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 quasi-insurrectional violence — turns the mind to the delicate question of Australia’s recently delicate diplomatic relationship with France.
It’s a moot point how effectively Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has managed to reset relations since predecessor Scott Morrison announced the disastrous, all-Anglo AUKUS defence pact in September, 2021. This came hand-in-hand with the decision to scrap a multibillion–dollar defence contract to build French submarines — 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, just a 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 with 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.
He did this 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. This 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 no Noumea — to pass controversial election reform, put a match to the current problems. That reform would mean, Kanak leaders said, an additional 25,000 non-Indigenous voters on the electoral role, or about one voter in five. Inevitably, this would revolutionise 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 guarantor (where NC is concerned). Simply put were France to pull out of New Caledonia 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 seek to move in? Your problem France, would suddenly also be our problem (Australia).
Except that it already is to some extent. New Caledonia’s only major export is Nickel, used notably in electric vehicle batteries, and via the injection of vast sums of Chinese money, Indonesia has become the world market leader. According to the US Institute of Peace, the majority of Indonesia’s nickel mines, processing sites and supply arrangements, are today controlled by Chinese groups. Deliberate overproduction is stripping out international competition and pushing down the market price — by 45% in 2023.
Usually overlooked is that there is also commonality between the Australian colonial experience and that of France in New Caledonia, 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 had the British in Australia and New Zealand. He characterised the current strife less as a matter of electoral reform, than a post-colonial question, manifestly still unresolved.
According to the United Nations, Trépied said, New Caledonia is a country still waiting for de-colonisation. But were France to grant it, would that ultimately mean independence? No, he said, when questioned on Radio France. In its vast majority, ‘the Kanaky’ would seek a 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 more conversation for Mr Albanese with the French President in the domain of Australia’s own colonial experience. Except that there, well, we’ve just refused with 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.