“We have agreed to make sure that we will conclude the Free Trade Agreement between Australia and India by the end of 2022 and an early harvest trade deal by Christmas this year,” Mr Tehan said.

“Before the final Free Trade Agreement,India and Australia will[have] an interim agreement by December 2021. We have started discussing issues of logistics,country of origin.”

Australian officials expected the slowdown in the EU trade talks in the wake of the submarine decision,which abruptly cancelled a contract with French company Naval Group in favour of nuclear submarines from the United States and United Kingdom.

Mr Tehan arrives in Paris in the coming days for meetings at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and had not expected a one-on-one meeting with his French counterpart,Franck Riester.

Mr Tehan will meet EU trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis,a former Latvian prime minister,but the meeting will not be a formal start to the next round of trade negotiations.

The Trade Minister confirmed the negotiations would start in November rather than October as scheduled.

“We understand the French reaction to our submarine decision but ultimately any nation must act in its national interest,which is what Australia has done,” he said in a statement.

Finance Minister Simon Birmingham,who was trade minister from 2018 to 2020,played down the impact on the overall deal.

“These negotiations have been going on already for a number of years,and they may have some time to go into the future,” he told Sky News.

“A one-month time,in relation to what I think is... quite a way into the negotiating rounds,well,that’s clearly not something that is going to likely change the end outcome all that much.”

Labor foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong and trade spokeswoman Madeleine King said the delay in Europe was a sign of the government’s diplomatic failure with France over the submarine contract.

“It is clear that Scott Morrison failed to do the diplomatic leg work required to manage the relationship with our French partners,” they said.

“As a consequence,Trade Minister Dan Tehan had already been refused a meeting with his French counterpart and has now been iced out of talks with the Europeans – embarrassingly while mid-flight to Brussels.

“Mr Morrison’s idea of diplomacy was a text message to[French President Emmanuel Macron] dumping the $90 billion future submarines program hours before announcing it publicly.”