‘Not the same as lying to him’: Morrison defends keeping AUKUS secret from Macron

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Madrid: Former prime minister Scott Morrison has admitted he kept the AUKUS submarine deal a secret from Emmanuel Macron because he feared the United States and Britain could pull out before it was signed to appease an angry French president.

Morrison’s plan to hide the $368 billion deal nuclear submarine deal between the three nations were revealed in leaked extracts of an upcoming book reported by Agence France-Presse on Wednesday.

Scott Morrison, Emmanuel Macron.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen, Bloomberg

The defence technology sharing pact resulted in Australia cancelling a $90 billion contract with France to build 12 conventionally powered submarines, which Paris later described as a “stab in the back” and withdrew its ambassador from Australia in protest.

On the eve of the AUKUS announcement in September 2021, Morrison finally contacted Macron informing him they were terminating the submarine contract. This came despite the pair having dined together at the Elysee Palace months earlier, where Morrison said he was “pretty clear” about his concerns over the submarine deal.

“I would say it was the most sleepless night I had in my entire prime ministership,” he said, citing the “unpredictability” of the close relationship between Washington and Paris. But he added: “I don’t regret it for a minute.”

Morrison said he had told counterparts, US President Joe Biden and then-British prime minister Boris Johnson, that he was not going to tell Macron the AUKUS deal was happening to make sure Australia was not “left with nothing”.

He said he felt it would be better not to give France time to “kill the arrangement that we have with you, and then we stand left there with nothing”.

“Our strategy was that if we are going to do this, we can’t let it lead to the French knowing – in case that damages the French deal. So, we had to build Chinese walls – pardon the pun – around our discussions,” Morrison was reported to have said in a new book The Secret History of The Five Eyes by journalist Richard Kerbaj.

Macron was outraged he was only informed of the new alliance hours before the public announcement was made, and later expressed fury at Morrison’s decision to leak a private text message from Macron after the contract was axed.

Biden later told Macron ahead of the G20 in Rome, with television cameras present, that he was “under the impression that France had been informed” about Australia’s intention to ditch the French Naval Group contract “long before” the AUKUS pact was revealed publicly.

Macron told this masthead at that summit: “I don’t think, I know” when asked if he thought Morrison had lied to him in his handling of the issue. Ministers in Macron’s party insisted France was “betrayed”, “stabbed in the back” and “deceived”.

But Morrison defended his plans, telling Kerbaj: “Not telling him is not the same as lying to him. I think Emmanuel thought I was … seeking leverage on the contract. Maybe he thought I was bluffing.”

Morrison described Macron in the book as a “canny politician” and “a class act”. He said the Frenchman was the first world leader to congratulate him on his 2019 election victory.

Currently in the UK giving a series of speeches about security in the Indo-Pacific and the AUKUS pact, Morrison told the author that the approach to get access to the shared nuclear submarine technology came because he was concerned about production delays and a growing security threat from China in the region.

“If there was ever a time to have a crack at getting nuclear-powered subs, it was either now or never,” he said.

He told British think tank Policy Exchange in London on Wednesday that it was remarkable that he had been able to maintain that secrecy.

“Everyone who needed to know [about AUKUS] knew that it could so easily be compromised,” he said.

Morrison said AUKUS could eventually be expanded to include other participants in various ways – potentially Quad member Japan – but it was important to first “make it work”.

“The delivery challenges are significant,” he said.

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