Tribune. Australia handled the cancellation of the submarine contract with France in a clumsy, even brutal way. The government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison has behaved like an unfaithful husband who dares not tell his wife he is leaving her until one day he walks through the door with his suitcase. It’s a cruel way to end a relationship, and the wife feels all the more betrayed when she finds out he’s been plotting for months – and is leaving her for a close friend of hers. !
The way to break up does not, however, explain the reason for the breakup.
Since the Australian government commissioned France to build twelve diesel-electric powered submarines in 2016, our country’s strategic environment and military needs have changed dramatically. Two years ago, anyone who suggested Australia acquire nuclear-powered US submarines would have been fired with sarcasm.
Today Australians realize that they no longer live in the same world. Beijing has been hostile and threatening to Canberra since Australia adopted tougher measures in 2017 to combat Chinese interference and espionage. The Chinese regime has stepped up influence operations with political, economic and academic elites, carried out large-scale cyber attacks and massively infiltrated the local Chinese community.
Impossible diplomacy
When the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marise Payne, in April 2020 called for the opening of an independent international investigation into the origins of the Covid-19, the Chinese authorities, furious, responded with a campaign of economic reprisals, by decreeing a ban on imports of wine, barley, coal, copper, beef, wood and lobster from Australia (French exporters took advantage of this).
For more than a year, no Chinese minister has taken an Australian counterpart on the phone. Diplomacy is impossible. The insults and threatening warnings from the organs and officials of the Communist Party of China have reached the point where we are threatened today with raining nuclear missiles on our heads if we do not surrender.
Unpublished fact, China specified, in November 2020, the type of relationship it wished to have with Australia: its embassy in Canberra transmitted to several Australian media a list of fourteen conditions for “normal relations” to resume. . These conditions go to the very heart of Australian democracy and the country’s sovereignty. These include repealing our foreign interference laws, allowing Huawei to participate in our 5G telecommunications network, lifting restrictions on Chinese investments in critical infrastructure, limiting press freedom and muzzle parliamentarians.
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