But that's the problem. Abbott isn't running talkback. He's running international diplomacy. And in that world of maddeningly polite, highly coded speech, this is a rhetorical bomb. It says our aid is conditional, that it imposes obligations and that if we feel those obligations haven't been met, we might just withhold it in future.

That's a hell of thing to imply, even in private. Especially when you're a country currently slashing foreign aid, and already hugely outspent by countries like China. But said in public, it's a wealthy country with far less leverage than it thinks trying to lord it over a developing one.

Hence Indonesia's extraordinary diplomatic serve: "no one responds well to threats," declared a spokesman for the foreign ministry, which sounds ominously like a diplomat's way of saying "you've just blown it". It's a particularly sharp response that reveals a particularly sharp sensitivity. Partly this is about the politics of drug smuggling in Indonesia. Every nation has its irrational belligerences; its issues where the politics dictate it is impossible to be too tough, where compassion is recast as weakness, and weakness is unforgivable. For us, it's probably boat people. For Indonesia, it's probably drugs. And when that's the political logic, the very last thing you can be seen to be doing is capitulating before a threat. "If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you," advises one of Sue Monk Kidd's characters in The Secret Life of Bees. That is precisely what our tsunami aid manoeuvre has denied Indonesia.

But this stand-off is also about something bigger. Perhaps the most alarming aspect of Indonesia's response is its allegation that "people will show their true colours": that our "threats" are not an isolated faux pas, but reveal something deeply characteristic about us as a nation. That through Indonesian eyes, this is all part of a broader pattern of objectionable behaviour.

Those objections are well rehearsed: we treat Indonesia's sovereignty with contempt, ignore their cries of offence, and then feel entitled to order them to do our bidding. It's at moments like these that such Indonesian grievances come home to roost.