, he won’t keep confidential messages exchanged between leaders. Second, his efforts have pointed to a profound mystery at the heart of the entire AUKUS announcement.

Morrison’s justification for the abandonment of the Naval Group contract was that Australia’s strategic situation had changed and that the contract itself was in trouble. There’s certainly no doubt about the second point: the subs contract has been bungled by the government from the moment it was announced with the goal of preventing the loss of the seats of Sturt and Boothby. But the first point? These are Morrison’s own words:

… The submarine contract was a significant investment by Australia. A decision taken five years ago. At that point, given the strategic circumstances at the time and the technology available to Australia, the Attack-class submarine was the right decision for Australia, but there have been significant changes that have occurred in our strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific, which has completely changed the game.

And what did that mean? He says he told Macron:

… that a conventional diesel-powered submarine was not going to meet Australia’s strategic requirements. We discussed that candidly. I did not discuss what other alternatives we were looking at.

That explanation appears to have been accepted from the outset. But what “significant changes” have occurred “in our strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific” in the past five years? There can only be one: that China has become more belligerent and more determined to throw its weight around.

But that is hardly a “significant change”: China has long been the principal threat in the region. As far back as the 2009 defence white paper of the Rudd government, China was described as “the strongest Asian military power, by a considerable margin. Its military modernisation will be increasingly characterised by the development of power projection capabilities. A major power of China’s stature can be expected to develop a globally significant military capability befitting its size.”

The secret version contained a chapter on fighting a war with China, including how our current generation of submarines would be deployed.

But perhaps China’s military threat was downgraded as part of the Coalition’s embrace of Xi Jinping under Tony Abbott? Did we go into the 2016 subs decision besotted with the prospect of, to use Paul Kelly’s words, being in closer orbit to Xi? According to The Australian’s Brendan Nicholson — Australia’s best defence journalist and sorely missed since his departure from the media — in 2016, “the navy’s new boats will be able to fire cruise missiles through their torpedo tubes and they will have, by any conventional submarine standards, a colossal range that will take them far up into the disputed waters of the East and South China Seas”. Indeed, the French boats would, we were told, have the capacity to operate “at the northern end of the South China Sea”.

The primary benefit of nuclear-powered over conventional subs is that they can remain underwater indefinitely, giving them greater capacity to operate undetected. At no stage has the government explained what changed in the nature of the pre-existing China threat that required a switch to nuclear-powered boats.

Except the existing French model, the Barracuda, is already a nuclear-powered boat that we asked Naval Group to switch to diesel and batteries. And one of the benefits of that model was, at least according to the hawks of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, that it could be switched back again so that later boats in the contract could be nuclear-powered.

Now we’re told that would require an Australian nuclear power industry, whereas the American reactor model can be put into the hull and ignored for 35 years. As Malcolm Turnbull notes, this raises significant safety questions. It also means that we don’t have sovereign capability, if our boats have to have major refits in other countries.

But the biggest question raised by Morrison is this: by cancelling the French contract, Australia will go into the 2040s without a new submarine. The Australian’s Greg Sheridan even suggested we wouldn’t have a full fleet of subs until 2061, if ever.

What “significant changes” in the “Indo-Pacific strategic environment” necessitate Australia having an extra 20 years operating 1990s-model boats against the biggest military power in the region? Do we politely ask the Chinese not to be belligerent until we’re ready?

Morrison’s glib, incoherent and mendacious account of the subs debacle makes for good headlines now. But it points to huge problems for the coming generation of Australian leaders who will have to face the challenges of the mid-21st century world. As if Morrison hadn’t already made things bad enough for them.