Didn’t lie to French leader, Australian says
CANBERRA, Australia — Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison denied that he lied to French President Emmanuel Macron while secretly negotiating a submarine deal with the United States and Britain, an accusation that has escalated a rift over Australia’s surprise cancellation of a French deal.
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce suggested that France was overreacting, saying, “We didn’t deface the Eiffel Tower.”
In September, Australia dropped the $66 million contract with the majority French state-owned Naval Group to build 12 conventional diesel-electric submarines. Instead, Australia formed an alliance with Britain and the U.S. to acquire a fleet of eight nuclear-powered submarines built with U.S. technology.
Macron told Australian reporters late Sunday in Rome, where he and Morrison attended the Group of 20 summit, that the new alliance is “very bad news for the credibility of Australia and very bad news for the trust that great partners can have with Australia.”
Answering a reporter’s question about whether he thinks Morrison lied to him, Macron replied, “I don’t think, I know” that he lied.
Morrison said he did not lie to Macron, while senior Australian government ministers criticized the French leader for escalating the dispute through the personal slight.
“We didn’t steal an island. We didn’t deface the Eiffel Tower. It was a contract,” Joyce said Monday in the New South Wales town of Moree.
“Contracts have terms and conditions, and one of those terms and conditions and propositions is that you might get out of the contract. We got out of that contract,” Joyce added.
Joyce’s office could not say whether “steal an island” was a reference to the English Channel’s tiny Sark Island, which unemployed French nuclear physicist Andre Gardes attempted to overthrow with an assault rifle in 1990. The bizarre event inspired the 2013 movie “The Man Who Tried to Steal an Island.”
Cabinet Minister David Littleproud described Macron’s criticism of Morrison as “unreasonable.”
Morrison could not reveal that the United States had offered Australia nuclear-propulsion technology when the two leaders dined together in June for national security reasons, Littleproud said.
“I was very clear that the conventional submarines were not going to be able to meet our strategic interests,” Morrison said.
Macron refused to take Morrison’s phone calls after the submarine furor broke until hours before the Australian leader was to fly to Rome last week.
The pair did not hold a bilateral meeting in Rome, but Morrison said they had “spoken several times” and would probably do so more in the coming days. Both leaders will attend the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, this week.
U.S. President Joe Biden told Macron last week that the U.S. had been “clumsy” in its handling of the Australian submarine alliance. Biden said he thought Macron had been informed long before the deal was announced.