Abbott's deft touch with leaders

The past few days have shown that Tony Abbott, at least at the public level, has a deft enough touch in foreign affairs.

His performance in welcoming three world leaders to parliament in five days contained nothing that was remotely embarrassing.

Britain's David Cameron, China's Xi Jinping and India's Narendra Modi are - obviously enough - different men from different countries with different ties with Australia.

Abbott calibrated his speeches accordingly.

Cameron was the easiest and the hardest. Easiest because our relations with Britain are so long and deep; hardest because there's little new to say.

The danger is that familiarity breeds neglect.

Abbott said all the usual things about Britain's rich legacy to Australia and the world and shared wartime sacrifices.

Perhaps his most interesting point was a follow-up to John Howard's formulation that Australia doesn't have to choose between its history and geography.

"Of course Australia is located in the Indo-Pacific, but our place is wherever there is an interest to advance, a citizen to protect, a value to uphold, or a friend to encourage," Abbott said.

"Like people, countries don't make new friends by losing old ones and they don't deepen some relationships by diminishing others."

If there was a slightly jarring note, it came at the end when Abbott declared that culturally, intellectually, even economically, the Australian-British relationship was now one of peers.

True, but in 2014 that's surely an unnecessary declaration.

Welcoming Xi presented different problems because we want vast Chinese trade and investment very much, but wish it was a democracy with fewer human rights issues.

Abbott solved it by emphasising the two countries' common economic interests and growing people-to-people ties while ignoring the nasty bits.

He spiced things up with a few sayings that could have been Chinese proverbs.

There was "we trade with people when we need them, but we invest with people when we trust them".

He also quoted Xi back to him with "if you want to walk fast, walk alone; but if you want to walk far, walk together".

To which Abbott added his own "all of us have a long journey to make and only one planet to share".

The PM's welcome to Modi was, perhaps, the one that gave him most pleasure.

As a young man he backpacked through India for three months, the sort of experience that endures.

"This land of the most ancient spirituality, of the exotic and of the familiar, has always made an impression on me," he said after quoting a poet from Modi's native Gujarat.

There was, of course, plenty of business to propose with the awakening superpower, not least a free trade deal.

In this context he had a mild swipe at the Indian bureaucracy - a massive and opaque beast where the humblest clerks build little empires of paper files - which brought appreciative chuckles from the large Indian audience in the galleries.

Abbott spoke as one can-do PM to another, but can-do with love.

That sounded fine with Indians, even if it came from a shirt-fronting PM.

Cameron and Modi both made little jokes about shirt-fronting so perhaps the term, that's been so criticised and analysed since Abbott first threatened Vladimir Putin with the experience, is becoming the latest entry in the diplomatic lexicon.