Opposition leader says Abbott’s ‘diplomatic faux pas’ put focus on ‘silly words’ rather than the substantive call for cooperation

Bill Shorten has described Tony Abbott’s threat to shirtfront the Russian president as a “brain snap” and a “diplomatic faux pas” that undermined Australia’s attempts to seek Vladimir Putin’s cooperation.

The opposition leader said he could understand the prime minister was motivated by emotion over the loss of 38 Australian lives in the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, but suggested the focus on a potential altercation with Putin had “contaminated” the potential for productive talks.

New figures prepared for Guardian Australia by the media tracking company iSentia show there were 21,345 mentions of the term ‘shirtfront’ in the Australian media between the 13 October comment and the eventual meeting in Beijing on Tuesday.

Abbott called for Putin’s full support for the international investigation during the 15-minute discussion at the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit on Tuesday.

The meeting occurred one month after Abbott vowed to shirtfront Putin at the forthcoming G20 meeting, invoking an Australian Rules football term for a physical confrontation.

Shorten said on Wednesday he believed Russia needed “to be a lot more transparent and honest with the rest of the world” and explain what it knew about the downing of MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July.

But he said Abbott’s comment had ensured the focus was on “silly words” rather than the substantive call for information and cooperation.

“I don’t want to make our foreign policy a series of clean-up jobs after faux pas from our political leaders,” Shorten said.

“I understand the emotions that might have motivated Tony Abbott’s brain snap. I am worried, speaking straight, that somehow because he had that reaction we have let Putin off the hook. Now we’re all focused on Tony Abbott – will he shirtfront, will he wrestle, will he have a big altercation with Vladimir Putin – where the real issue is the families and getting to the bottom of what happened.”

Shorten said he would not seek to speak to Putin when the Russian president visited Brisbane for the G20 this weekend, because he believed the situation “has become sufficiently contaminated that talking of these matters isn’t going to resolve it now”.

“Now we have given Putin the opportunity to look strong – he is not going to be shirtfronted,” Shorten said.

“Putin has massive popular support in his own country. He, I don’t think, frankly, cares about what Australia thinks. What I do know is that we need to be speaking to the rest of the world to put pressure on, to make sure that we get the information we want. Surely there’s information that the Russian military have, that people close to the separatists have, which can tell us what happened, why it happened, and what’s going to be done and who’s responsible. It’s results that count, not big headline-grabbing brain snaps.”

Abbott’s office said the prime minister had told Putin it was “incumbent on all countries, including Russia, to respect United Nations security council resolution 2166 and to cooperate fully with the independent investigation into the MH17 atrocity”.

Abbott said Australia “was in possession of information suggesting that MH17 was destroyed by a missile from a launcher that had come out of Russia, was fired from inside eastern Ukraine and then returned to Russia” and if this was true “it would be a very serious matter”.

Abbott and Putin “agreed that all relevant information should be provided to the independent investigation and that the investigation should proceed with the full support of the international community”, according to the account provided by the prime minister’s office.

Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was quoted by the state news agency RIA Novosti as saying Abbott did not appear to deliver on his “shirtfront” threat. “It appears that he did not try,” Peskov said.

Abbott said on 13 October: “Look, I’m going to shirtfront Mr Putin – you bet you are, you bet I am. I’m going to be saying to Mr Putin: Australians were murdered and they were murdered by Russian-backed rebels using Russian supplied equipment.”

He subsequently toned down his comment, vowing to have a “robust” conversation.

Analysis of Australian media coverage by iSentia shows 21,345 mentions of the term shirtfront between 13 October and 11 November.

Most of these mentions occurred in the first seven days, when shirtfront was used 13,501 times, including on 325 occasions in the press, 4,226 on radio, 3,771 on television, and 5,179 on the internet.

Coverage then quietened down, before a gradual increase of mentions of shirtfront in the days leading up to the Apec and G20 summits.

In a separate iSentia analysis of social media, there were 16,351 mentions of shirtfront in relation to Australian politicians between 13 October and 11 November.

“Social media tracked almost identically to broadcast: all the comments in the first three or four days after, with some rebound in the last couple of days,” an iSentia spokesman said.