By Peter Hartcher
- Shirtfronted part one: what went wrong for Abbott
- Shirtfronted part two: the Peta Credlin story
- Shirtfronted part three: Joe Hockey's economy
- Shirtfronted part four: Security: 'Our money's on Putin'
- Abbott is not a victim: Bishop speaks out
- Tony Abbott unleashes public attack on Julie Bishop
Tony Abbott's threat to "shirtfront" Vladimir Putin caused such a sensation that Russian and American diplomats were still having fun with it 10 months later.
Russia's Foreign Affairs Minister, Sergei Lavrov, teased his Australian counterpart, Julie Bishop, in an international meeting in August, wondering when Abbott would get around to carrying out his threat.
"Is your prime minister still going to shirtfront my president?" Lavrov asked Bishop in his gravelly, heavily accented English at a meeting of foreign affairs ministers from 10 nations.
The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, jumped in. Yeah, he said, "we've been putting money on the result and we're backing Putin," he announced to some levity.
Tony Abbott and Vladimir Putin at the APEC meeting in Beijing in 2014. Credit: Alexey Druzhinin
Bishop shut down the fun with a curt, "Thank you for that, John" and returned the discussion to the agenda for the meeting of the Asean Regional Forum ministerial meeting on August 6 in Kuala Lumpur.
The anecdote is told in part four of Fairfax Media's Shirtfronted series on the life of the Abbott government, which also reveals that Malcolm Turnbull spent two years trying to be appointed to the Abbott cabinet's National Security Committee, but was blocked by his prime minister.
Abbott later explained that Turnbull would only "gum up the works" because all his instincts on national security were the opposite of his own.
The then prime minister issued his "shirtfront" threat in anger and frustration after Russian-backed rebels shot down a civilian aircraft, MH17, over Ukraine in July last year, killing all 298 people on board, including 38 Australian citizens and residents.
The "shirtfronting" threat was a running joke between Russia's Foreign Minister and the US Secretary of State - but the encounter was in fact far less threatening.
Holding Russia's president ultimately responsible, Mr Abbott told reporters in October ahead of a November meeting: "Look, I'm going to shirtfront Mr Putin...you bet you are, you bet I am."
A Russian official sardonically told reporters that Mr Putin had a black belt in judo, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said Abbott had suffered a "brain snap" and the ANU's Australian National Dictionary Centre nominated "shirtfront" as the word of the year because it was so widely remarked.
But, in the event, the meeting of the two leaders at APEC was unremarkable and the Macquarie Dictionary said it was changing the definition of the word. Broadening the definition from the footballer's act of aggression, it was to add "to confront someone with a complaint or grievance".
Unabashed, Abbott last month received a freedom award from Australia's Ukrainian community for leading international opinion against Russian aggression.
Accepting the award, he said he had wanted to "assert universal decencies of mankind against their violators whether that be a terrorist caliphate or a Russian president that needed shirtfronting".
Part four of the series also details how all of Australia's security, defence and intelligence agencies united to oppose an Abbott plan to deploy 1000 armed troops to the crash site in Ukraine.