The publication of a sexually lurid cartoon of Tony Abbott on the front page of Indonesia’s Rakyat Merdeka newspaper on Saturday is the second time in seven years that the same newspaper has courted the outrage of Australians by inking an offensive image of the Prime Minister.

The first time, in 2006, a cartoon of then Prime Minister John Howard in the guise of a dingo mounting his foreign minister, Alexander Downer, inflamed an already torrid diplomatic row.

Saturday’s edition of Rakyat Merdeka (The Free, or Freedom of the People) devoted the top left corner of its front page to a colour sketch of Tony Abbott as a peeping tom, cracking open a doorway marked “Indonesia” while apparently masturbating and exclaiming “Oh my God Indo ... So Sexy.”

The cartoonist, Fonda Lapod, is the same cartoonist who created the “Adventure of Two Dingoes” cartoon at the height of a 2006 diplomatic crisis. That cartoon was also plastered across the newspaper’s front page.