TONY ABBOTT, Australia’s new prime minister, has a knack for boiling complex issues down to catchy little phrases. How to cope with the desperate asylum-seekers approaching Australia in rickety vessels? “Stop the boats”. What to make of the arguments about mankind-induced climate change? “Absolute crap” (though he later conceded this was a “bit of hyperbole”). How to evaluate the tussle between Bashar Assad and his varied opponents in Syria? “Baddies v baddies”. And what principles will govern foreign policy under the Liberal-National coalition he led to a sweeping election victory on September 7thover Kevin Rudd’s Labor party? “More Jakarta; less Geneva”. This last tabloid headline serves at least three purposes. One is to suggest that the coalition will focus more on bilateral ties than on the sort of international talkfest Mr Rudd loved to frequent (though as rotating chair of both the United Nations Security Council and the G20, Australia can hardly forsake multilateralism.)

The second message is that, in the words of Julie Bishop (pictured to the left of Mr Abbott), who will be the new foreign minister, “our standing in the world is highest when our influence in the region is strongest.” Relations with Australia’s “Indo-Pacific” neighbours, which account for some 70% of its foreign trade and seven of the leading ten countries from which its new immigrants come, are to be the “focus” of coalition policy.

A third is that, though an unabashed fan of what he calls the “anglosphere”, Mr Abbott will be an “Indo-Pacific” prime minister. He promises to do a better job than did Mr Rudd, a former diplomat, in improving ties with the region. Mr Rudd came to power in 2007 spinning grand plans for an Asia-Pacific Community. He liked to portray himself as at home in Asia, and to show off his skills as a Mandarin-speaker. In contrast, of 12 points in a summary of the “action plan” of Mr Abbott’s Liberal party, only one—“deliver stronger borders”—was a foreign-policy issue.

In the memoir he published in 2009, “Battlelines”, Mr Abbott attests his passionate support for Australia’s alliance with America and its ties with Britain and its monarchy, in contrast to Labor’s republicanism. “Given America’s role,” he wrote, “it can’t quite be said that the modern world has been made in England. But it has certainly been shaped in English.”

Now he has to reconcile these views with a foreign policy focused on Asia. The first obstacle will be the Jakarta he offers more of. His first overseas trip as prime minister will be to Indonesia, perhaps even before the summit in Bali in early October of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum. But Indonesia has been disturbed by the two distinctive foreign-policy positions he has spelled out. One is to “stop the boats”, ie, to turn boats carrying asylum-seekers back—presumably to their last port of call, usually in Indonesia—and to buy boats from Indonesian fishermen who might otherwise sell them to people-smugglers. The other is to cut Australian overseas aid by A$4.5 billion ($4 billion) over four years. Indonesia is the biggest single recipient.

Even more important, and potentially difficult, is how to handle China and America. China is Australia’s biggest market, and, through its inexhaustible appetite for Australian minerals, a main reason why Australia is enjoying its 22nd consecutive year of economic growth. Yet Australia relies for its security on an alliance with America. In managing this tension, the new government is unlikely to be very different from the last. As Rory Medcalf of the Lowy Institute, a think-tank in Sydney, puts it “there is very clear bipartisanship in making the most of both relationships.”

Ms Bishop insists they need not be a problem for Australia: “we have not been asked to choose” between the two big powers. This has long been the refrain of Australian governments, though Mr Rudd did suggest it might not always be true. Indeed Hugh White, of the Australian National University in Canberra, argues that conservative governments like Mr Abbott’s may have more leeway than did the Labor party in dealing with America and China. John Howard, a conservative Liberal prime minister from 1996 to 2007, and a staunch pro-American, managed big improvements in relations with China. Whereas Labor walks on eggshells not to lose votes by appearing anti-American, the coalition’s commitment to the American alliance is not in doubt.

However, America used to agree with Mr Howard that Australia did not have to choose between, “our history and our geography”. Now, says Mr White, “the Americans don’t agree any more.” Nor, perhaps, does China. As Nick Bisley of La Trobe University in Melbourne puts it, it is not a question of Australia’s having to choose, but “of having to manage the choice it has made”: an alliance with America.

China was certainly irked by Australia’s agreement in 2011 to play host to 2,500 American marines in its Northern Territory, part of America’s “pivot” towards Asia. Mr Abbott and Ms Bishop support the deployment, and blame bad presentation for making China feel it is the target. But military rivalry in the Asia-Pacific region between China and America is not just a presentational problem.

Australia is not the only country in the region whose economic future seems ever more inextricably bound up with China’s, yet whose security rests on an alliance with America. China, just as it sometimes finds right-wing Republican presidents easier to deal with in Washington, may feel it at least knows where it is with the anglospherical Mr Abbott. But it will have noticed that Japan, South Korea and now Australia have all in the past year elected right-wing leaders strongly committed to their countries’ alliances with America. This is unlikely to make it easier to deal with, or more willing to connive in the pretence that Australia’s alliance with America has nothing to do with China.

(Picture credit: AFP)