The most savage speech from a diplomat ever delivered in the nation’s capital

Put yourselves for a moment in the shoes of the French ambassador to Australia, Jean-Pierre Thebault, as he stood at the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday.

As he verbally eviscerated Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Thebault was fighting, as it were, for his country. And not only for his country, but for his own reputation and that of his embassy staff, and probably for some of their jobs, if not his own.

Under the circumstances it could only be described as a nuclear-grade attack — perhaps the most savage speech from a diplomat ever delivered in the nation’s capital.

You could practically see jaws dropping up the road in the RG Casey building, home of Australia’s diplomats and international spies, as he laid out the terms of what France sees as Morrison’s absolute betrayal of trust. The diplomatic world, including some of our top former ambassadors, was already disgusted, if not surprised, by Morrison’s glaring absence of diplomacy in handling the subs matter: now he was being called out on his own home turf.

Thebault, you’ll remember, was recalled to Paris after Morrison announced on September 16 that his government was ditching the $90 billion French submarine contract. As a diplomat, he is a public servant. The question he’d have been asked repeatedly is: “How the hell did you not know?”

Returned to Canberra as a man on a mission, his speech was a detailed explication of the devastating point that French President Emmanuel Macron made in in Rome when The Sydney Morning Herald journalist Bevan Shields asked him, “Do you think [Morrison] lied to you?” and he replied: “I don’t think, I know.”

Morrison’s own worst traits have been on full display since Rome: the slipperiness, the spin, the smirk, the failure to listen, the aggression, the blustering self-justification, the shifting of grounds, and above all the faux conflation of himself with the Australian people.

Yet Macron had made it very plain that he wasn’t attacking Australia’s right to make a sovereign decision. Equally, Thebault was careful to distinguish between the political spin and the honesty of Defence secretary Greg Moriarty at Senate estimates last week when he said there had been no cost blowout in the project.

Just as the Frenchmen’s words resonate, so do Morrison’s, but not in a good way.

If only he had acted with dignity in the face of France’s fury and humiliation; but he didn’t or couldn’t. He should have owned up to the lie and the deliberate, prolonged deceit, and apologised deeply and publicly — but no. He’s no Peter Beattie, the former Queensland premier who made apology an art form.

Had Morrison, as he has claimed, clearly informed Macron back in June that the conventional subs no longer served Australia’s strategic needs, the French would have screamed blue murder there and then, unless he’d dangled the prospect of buying French nuclear subs instead. It makes no sense otherwise that they would wait until the September announcement to unleash their rage.

Then there’s the bare-faced leak of Macron’s personal text message to Morrison. This piece of stupidity does the opposite of what Morrison claims: it underscores the fact that France was not in the loop, and leaking it merely escalates the row to a whole new level of distrust, as Thebault made clear on Wednesday.

Don’t hold your breath for the Australian Federal Police, or the secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens, to be asked to investigate which genius leaked it. Morrison’s smirk said it all.

Bet he won’t be receiving many personal text messages from world leaders in the foreseeable future.

Perhaps if he had gone to Scotland with a solid plan for zero emissions by 2050 and a strong new commitment for 2030, he might have been able to move past the debacle on the world stage. But he didn’t and he couldn’t: “the Australian say” is as empty as a pocket but with a great deal to lose.

Being the down-home Sharks’ supporter who doesn’t hold the hose isn’t going to cut it this time. But Morrison remains unrepentant, as is his way.

Public servants have every reason to be sick to the stomach about the fact that they are held to far higher standards of integrity than politicians.

In Sydney, at the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption inquiry, former premier Gladys Berejiklian clung to her fig leaf of a “love circle” that was different from “family” and justified her in not declaring her relationship with former colleague Daryl Maguire as the conflict of interest that every public servant knew it plainly was.

It needs hardly be said that Morrison is no longer in Macron’s love circle, but US President Joe Biden is, because he ganged up with Macron — who is soon to be the de facto leader of the European Union and also has nuclear weapons — over Morrison’s cancellation of the submarine contract, with all its complexities, sensitivities and strategic implications for the Indo-Pacific region that go far beyond technology, as Thebault was only too happy to point out on Wednesday.

Yet Biden is in the new trilateral AUKUS love circle of himself, Morrison and the British PM, Boris Johnson.
After Brexit, Johnson may not be Macron’s favourite person either but they and Biden are in the powerful NATO family and we aren’t. Johnson also has nuclear weapons and we don’t. Our consolation prize is the longstanding Anzus treaty with New Zealand and the US, although our closest real family, New Zealand, isn’t in AUKUS because of the nuclear thing.

And AUKUS isn’t a formal and binding treaty. It is still at the memorandum of understanding stage, as PM&C told Senate estimates last week, although the details of the MOUs (it turns out there are two of them) are classified and the officials at the table hadn’t seen them.

It is mostly on AUKUS and Anzus that we are supposed to pin our strategic hopes if China comes knocking, or rather, sneaking in with its own five dozen or so operational submarines, including 12 nuclear-powered vessels of which at least half carry ballistic missiles.

And given that the British and Australian navies are virtually interchangeable, whereas the US navy is very different, some think it makes much more sense for us to acquire the British Astute class nuclear subs rather than the American Virginia class.

That is, provided the Poms still have the capability to build and deliver them, because as Thebault was so eager to point out, they’re not going to be built here.

So Morrison really does need to stay in Johnson’s love circle. Yet curiously PM&C appears to have had nothing much to do with AUKUS at all. Officials at estimates not only hadn’t seen the MOU but hadn’t been involved in the process. They didn’t really know anything about it. The public servants who were involved, they said, were from Foreign Affairs, Defence, Navy and the Attorney-General’s Department.

Nor could PM&C shed any light on the appointment in June of Lieutenant General John Frewen as coordinator of the vaccine taskforce, rebadged COVID Shield, because the PM had personally picked and appointed Frewen, PM&C had merely supplied the paperwork for his appointment and the taskforce was being run out of the Department of Health.
It couldn’t say anything about what Gaetjens knew or did either, since he wasn’t at estimates (as is customary for the secretary of PM&C).

As for the National Party and its letter of demands on climate change (or lack of it), there were long exchanges about who had seen the letter and what advice, if any, PM&C had given the PM about it — none, and they hadn’t seen it.

Gaetjens is definitely in Morrison’s love circle, even perhaps in his “family” as a former chief of staff. The question is, though, whether PM&C itself is in Morrison’s love circle, given how so much policy is evidently being run directly out of his office rather than through the department.

Morrison is certainly the poorer for it.

This article is republished from The Mandarin.