Scott Morrison. Bad Boyfriend.

Five warning signs that your so-called ‘strategic partner’ is a bad match.

France, we’re sorry. But you need to take some responsibility for this break up. Sure, when you first got together over champagne and submarine contracts, Scotty seemed like the best guy in the world but now, you just can’t figure out where that $90b he owes you might be. You’re wondering if he’s lost interest or he simply wasn’t the perfect match your state-owned ship building conglomerate thought he was. France, things have been going wrong for eighteen months and you should have paid attention to these early warning signs that in Scott Morrison, you had… A Bad Boyfriend.

He Had No Time For You

Did you notice at all the cool multilateral get togethers that he never made time for you, but he was always hanging out with his so-called ‘new best friends’ who are really just the same old losers he’s always hung around with and is never going to quit. Yes, Scotty made plans with you, but then he canceled them. Without even telling you! And he always had a convincing excuse, no matter what accusation of faithlessness you made. “Oh, no, I’m not googling up self-contained nuclear propulsion options, I was just looking at how cool your fast breeder reactors are.” Sound familiar, France? One of the biggest signs of a bad boyfriend is having no time for you but unlimited time and an unspecified budget for everything else. A guy will always make time for a strategic partner he’s truly interested in. If not, his attention is clearly elsewhere.

2. He Has Tons of Secrets

Hurts doesn’t it? To look back and see the truth. But France, if there was always an air of mystery surrounding your man’s whereabouts, something’s up. While it’s not your man’s responsibility to tell you about every single thing that’s going on in his geo-strategic area of influence at every moment, if you do feel like he’s hiding something like a secret meeting with the British Admiralty’s top nuclear submarine guy, he’s probably hiding something like a secret meeting with the British Admiralty’s top nuclear submarine guy. And some of these secrets could just involve a number of different admirals or even presidents. A guy like Scotty could be chatting with them on secure encrypted networks or speaking with them in the corner of the very G7 garden party you threw at the Palace after scoring him an invite when he wasn’t even supposed to be there! If he’s doing this, it’s a huge red flag, with a little yellow star on it.

3. He’s Controlling and Manipulative

The worst part about being manipulated in a relationship is that quite often, we don’t even know it’s happening. Bad boyfriends like Scotty twist your thoughts, actions, wants and desires into something that better suits how they see the world. They mould you into someone who serves their own purposes. One major sign of a controlling and manipulative bad boyfriend is the constant guilt tripping. If he can convince you to feel guilty for a few quibbling schedule slippages and a completely explicable cost blow out from fifty to two-hundred and sixty billion dollars, then he’s a bad boyfriend who wants to force insecurities on you to control how you act towards him. You should have dumped him before he dumped you, France.

4. He runs down your hopes and dreams.

You imagined a perfect future in which nobody questioned your quaint colonial possessions in the Pacific region because you insisted you weren’t a foreign occupying power but a legitimate local who contributed to the Neighbourhood Watch scheme with twelve Shortfin Barracuda Attack submarines. He mocked your submarines — which he asked you to build! — and when you gently reminded him about how you were contributing to the future of all those low lying islands by reducing your carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, he threw a lump of coal at you. Scotty was not good for you, France. He’s no good for anybody.

5. He Doesn’t Apologise

This bad-boyfriend sign can be recognised within a few weeks of signing contracts and beginning design work. He has a big ego and just doesn’t apologise for anything, even if it’s his own fault, like insisting you take the perfectly good nuclear reactors out of your very nice hunter killer submarines and replace them with completely imaginary diesel-electric motors. And when you confront him about it, he may just mumble or blame something else like the stupid Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty for his mistake. We all do things we shouldn’t do from time to time and find ourselves having to explain our actions. Like that time you set off all those atomic bombs at Muraroa and sunk the Rainbow Warrior. Apologizing isn’t always admitting one’s guilt. Especially not before the International Criminal Court. Sometimes it’s showing how much you care about the other. And your bad boyfriend will never do that.

We know this, France. We’ve been living with him for years.