The Australian government has agreed to pay A$830 million (US$585.35 million) in a settlement with French arms manufacturer Naval Group over the administration of former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison’s controversial decision to scrap a submarine project.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday announced that the confidential settlement would draw a line under the canceled project.
Albanese’s party, at the time of the cancelation in opposition, gave support to the AUKUS security alliance between Australia, the UK and the US, which replaced the project and under which Washington and London have offered to help Canberra acquire at least eight nuclear-propelled submarines and cooperate on other advanced technologies.
Photo: AP
However, Albanese said that the way it was handled by his predecessor’s administration “has caused enormous tension in the relationship between Australia and France.”
“This is a fair and an equitable settlement which has been reached. It follows, as well, discussions that I’ve had with [French President Emmanuel] Macron, and I thank him for those discussions and the cordial way in which we are re-establishing a better relationship between Australia and France,” he said.
The agreement was forged by the new administration just three weeks after Albanese’s election victory.
It was not reached before the election by the former government and kept confidential, Albanese said.
The total cost of the failed submarine project for Australian taxpayers is A$3.4 billion, which is down from the A$5.5 billion announced as Canberra’s approved budget for the project.
Officials had considered this to be a maximum “envelope.”
Albanese said that despite the lower cost, it was still “an extraordinary waste from a government that was always big on announcement, but not good on delivery, and from a government that will be remembered as the most wasteful government in Australia’s history since federation.”
The prime minister said it would allow Australia to move forward in its relationship with France.
Macron accused Morrison of lying to him about the deal, and Morrison later said he was “not going to cop sledging of Australia.”
Part of a text message exchange between the two leaders was released to several Australian media outlets in an apparent attempt to blunt the idea that France had been completely blindsided by the cancelation.
French officials denounced the leaking as “an unprecedented new low.”
By contrast, Macron warmly welcomed Albanese’s election last month, extending an invitation for him to visit Paris, which Albanese said he had accepted.
“Details are being worked through. We have a critical relationship. France, of course, plays a critical role in the European Union, and President Macron, of course, has recently been re-elected. I am newly elected and it is important that we have engaged — I appreciated his message of congratulations and the fact that both of us want to reset the relationship between our two countries,” Albanese said. “I see a personal meeting between myself and President Macron in France as being absolutely vital to resetting that relationship, which is an important one for Australia’s national interests.”
On Thursday, the opposition leader Peter Dutton said he had devised a plan as defense minister in Morrison’s administration to buy two Virginia-class submarines by 2030 to fill the gap before the nuclear submarines are delivered.
He had “formed a judgement the Americans would have facilitated exactly that,” he said.
Albanese said that Dutton had presided over an “all-announcement, no-delivery” regime.
“You don’t defend your country and our national security with a media release — you defend it with operational capability,” he said.
“My government intends to concentrate on delivering rather than the statements that Peter Dutton has made that contradict all of the statements that he made while he was defense minister.”
As to whether Australia was negotiating for the submarines Dutton mentioned, Albanese said he would not be making “on the run comments” about national security and defense.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
RSS