Suddenly, the stakes just got a lot higher. The arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron in New Caledonia today — after more than a week of insurrectional violence — inevitably turns the mind to the delicate question of Australia’s recent diplomatic relations with France.
It’s a moot point how effectively Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has managed the ‘reset’ since his predecessor Scott Morrison announced the disastrous, all-Anglo AUKUS pact in September, 2021. This came hand-in-hand with the decision to scrap a multibillion–dollar defence contract to build submarines with the French — without actually telling the French.
One can hardly imagine, then, Mr Albanese picking up the telephone to consult, let alone advise Mr Macron, beyond the imperative of getting about 300 Australians out of France’s crisis-torn Pacific Island territory, a mere two-hour flight from Brisbane.
That’s a shame, frankly, because there’s considerable shared Franco-Australian concern about the fate of the beautiful archipelago. And the majority view among French specialists seems to be that the current French government has made major mistakes in its New Caledonia policy, after some 40 years of rather successful appeasement.
That appeasement was initiated by the late French Socialist Prime Minister, Michel Rocard, a political mentor of Mr Macron and a good friend of Australia. He ended the bloodshed of insurrectional riots in the 1980s, which also, significantly, were triggered by high-stakes electoral reform.
This he did by kick-starting a high-integrity process of self-determination, under the so-called Matignon Accords, with a big onus on relationship-building and the forging of a common identity. The Accords morphed into the Noumea Agreement of 1998, which was to conclude with a third and final independence referendum in December, 2021.
But when the indigenous Kanak population, struck by COVID — hundreds of deaths in a small population with unique rituals for burying the dead — asked for a modest 6 to 9-month delay before the last referendum was held, their request was flatly denied by the government in Paris.
This last May 13 decision, then — in Paris not Noumea — to pass controversial election reform, put a match to the current problems. The reform would mean, according to Kanak leaders, an additional 25,000 non-Indigenous voters on the electoral role, or about one voter in five, inevitably revolutionising the domestic political equation, yet further diminishing the size of the Indigenous vote.
In Australia, both sides of politics have tended to keep out of New Caledonian politics, but the off-line view has been that regional stability is important to Australia’s own security and a French presence is its virtual guarantee. Simply put, were France to go and civilian strife erupt, Australia would be expected to get involved as the region’s largest democracy. The related still pointier issue is, were France gone, would China move in? Your problem (France), would suddenly be our problem (Australia).
Except that it already is, to some extent. New Caledonia’s only real export is Nickel, used in electric vehicle batteries, and via the injection of Chinese money, Indonesia has become the world market leader. According to the US Institute of Peace, the majority of Indonesia’s nickel mines, with processing sites and supply arrangements, are now controlled by Chinese groups. Deliberate overproduction is stripping international competition and pushing down the market price — by about 45% in 2023.
Usually overlooked — quite separately from the above — is that there’s commonality between the colonial experience in Australia and that of France in New Caledonia, as cited by a high-profile French academic on national radio here this week.
Benoît Trépied, of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), said that France had sought to establish a new society in New Caledonia exactly as the British did in Australia and New Zealand. In fact, he characterised the current strife less as a matter of electoral reform, than a post-colonial question still unresolved.
According to the United Nations, New Caledonia is a country still awaiting de-colonisation. But were France to grant it, would independence be the ultimate result? No, Trépied said, on Radio France. Kanaks would seek their own brand of “associative independence”, whereby, say, the justice system, currency and foreign policy would be reassigned to France, or at least French oversight. On the China question, he asked rhetorically: “Why would the Kanaky seek independence only to cede it to another colonial ruler?”
There would be yet further conversation for Mr Albanese in the domain of Australia’s own colonial experience. Except that there, well, we’ve just refused via the Voice referendum to recognise our Indigenous brethren in the national Constitution, or vote for the creation of a minimalist external advisory council.
One wonders at the make-up of modern Australia, the shape and contour of its history since European settlement, if Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders still made up, as do indigenous Kanaks in New Caledonia today, 40 percent of the total population.