There were 14,722,754 voters enrolled to vote at the September 7 election. Just under 79 per cent of them cast their first vote for the Coalition parties or the Australian Labor Party, compared to more than 85 per cent in 2007 when government last changed hands.

Bob Katter’s party, Clive Palmer’s party and Family First scored just over one million first preference votes between them. The Greens got 1.1 million. There were 811,143 informal votes and around one million people didn’t bother to vote.

This spraying of first preference votes around the political system underlines how many voters – no matter how disillusioned they were with Labor – were not prepared to buy Tony Abbott.

For all these voters, and many others, the Prime Minister remains something of an enigma after the long self-imposed silences of his first months in the job.

So whatever else the increasing tensions between Australia and Indonesia this week may represent, they represented a chance for voters to get a handle on just what bill of goods they have found themselves with in Tony Abbott.

It was John Howard who observed that the real tests of governments were how they dealt with things that came up unexpectedly.

What voters – or at least the group that the Coalition so assiduously courted over the past three years – think of what Abbott has done this week may be very different from the commentary of recent days which has reflected on the impact of the Prime Minister’s actions in Jakarta.

TWITTER SPECTACLE

The Coalition’s pollster Mark Textor has made rather a spectacle of himself this week, besieging twitter with his thoughts about the whole affair.

Most colourfully, he tweeted: “Apology demanded from Australia by a bloke who looks like a 1970s Pilipino [sic] porn star and has ethics to match.”

This was taken by most as a reference to either Indonesian foreign minister Marty Natalegawa or even President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, though Textor kept insisting this was not the case.

But in a string of belligerent messages, Textor kept reiterating a broader political point that he didn’t believe voters gave a rats if Indonesia was offended by the revelation of eavesdropping.

Talkback radio strongly endorsed Textor’s sentiment.

On 2UE on Thursday morning, for example, Paul Murray and former Labor leader Mark Latham opined that Australia shouldn’t be kowtowing to Jakarta, let alone apologising.

Talkback callers were of the same view. If Indonesia didn’t like it, we could cut their aid. They did not want Tony Abbott to give any quarter, and certainly not apologise.

The pertinence of these views is whether they drove the flavour of Tony Abbott’s response to the issue on Tuesday when he took such an uncompromising position, refusing to apologise and linking his government with the actions of former governments in intelligence matters.

Not even his own parliamentary colleagues could quite understand the PM’s position this week.

DIFFERENT DIPLOMATIC OPTIONS

There were so many options open to him, they observed, other than just such a bald rebuff. The fact Abbott had spent so much time apologising for a range of Australian sins on his visit to Jakarta made the turnaround only seem more bizarre.

Even the Coalition’s most enthusiastic media backers were left somewhat high and dry as a result of his actions, since they had opened an early assault on the basis that the Prime Minister was being unfairly lumped with a Labor mess.

Abbott didn’t even opt to distance himself from the 2009 eavesdropping on SBY.

Yes, this might have been because everyone just assumes such surveillance has gone on for years and has probably continued.

After all, the PowerPoint documents at the centre of the controversy certainly seemed to indicate that such surveillance was nothing new, but was merely reporting on the impact the spread of the 3G mobile phone network was having on such operations.

There are many more subtle reasons why the PM may have acted as he did.

The limitations put on what he can say both because of the tradition of not commenting on intelligence matters, and by the fact the government doesn’t know what else will emerge, are a couple of completely legitimate ones.

There is also the slightly disconcerting reality for both sides of politics that few politicians believe intelligence agencies actually keep their masters in the loop on their activities. But such subtleties don’t really play out with Australian voters any more than they do in Jakarta.

The voters, channelled by Mark Textor – who finally apologised on Thursday after his remarks made the news in Indonesia – and talkback radio, will have drawn their conclusions.

SOLUTIONS ARE NEEDED

But that doesn’t solve Tony Abbott’s ongoing problem with Jakarta, nor does it answer the question of whether the PM is showing any signs of breaking out of the attack mode he perfected in opposition but which surely doesn’t work in the national interest as prime minister.

Lots of domestic political baggage has been loaded onto this dispute, including attacks on the ABC and Guardian Australia for being so “irresponsible” as to publish documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Many of the attacks were from the same people who had been screaming about Labor attempts to squash freedom of the press, just 12 months ago.

It is interesting to note that when the WikiLeaks first appeared in late 2010, Tony Abbott condemned them, saying “anything which compromises national and international security is very regrettable”.

This did not stop him, however, from making political capital on some of the WikiLeaks revelations about Labor.

That is an utterly pragmatic way to have behaved.

But he is now in charge and must find a way to rebuild the relationship with Indonesia after another set of leaks.

The immediate risks remain that the cost of Abbott’s robust foray into diplomacy will be an upsurge of boat arrivals, or economic consequences, like a slowing of the beef trade that will hurt his own base harder than anyone else.

If you read President Yudhoyono’s statement on Wednesday, it is not as belligerent as the pointy actions it contains might suggest, giving an opening for detente.

But the big issue here is that Indonesia is going into presidential elections which are producing a rise in nationalism.

The one thing Australia would want to avoid is those elections being built on a foundation of anti-Australian sentiment.

Silence Won't Fix Abbott's Indonesia Crisis